On March 7, 51.2% of Swiss voters approved a ban on burqas and niqabs in the country’s public areas. The fact that the ban was passed during a pandemic of coronavirus, an airborne pathogen, which has forced humanity into masks, is suggestive. Functionally, the niqab worn over the mask does not provide any extra concealment, or security risk, than the masks most of us are wearing. Clearly, as with all the European burka bans to date, the rationale behind the Swiss one is likely to be less honorable than claimed by its advocates, and the pandemic restrictions highlight that. By criminalizing this garment, often worn for religious reasons, bans provide Islamophobes across the political spectrum with an excuse to harass Muslim women with impunity.
In 2009, in the run up to the passing of the French burka ban, Nicholas Sarkozy, the then French president said that the burka constituted “debasement of women” and a sign of their “subservience”. A burka ban was proposed as a legal solution and passed by the National Assembly of France in 2010. It became effective in 2011, and soon after, Belgium passed a similar ban. At the time of writing, eight European countries have banned the burka.
Research has shown that banning face coverings had an effect opposite to liberating women — street harassment of women, now shown as strongly correlated to the ban, spiked; women who already faced severe discrimination in the labor market were further pushed out of employment, and effectively imprisoned in their homes as they limited their outdoor activities out of fear of attacks or fines. The 2004 public school headscarf ban has been shown to negatively affect girls’ access to and quality of education.
Any government genuinely concerned with the welfare of women who belong to a religious minority would review such a restrictive law, and repeal it if evidence indicates its effects are detrimental. The fact that the increase in harassment and isolation of niqabi women was not sufficiently troubling for the French and Belgian governments to reconsider this law (and for the Netherlands, Austria, Bulgaria, Latvia, Denmark, and Switzerland to vote against it) suggests that they were considered unimportant, or perhaps, intended. The case of Switzerland, which passed a burka ban on March 7, 2021 in a nationwide referendum during the pandemic illustrates a deeply racialized nature of masking.
Contrary to the statements about a supposedly equalizing effect of face coverings, the pandemic has shown that only white, secular-liberal citizens are allowed to wear masks unhampered. Those who do not fit this description – in particular non-white and religious – are demonized. In France, for example, one is liable to pay 135 euros if caught in public without a mask, while wearing a niqab still carries a risk of being fined up to 150 euros. This puts veiled women entering the public space in an impossible situation.
Posters used in the Swiss referendum campaign depicted a scowling woman in a niqab (widely mislabeled as a burka) with the caption “Stop Extremism”, as if clothing had the power to induce or suppress belief in extremist ideologies. A referendum such as this one is also a convenient smokescreen that redirects attention from the high number of domestic political extremist attacks in Switzerland.
Given the minuscule number of women who wear the niqab in Switzerland (approximated at 30), and a lack of evidence linking women who wear the niqab to terrorism, it is likely that the Swiss ban was more about optics (introducing a severe solution to a non-existent problem and feeding the xenophobic sentiment that boosts political ratings) than any measurable policy outcomes.
Anna Piela is a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, USA. She is the author of Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US (Bloomsbury, 2021)
