The French government has decided to ban the totally burqa veil or niqab-on women in public places such as schools, health centers or institutions. The French right suggests that it be banned in the streets as well, so that the Islamic veil would be restricted to privacy.
I think that the fact that the woman appears in public, covered from head to toe while the man goes as campy as he wants, is not a merely cultural fact but a public repression of the image of the woman, which he must see, not with respect, as some fundamentalists preach, but with an atavistic and ill-concealed misogyny passed down from generation to generation to make it the “norm” of life.
In secular states such as France and Spain, as well as in all of the West, equality of duties and rights of men and women has been reached after an arduous crossing of the desert behind human rights, and this success, which is no minutiae, cannot be violated by any religious or cultural pretext. The West, with all its shortcomings and imperfections, is the place where the values of the Enlightenment have been definitively embodied without possible reversal, and the phenomenon of immigration, otherwise unstoppable, cannot change. this basic question.
The problem of the integration of immigrants in the West is and will be, for a long time – perhaps two generations – the change of some customs of their roots for the benefit of freedom, equality and fraternity, that, between men and women. , and between one generation and another. The path to the conquest of freedoms is full of misunderstandings and misunderstandings, but we must work with this continuously, without being distressed by any group, whatever its origin. It is about advancing in the assumption of freedoms and paying the prices that this entails. And the big letter for this must be the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, there can be no other alternative or even interpretations on the sidelines.
Customs that go against these rights must be eradicated because they are only subterfuges to categorize people and thus suspend equality. Perhaps, in this matter of the veil for women, a consultation should be made only on women, perhaps some would accept it for fear of reprisals, but many would directly oppose its use.
Remei Margarit