They say it was a positive experience because other swimmers were interested in what they were doing and they were able to tell them about the issue. The activists sing slogans and splash around in a public pool. In videos of those parties, people are wearing burkinis and bikinis, and are joined by many non-Muslims. They began their campaign with letters and some very positive meetings with local officials. And people depend on the public pools to cool off. The women say Grenoble gets very hot in the summer because the surrounding mountains trap the heat. Pool parties help kick off the campaign for burkinis "So here they were making picnic lunches for their children and husbands to go to the pool, yet they couldn't join them." "We met some women who felt discriminated against because they couldn't get into the pools due to their hijab and because they couldn't wear a regular bathing suit," she says. Anissa says the work all started quite simply four years ago. The women, Yasmina and Anissa, both in their early 30s, don't want to give their last names because they've gotten online threats. Two of the community organizers are also in the office. "Come on guys, be serious, we just want to go swim."Īlong with the burkini, the group is also pushing to allow boxer trunks in notoriously restrictive French public pools, and for what is known as the "monokini," i.e. "If we say we only want to go to the swimming pool - nothing else - they say, 'Yeah, but after that you will ask for separate swimming hours and then after that, you will ask to pray in the swimming pool, and then open a mosque in the swimming pool,' " he says and laughs. He says Muslims are always suspected of having a hidden agenda. But there was political harassment as soon as it came to Muslim women. Elies Ben Azib heads the organization, which also fights to protect the rights of disabled and impoverished people, and only recently took up the struggle for Muslim women who want to wear a bathing suit that protects their modesty.Īlliance Citoyenne Alliance Citoyenne activists engage in civil disobedience in a Grenoble pool in June 2019.īen Azib, who happens to be Muslim, says the group never had any problems with its other work.
The mayor has appealed.Īcross from the Grenoble train station is the office of Alliance Citoyenne, a citizens rights association that has been fighting for the body-covering bathing suit to be accepted in public pools. President Emmanuel Macron's interior minister, a hardliner, called the Grenoble ruling a provocation - and immediately filed an injunction to block it in court. Victories involving food or clothing may seem innocuous, but are very grave." This is how is Islamist fundamentalists take over. "The opposite of our values and our constitution. "It's a sign of separatism and of the submission of women," Le Pen said.
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In a TV interview, far-right leader Marine Le Pen called the full body-covering swimsuit a threat to French secularism and beyond. Piolle said there was simply no reason to ban them.ĪFP via Getty Images Members of the pro-burkini association Alliance Citoyenne celebrate after members of the municipal council voted to allow the wearing of the burkini in the city's swimming pools, in Grenoble on May 16. In mid-May, the town council approved the wearing of full body-covering bathing suits, commonly known as the burkini, in Grenoble's public municipal pools. While France bans outward religious symbols in public schools or in government offices to ensure neutrality, people are allowed to wear what they want in public. "I understand that they struggle with religious expression in the public space," he says.īut the mayor says people are confusing things. He says the religion that's more visible today in France is Islam, and that makes some people nervous. Piolle grew up Roman Catholic and he says 30 years ago, there were more signs of Catholicism in public. "It touched some very intense emotions for people," he says during an interview in his office. Rather, Piolle is being assailed for allowing the burkini in his town's public pools.
By the end of the year Grenoble will meet all its electricity needs with renewable energy.īut no one's talking about that, he says. GRENOBLE, France - Grenoble Mayor Éric Piolle was the first environmentalist to lead a major French city, and this year his Alpine town has been named a European green capital.
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