One day while I was in Paris on Choate’s Summer Program Abroad, I was walking home from school and I stopped at a newsstand to buy Le Monde, a leading French paper. While I was scrutinizing the stand for the paper, I noticed a Time Magazine cover that took me aback. A photo of a woman in an Islamic burqa graced the cover. I could not differentiate between the burqa and the background. All I could see were the women’s cerulean eyes. I felt like she was looking right at me, and had something she was dying to tell me—I just couldn’t figure out what it was.  This was the start of my interest in the recent controversy surrounding burqas and other religious symbols in schools.

A burqa is an outer garment worn by women as a form of religious expression in some branches of Islam. The burqa is worn to shield a woman’s body, which is considered sacred, from men outside of her family. A burqa consists of a loose body covering, a head covering, and a face veil. Some face veils cover a woman’s whole face with only transparent fabric covering the eyes, while others have an eye opening. Even though the burqa is now a religious symbol, it actually originated before the creation of Islam. It was created in the Middle East as a protection from sandstorms and windy desert conditions. It gained its religious connection simply from a statement from the Qur’an telling all Islamic men and women to dress appropriately. Although the wearing of the burqa began as a cultural preference, it has evolved into a mixed symbol for Islam: for many Muslims, it is simply an expression of their faith, but for many Westerners, it is a symbol of oppression of women who operate under Islamic traditions.

For some Westerners, the burqa has gained this negative association due to the recent tensions between the United States and parts of the Middle East. For example under the harsh rule of the radical Taliban in Afghanistan, Afghani women were forced to wear a burqa or a burqa like garment in public. When the United States intervened and ousted the Taliban after September 11th, many of the impositions—such as the forced wearing of the burqa—were vilified by the West as examples of Taliban oppression.

The wearing of the burqa has become a political controversy in Western Europe, which has a substantial and growing Muslim population. In 2004, burqas were banned in France as part of a law that prohibits students to wear clearly visible religious symbols. President Sarkozy has openly declared that he wants burqas banned because he believes it deprives women of an identity. He has also said that he believes the wearing of the burqa to be a security matter because anyone could hide behind the screen of the veil. The French National Assembly appointed a commission to investigate the issue further, and in January of this year the committee decided that burqas would be banned on all public transportation and in any public service buildings.

In reality, it is the burqa ban not the burqa itself that is offensive. With these actions, the government is making many sweeping generalizations about women who wear burqas. While admittedly in some fundamentalist communities women are forced to wear the burqa, there are many women who choose to wear the burqa because they believe in what it symbolizes. Look no further than Marjane Satrapi’s famed graphic novel Persepolis or visiting speaker and author Azar Nafisi for proof of this. Although these two women made the personal choice to not wear the veil, in their writing and speaking they emphasize that the veil is a holy symbol that should be worn by those who choose it as an expression of their faith.

Furthermore, I do not believe that the law that prohibits students from wearing religious symbols in schools is uniformly enforced. My French sister told me that she and many of her friends wear necklaces with crucifixes on them to school everyday, and no teacher ever said anything about them. This would make sense considering France is a predominately Catholic country. The ban thus discriminates against Islamic women and creates a hierarchy of religion that is degrading to Islam as a religious belief and to all of those who practice it.

The bottom line is, Islamic women across the world should have the right to choose whether they want to wear a burqa or not. Sadly, this is not the case for many burqa wearers. We, as a society, do not have the right to put all burqa wearers into one category. I realize now what the woman on the cover of Time was telling me. She didn’t need words to make her statement; wearing the burqa is her choice and that choice speaks for itself—no further explanation needed. The burqa is a sacred symbol that is integral to some people’s full expression of their Islamic religion. The French government does not have the right to control anyone’s religious beliefs in this way. Rightfully, religious matters are not matters of state. But even more than that, the French government’s actions have taken away a fundamental right of the French people: they’ve taken away the right to make one’s own decisions. By taking away this right to choose one’s own attire, the French government has crossed a dangerous boundary. French citizens beware: your freedom is being severely compromised.