‘Sisters on Saturdays and Sundays only’

A SHOPKEEPER has been fined $730 for ordering different opening hours for men and women at his store.

In 2011, France became the first country in Europe to ban the wearing of the veil in public. Picture: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

A MUSLIM shopkeeper has been fined $730 (€500) for ordering different opening hours for men and women at his store in the French city of Bordeaux, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Jean-Baptiste Michalon, the owner of a general store who converted to Islam in 2012, created an uproar when he pasted a notice outside his store in June 2015 indicating different shopping hours for men and women.

“Sisters” were invited to shop on Saturdays and Sundays only, while “brothers” were told they could shop on weekdays.

Michalon quickly abandoned the plan faced with a swell of negative reaction, and his shop has since closed its doors.

“We put this in place at the request of the sisters who preferred when my wife was behind the counter. It is a shop where we sell clothes,” Michalon told AFP at the time.

Michalon’s lawyer Tristram Heliot told AFP that the shop owner “admitted it was a blunder and tactless”.

Politicians slammed the move, as did Bordeaux’s chief Imam Tareq Oubrou. “We never saw this during the time of the Prophet. Markets were mixed. It seems a bit strange to me in a world where social mixing is an established culture,” he said.

Muslim women in the audience at a Hizb ut-Tahrir conference in Sydney, titled ‘A Community Criminalised: Innocent Until Proven Muslim?’

On Twitter, Bordeaux Mayor Alain Juppé call for “an end to such a discriminatory practice”, The Local reported, while Naima Charai, the head of French equality group ACSE, tweeted that gendered opening hours were “unimaginable and unacceptable”.

“Respect for the republic should be seven days a week,” she wrote.

In Australia, controversial Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir was recently ordered by a NSW tribunal to stop segregating women at its events.

Former News Corp journalist Alison Bevege sued the group and five of its members for sexual discrimination after she was forced to sit in the women and children’s section at a public lecture in 2014.

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Ms Bevege was treated unfavourably on the grounds of her sex in contravention of section 33 of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act.

“People should be judged for their character, intelligence, ideas and abilities — not their skin colour or gender,” she wrote after the ruling.

“Islamists argue that gender segregation is ‘separate but equal’, and voluntary — a free religious choice. But secular Muslims exposed this idea as false.

“Lejla Kuric, a former Bosnian refugee, is among those who have pointed out that women are subject to social coercion if they step out of line in the West — and has written about how in countries where gender segregation is enforced women are severely held back in every aspect of life.”