Bell: Sarkozy Wants to Ban Whole-Body Burqas

ST. TROPEZ The Mediterranean coast of France is a place of contrast. The land falls sharply from mountainous heights into the sea. The forested, stony mountains harbor clouds against the azure sun of the water and beaches. Africa and Islam lie across the sea and lap at the cultural shores of Marseille, Toulon, and Nice.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing a legal bulwark to help maintain the contrasts. He wants the wearing of the whole-body burqa garment -- worn by a small number of ultra-orthodox Muslim women -- banned. In Belgium, at the end of March, a parliamentary committee unanimously approved such a ban for that country, pending a further vote of the entire lower chamber. Several Belgian municipalities have already ordered a ban.

Proponents of a ban assert that the burqa exploits women and that, by concealing entirely the face of the wearer, it poses a security risk. They claim that, in a more general manner, wearing burqas encourages extremism. Opponents note that a ban infringes freedom of religion, belief, and conscience and, for that reason, would probably ultimately be struck down by the European Court of Human Rights.

On a recent Saturday, my wife and I drove to the top of a 2,500-foot mountain, through dark forests of cork oaks and thick growths of myrrh. From the Franciscan priory of Notre Dame des Anges, at the highest point in the Massif des Maures, you can see the Mediterranean to the south, the Maritime Alps to the east, and the rocky crags behind Marseille to the west.

The priory rests on the foundations of a chapel built in 517 by Thierry, the son of Clovis, France's first Merovingian king, in gratitude for his victory over the pagan Visigoths. A friar greeted us. Born in Senegal, he had lived in Italy before coming to France. I asked him whether other Africans make the pilgrimage up the mountain, and he told me they do and that Algerians and Moroccans visit as well, bringing Islam to the ancient summit of French Christianity. Human culture, then, is still as diverse on the mountaintop as is the splendid view.

In Oregon, in February, the state legislature lifted a ban on religious clothing in schools, finding it an infringement of First Amendment rights. The contrast, once again, between American attitudes toward religion in the public sphere and those of our European friends, comes into view, as it did last autumn when Swiss voters banned the construction of minarets.

The alternative to a burqa ban is the requirement that wearers show their faces for identity documents and security checks. Many of the justifications for a ban are, in the end, manifestations of culture as much or more than they are manifestations of rational legal or security concern. European constitutional laws do not so specifically prescribe freedom of religion and expression as does the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enshrines Jefferson's 1786 Virgina Statute on Religious Freedom. Cultural consensus for or against a certain liberty can therefore play a different role than it does in the United States.

Many Americans struggle with the "permissiveness" First Amendment case law sometimes seems to encourage. Containing and preventing freedom of religious expression can have the opposite effect of that which its proponents envision. When countries wall off or attempt to suppress Islamic culture, they often feed the resentments which spill over -- in the French and Belgian riots of 2005 and, quite possibly, in the encouragement of recruitment into Islam's radical strains.

We return to France and to our other European haunts because we deeply admire and respect European culture. In sun-drenched, pastel St. Tropez, with its many inviting sidewalk restaurants, you cannot dine between 2:30 and 6:00, because competition law prevents restaurants from operating at those times. You can, however, drink at a bar or buy consumer goods. Speed limits, radar cameras, and high fuel taxes regulate driving culture, but thousands of anarchic motorcyclists speed down the middle of the road, darting in and out among well-behaved automotive drivers. Humanity will out. If one gives it freedom, it will do so more constructively.

The Richmond-based First Freedom Center, as whose president I was recently elected, does not presume to preach "the American way" to others. Rather, it casts the light of learning on developments at home and abroad where religious identity and the human rights of freedom of religion, conscience, and belief intersect.

Banning burqas arises from the same instinct which has moved some American schools to attempt the banning of yarmulkes. The south coast of France is by no means the only place of intersection, but it provides an interesting focus for the infinite resonance of our mission. Together with our board of eminent Virginians and its chair, Dean Rodney Smolla, I look forward to making the First Freedom Center a world-class institution based importantly in Richmond.

Ambassador Randolph Bell is president of the First Freedom Center in Richmond. Contact him at rmbell1947@earthlink.net.