Interestingly, the burqa finds little mention in the Quran; some scholars even believe the burqa is older than Islam. The history of the dress is actually rooted in geography, the overall dress and the nakaab (face covering) worked as a sand mask in windy deserts.

In today’s political zeitgeist, when an American president opens a speech with an ‘assalaam aleikum’, Sarkozy’s naivete is both startling and laughable. Even though France is proudly secular, its president’s views are a violation of democracy.

It harks me back to the Turkey of the great Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who’s passion for modernity had him shut down Sufi centres, upchuck the fez and veil, cleanse the Turkish language of all Arab and Persian leanings and changed the script to roman. But that was the 1920s; Turkey had broken up with Islam and had embraced a western idea of secularism. Islam was not for the bourgeois Kemalists, it was for the poor, who had no money or literature to entertain themselves with.

Today, Islam has found its way in through the backdoor and independently. As migrants from the conservative Anatolia increased, the new Istanbullus are more sure of who they are. The streets that lead to beautiful Istanbul’s Bosphorus are lined with women in designer headscarves driving SUVs, confident of their religious identity and their place in the world.

The burqa, or the hijab (head scarf), has ceased to be a symbol of radicalism. It is now looked at as an assertion of culture and an acceptance of history. (That Christian Dior’s John Galliano is wooing the Arab market with his embellished abayas is another matter altogether). But it may take more than a man who’s more at ease with an extramarital affair than a conservatively dressed woman to figure that one out.

... contd.