PARIS — The world’s first ban on Islamic face veils took effect Monday in France, meaning that women may bare their breasts in Cannes but not cover their faces on the Champs-Elysees.
Two veiled women were hauled off from a Paris protest within hours of the new ban. Their unauthorized demonstration, on the cobblestone square facing Notre Dame Cathedral, was rich with both the symbolism of France’s medieval history and its modern spirit of defiance.
While some see encroaching Islamophobia in the new ban, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government defended it as a rampart protecting France’s identity against inequality and extremism. Police grumbled that it will be hard to enforce.
Ban worries allies
“The law is very clear. Hiding your face in public places is cause for imposing sanctions,” Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Monday at an EU meeting in Luxembourg. He said it defends “two fundamental principles: secularism and the principle of equality between man and woman.”
The law affects barely 2,000 women who cloak themselves in the niqab, which has just a slit for the eyes, and the burqa, which has a mesh screen over the eyes, and it enjoyed widespread public support when it was passed last year.
But it has worried French allies, prompted protests abroad and come to epitomize France’s struggle to integrate Muslim immigrants in recent generations.
France is a traditionally Catholic country where church and state were formally separated more than a century ago, when Muslims were barely a presence. Today, it sees itself as a proudly secular nation: Few Catholics attend church regularly, and small-town churches are crumbling — while growing demand for prayer rooms means Muslims pray on sidewalks and streets.
Muslims see stigma
Though only a very small minority of France’s some 5 million Muslims wear the veil, many Muslims see the ban as a stigma against the country’s No. 2 religion. Many have also felt stigmatized by a 2004 law that banned Islamic headscarves in classrooms.
About a dozen people, including three women wearing niqab veils, staged a protest in front of Notre Dame on Monday, saying the ban is an affront to their freedom of expression and religion. Much larger crowds of police, journalists and tourists filled the square.
Two of the veiled women were taken away by police for taking part in an unauthorized demonstration, Paris police authority said. They were released later Monday after questioning. Amnesty International condemned the detention of the women and others at the protest.
It was unclear whether the women were also fined for wearing a veil.
The law says veiled women risk a $215 fine or attendance at special citizenship classes, though not jail. People who force women to don a veil are subject to up to a year in prison and a $43,000 fine, and possibly twice that if the veiled person is a minor.
