The Morality Police

-

 

beach with loungers

Last week,  in the sea at La Sablettes, (Toulon, Var, France) I saw something that warmed my heart. In the sea, submerged to their necks, were three young Muslim women, clad in burkinis, various drapes and a head scarf. It was 34 degrees and full sun; the beach was as busy as Buchanan Street on the Saturday before Christmas.

Earlier that day I witnessed a woman being stretchered off by paramedics, drip and oxygen attached. Probably a heat stroke. Many is the time that I spared a thought for Muslim women, wearing the hijab, niqab or abaya in this sweltering heat. And here were three women, girls actually, confounding expectations, having fun in the waves and cooling down like everyone else.

Here in the Var, and elsewhere in France have been many attempts to ban burkinis. A burkini is a super- modest swimsuit, not much different from a full wetsuit. Hair, legs and arms are covered enabling Muslim women to go bathing and swimming without compromising their faith.

In France, there is a ban on ostentatious religious symbols (keppahs, large crosses and muslim dress included); and this ban is enforced in many public buildings. During the heatwave, swimming pools are temporarily free to use but as swimming pools are supported by the state, the use of burkinis is prohibited in order to guarantee seperation between Church and State. 

There are ongoing attempts to ban the hijab in more places, especially in areas where the Front National polls high. Here there are voices to ban the burkini on beaches as well. Men seem endlessly fascinated by women's dress: you can go topless on the beach and having your arse hanging out of a thong and nobody bats an eyelid, but women who like to dress modestly because of their faith are hounded off the beaches.

So I liked those young women, for forging their own path, enabling them to have fun whilst keeping to their faith.


Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you! Be your nose a pointer for your brain! (OED)

Popular posts from this blog

‘The whelk ye freely confessed’: The Witch Trials in Crook of Devon

-
Image
One day in the early spring, Isabel Rutherford got a knock on her door. We don’t know whether she had a husband, friends or children. We certainly know that she had enemies. Isabel was accused of witchcraft and confessed. On the 3rd of April she was tried and convicted for witchcraft. On 5 April, she was taken to Lamblaires, a field close to the Crook Mill. She was strangled and her body was burned at the stake. Were her friends and family there to say goodbye? Were her accusers there? We don’t know. Two other convicted witches were executed alongside her and more were to follow. The year is 1662; the place is Crook of Devon, a rural village in Kinross-shire in Scotland. 350 years ago, people believed in the existence of witches. This belief was so entrenched that in Scotland alone, thousands of people were accused of witchcraft and in many cases convicted and executed. Around 3,000 people were tried, although gaps in the records make an accurate count impossible. There could hav...
Read more

Domestic Goddess, of sorts

-
Image
With reassuring regularity my nearly-30-year-old son phones me with a domestic query. He, in the age of googling anything and everything, still prefers me as the prime domestic search engine. These questions vary from gardens to stain-removal, from cooking to mending. He is also wont to dropping his mending in my lap from time to time. ‘Can you fix this, mum?’  Part of me is glad that he asks me and not his girlfriend. It is a mother-thing, not a woman-thing. Part of me is glad that I am still relevant in his life. The first of these calls was when he was just living in the student halls. ‘Mam, how do you defrost meat balls?’  He had a little, handwritten cookbook with him, with tried and tested recipes written down in his own hand. Meatballs, spaghetti cannelloni (for years pronounced by him as candeloni) and brownies.  Student fare: things we had practised. However, we never practised defrosting. Another goo...
Read more

The Little Hill of Women

-
Image
  I wasn’t prepared for the sheer beauty of Omey Island.   The extraordinary quality of light, the shifting patterns of currents in the water and the clouds in the sky, the poles marking the causeway.   The calm sea was almost imperceptibly advancing, swallowing up the ripples in the sand, inch by inch. Before parking in the small car park at the slipway, I’d gone into Sweeney’s, the pub cum village shop.   When I asked about Patti, the shopkeeper told me that she had been buried three months ago.   I had known I would be too late. ‘She never married,’ the woman said.   ‘Too busy painting.’   She pointed at some postcards.   I bought water and a sandwich and set off.   The causeway would be open for another two hours.   It was brightening up, the wind blowing holes in the clouds.   A funeral procession was gathering to walk over to the graveyard.   Here, even funerals here were subject to the tide. Crossing the causeway t...
Read more