France's President Francois Hollande has made a passionate plea for tolerance in the face of calls in some French seaside towns for "burkini bans" prohibiting women from wearing Islamic dress on the beach.
Mayors in around 30 town this summer sought to ban the swimsuits, which leave only the face, hands and feet uncovered, ostensibly on security grounds. Some retracted the bans after France's highest court ruled they were unconstitutional, but others are holding firm.
Speaking in Paris yesterday on "Democracy in the Face of Terrorism", Hollande said a ban on the burkini would be unconstitutional. He said Islam could "certainly" co-exist with Christianity and Judaism and that France's much-vaunted secularism was not a "state religion" to be used against other faiths.
"Can Islam accept the separation of faith and law that is the very basis of secularism? My response is yes, clearly yes," he said. "The immense majority of our Muslim compatriots today give us daily proof by practising their faith without any threat to public order."
He continued: "The question the Republic must answer is: Is it really ready to embrace a religion that it did not expect to be this big over a century ago? There too, my answer is yes, certainly."
He said: "As long as I'm president, there will be no kneejerk law that is as impossible to apply as it is unconstitutional."
He rejected calls for more repressive laws after recent terrorist outrages, saying: "The French Constitution is not a flexible text with ellipses or parentheses... We must guarantee security without giving up on living how we want to live." He continued: "I will not let [fundamentalists] test the limit of the rRepublic, and I will not give them any excuse to stigmatise Muslims, either."
Hollande was ranging himself directly against former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who has declared he will once again stand as a candidate. Sarkozy has called for a burkini ban and said suspected radicals should be interned in camps.
