Italy's reputation for religious tolerance was in the balance last week after a ban on women wearing burqas instigated in a tiny Alpine village began spreading across the country.
| Soddy Arabia has no reputation for religious tolerance, so they don't have to worry about things like that... |
An Italian woman who converted to Islam nine years ago and took to veiling her face after performing the Haj, the pilgrimage to Makkah, has received two fines from the authorities in the village where she has lived all her life. Sabrina Varroni, 34, converted after marrying her Moroccan husband, with whom she has four children. There are 10 other Muslims in the village, but she is the only who wears the veil.
| So nine out of ten are assimilating... |
The mayor of Drezzo, the 1,000-strong village near the Swiss border where she lives, has strong views on such practices. A member of the xenophobic and separatist Northern League, Cristian Tolettini found two laws on the books to help him stamp them out: one passed under Mussolini's fascist rule in 1931, banning the wearing of masks in public, and another dating from 1975, at the height of the Red Brigades scare, forbidding the wearing of items that disguise a person's identity. And he has instructed local police to enforce them.
| Even though the 1931 law was passed by Mussolini, it sounds remarkably like good sense. And the tie-in to the Red Brigades "scare" — they kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, remember — seems pretty apt. |
| Though the author meant the reference to the Red Brigades differently, of course. |
As a result, last week Drezzo's only policeman handed Varroni two penalty notices on successive days, each for about £25 — once when she was waiting at the bus stop for her children to come home from school, once in the municipal office. The following day she seemed likely to get another if she didn't remove her veil. Instead she stayed indoors. Despite the evident absurdity of a village woman known to all the other inhabitants being fined for setting foot outside her home, Tolettini defends his action. For Varroni to go around wearing the burqa, he said, was "a continual and conscious violation of the law" which was "not a question of principle but of correctness. The law of 1975 was enacted in light of the terrorism of the Red Brigades, and today too it seems to me that reasons of security are not lacking." |