"France is a country where there is no place for the burqa, where there is no place for the subservience of women," Sarkozy said in a speech on French national identity.

France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority, has set up a special panel of 32 lawmakers to consider whether a law should be enacted to bar Muslim women from wearing the full veil. The country has had a long-running debate on how far it is willing to go to accommodate Islam without undermining the tradition of separating church and state, enshrined in a flagship. Sarkozy says all beliefs will be respected in France but says "becoming French means adhering to a form of civilization, to values, to morals." He also said that "France is a country where there is no place for the burqa."

A burqa  is an enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions for the purpose of cloaking the entire body. It is worn over the usual daily clothing (often a long dress or a shalwar kameez) and removed when the woman returns to the sanctuary of the household .

 

The burqa is usually understood to be the woman's loose body-covering, plus the head-covering (Arabic: ḥijāb, taking the most usual meaning), plus the face-veil (Arabic: niqāb). The word comes from the Arabic root which means "to patch up" or "to sew up". The face-veil portion is usually a rectangular piece of semi-transparent cloth whose top side is sewn to corresponding portion of the head-scarf, so that the veil hangs down loose from the scarf, and it can be turned up if the woman wishes to reveal her face (otherwise the whole face would be covered). In other cases, the niqāb part can be a side-attached cloth which covers the face below the eyes' region.

 

The face-veil portion is also called purdah, a Persian word meaning "curtain"