A lone Italian uncovers rift on veils

The immediate issue is how one woman in one tiny town in northern Italy dresses, so it made a certain kind of sense for Giorgio Armani to weigh in. His opinion? A woman should wear what she likes, even if what she likes is a veil that hides her face completely.

"It's a question of respect for the convictions and culture of others," the fashion designer said in an open statement released late last month. "We need to live with these ideas."

Armani was speaking out in defense of Sabrina Varroni, a Muslim woman from this town near the Swiss border who has been fined €80, about $100, for appearing twice in public wearing a veil that completely covered her face. It was a punishment that has won cheers from some Italians and horrified others.

Armani's views were just one of the particularly Italian twists to questions facing much of Europe over its uneasy relationship with Islam.

The case of Varroni is not a simple one about religious freedom.

Drezzo, population 1,800, is controlled by the Northern League, a political party in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition that has advocated the secession of northern Italy and strict controls on immigration. The case has been viewed by some as a telling clash of two ideologies: Islam versus Italian xenophobia.

To fuel that view, Drezzo's mayor, Cristian Tolettini, fined Varroni under a 1931 Fascist-era law banning the wearing of masks in public. The Italian press also got into the act when a reporter from the Milan newspaper Il Giorno showed up in Drezzo last month completely veiled and was promptly fined, too.

Varroni, a 34-year-old mother of four, is not one of the thousands of poor Muslims who have immigrated legally to Italy in recent years to seek a better life. Nor is she among the thousands more arrivals in Italy who have come illegally.

She is a native Italian who grew up in Drezzo and married a Tunisian more than 10 years ago, converting to Islam.

Late last month, she wrote an impassioned letter to Italy's president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In it she complained of threats to her and her family and begging for help.

"I'm scared of the violence that this unwanted publicity will seek out," she wrote. "I've never tried to proselytize, or use my veil as a provocation. What harm am I doing? I am not masked. I'm simply wearing a veil that is obligated by my faith."

Similar arguments have been made by female students in France, Germany and Turkey, which restrict the wearing of a less severe symbol of Islam, the head scarf, in schools. In June, the European Court of Human Rights rejected an appeal by a Turkish student, saying that such laws "can be justified" to prevent fundamentalist groups from pressuring women to wear such symbols.

The problem in Drezzo, which has a handful of Muslim immigrants, started two years ago when Varroni showed up at the town hall wearing a veil that covered her entire face. In a telephone interview, she said she began wearing the veil, called a nikab, about five years ago.

"I wear the veil because it is a law," she said. "It is an obligation of my faith."

The mayor saw it differently. "I was stupefied," Tolettini, then the deputy mayor, recalled. "We have a lot of Muslims who live here, and they don't dress like that."

He asked her to show him her face so that he could identify her. She said, according to Tolettini, that she would do so only for a woman. Tolettini said he decided to let it go, but warned her that there were laws against appearing in public with a concealed face.

There were no problems until July 2004, when she went to the town hall again and Tolettini, now the mayor, was there. "My authority and my duty was to have her identified," he said. "She clearly refused."

There is much dispute about the laws Tolettini cited. There are two, neither of which anticipated the issue of Islamic dress: the one from 1931, promulgated under Mussolini's rule, and a second enacted in 1975, when fear of the Red Brigades group was high, forbidding disguises that mask a person's identity.

On Sept. 17, Varroni, veiled, went to pick up her children from school. The town's sole police officer issued her two fines totaling €40 under the old national laws. The next day, she went to the town hall again in her veil, and was fined another €40.

Verona's lawyer, Serena Soffitta, said the fines were a vendetta against her client and an example of the Northern League's opposition to immigration.

"She is the only person in that town who wears a veil," Soffitta said, adding in a reference to the Northern League, "They only want Italians in Italy."

Tolettini denied this, saying he was not part of the party's more reactionary wing. To him, the matter is both simple and crucial: No one is above the law, he said, and letting people hide identities, even for religious reasons, is a threat to public security, especially at a time of widespread fear of terrorist attacks.

"I don't think that she is dangerous at all," he said. "But the type of clothing that she wears, that is dangerous. It could result in something that we regret very much. It's a problem of security. It's a problem of public order."

The case has stirred up Italy for weeks, both in favor of Varroni and against her. Hard-line members of Parliament have supported Tolettini's upholding of the laws, and Cesarino Monti, a Northern League senator, has proposed an even tougher one: a fine of up to €5,000 and up to six months in jail for people who cover their faces in public.

Monti pointedly excluded events in which Italians often wear some kind of mask, like fans at sporting events and revelers at public festivals like carnivals.

The opposition, meantime, has condemned what it said is an overzealous application of the law in a way that, its leaders said, sends a message of intolerance toward Islam and foreigners.

"If you let young girls who come into this country dress themselves, to wear what they feel is comfortable, you'll see that eventually they will change," said Maria Luisa Campagner, a regional official with the center-left Daisy Party, a coalition that includes the Italian People's Party, the successor of Italy's Christian Democrats. "They may arrive wearing the chador, but they'll end up wearing blue jeans and new hairstyles."

Meanwhile, the Association of Muslim Women, a group with about 600 members in Italy, says that Islam does not require covering the whole face and that Varroni should consider a less extreme veil.

"We don't want this phenomenon to explode," said Asmam Dachan, the group's spokeswoman. "We already contacted her to tell her that Islam doesn't demand this and that it is better to meet with the mayor and work something out, especially in this delicate moment."

So far, Varroni has refused to pay the fines, and her case is working its way up the legal system. Her lawyer said it is an example of the new challenges Italy is facing with a rising population of Muslims and is a test of how well the nation will deal with those challenges.

"For us, this is new," Soffitta said. "There is no law that says a burka is legal or illegal. Until now, we haven't needed one. We've let good sense be our guide."