Italy will work to fight “Islamic separatism” and “counter-societies where Sharia law” reigns with a proposed new law that would crack down on religious fundamentalism and foreign influence on mosques.
The Brothers of Italy party (Fratelli d’Italia, FdI) of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni unveils new law to combat “Islamic separatism” that will crack down on hate preachers, foreign mosque funding, virginity examinations for Islamic brides, child marriages, arranged marriages, and face-coverings for women. The law would make just the latest European country to move towards banning the burqa.
Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and FdI spokesman on immigration Sara Kelany spoke out on the need for the bill, saying on Wednesday there is an obvious need for “crackdowns on Islamic fundamentalism and religious separatism” to “defend Western values based on freedom, quality, and respect for human rights”, reports ANSA.
The siloing of communities and diverse groups has allowed the establishment of parallel societies in Italy, Kelany said. She explained the bill, if turned into law, would “serve to counter the emergence of enclaves, counter-societies where Sharia law, rather than the Italian legal system, applies, and where Islamic fundamentalism thrives”.
The most prominent of the articles on the bill is that which goes after the burqa and niqab, full-face and body coverings for women culturally associated with migrants from some Islamic-majority nations. This is important to ban in Italy because regular citizens have a reasonable expectation to be able to know “who they’re dealing with” on a day-to-day basis, and because to not ban the garments would “undermine women’s dignity”.
The rule would ban the garments in public places, schools, workplaces, and universities.
She said women being forced to cover up undermined them. The FdI politician explained: “Erasing a woman’s face means humiliating her. Some talk about free choice, but I find it hard to believe a woman would want to humiliate herself. The left, blinded by ideological do-goodism and fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, on the one hand cries out about patriarchy, while on the other remains silent on these intolerable phenomena”.
Another of the articles in the proposed bill would crack down on foreign funding for mosques, which has become a concern in Italy where hidden foreign powers have used their financial support to exercise power in Italy. On the subject of potentially extremist mosques, a further article in the bill would introduce rules for a crackdown on hate-preachers preaching race-hatred and contributing to “Islamic separatism”.
A major feature of the bill focusses on forced marriage. Already illegal in Italy, the law would strengthen those rules and considerably increase the jail sentences for those found guilty of arranging forced marriages, and particularly in cases involving children. Another cultural peculiarity brought in by some migrant flows, the law would also ban the performing of virginity checks, the issuing of virginity certificates, making both a crime punishable with prison time.
Newspaper il Fatto Quotidiano notes the bill has the support of the League of Matteo Salvini, which had introduced similar bills of its own in recent memory. It also cites criticism of the initiative by an Italy-based Imam who questioned the purpose of the law, given wearing a full-face covering in Italy is already illegal under counter-terror law dating back to Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’ in the 1970s.
Indeed, while there is no national religious covering ban in force across Italy yet, there have been several cases this century where local authorities have used those existing laws to enforce their own city-wide de-facto bans. Lombardy, in Italy’s wealthy north banned Islamic coverings in 2015 during an ongoing wave of terror attacks across Europe, saying it was not reasonable to go incognito in government buildings, hospitals, and schools.
A BBC review of burqa bans across Europe notes some local towns in Italy were using face-covering rules to try and ban Islamic head coverings in their areas as far back as 2004.
The most famous burqa ban of all is that imposed by France, which has also banned Islamic swimwear, which has led to over a decade of bitter legal wrangling over the issue, as the French state’s strong positions on secularism collided with Islamic identity. France has the largest Islamic population of any European nation.
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