Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey

The Case of the Headscarf Ban

Amelie Barras

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415821780
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Over the past few years, secularism has become an intrinsic component of discussions on religious freedom and religious governance. The question of whether states should restrict the wearing of headscarves and other religious symbols has been particularly critical in guiding this thought process.

Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey documents how, in both countries, devout women have contested bans on headscarves, pointing to how these are inconsistent with the 'real' spirit of secularism. These activists argue that it is possible to be simultaneously secular and religious; to believe in the values conveyed by secularism, while still remaining devoted to their faith. Through this examination, the book highlights how activists locate their claims within the frame of secularism, while at the same time revisiting it to craft a space for their religiosity.

Addressing the lacuna in literature on the discourse of devout Muslims affected by these restrictions, this book offers a topical analysis on an understudied dimension of secularism and is a valuable resource for students and researchers with an interest in Religion, Gender Studies, Human Rights and Political Science.

1 Introduction

The hegemony of secularism, gender and space

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775234-1

Responding to harsh criticisms attacking her decision to participate in the 2010 regional elections while wearing a headscarf, Ilhem Moussaid, a 22-year-old member of the new French anti-capitalist Party (NPA) explained: ‘I am a secularist, feminist and anti-capitalist’ (Ilhem, cited in Alemagna, 2010). Ilhem and her small white headscarf created the headlines in newspapers in early February 2010, and became the prime subject of discussions among intellectuals, politicians and even members of her own party. Martine Aubry, leader at the time of the French Socialist Party, argued that a candidate wearing a headscarf would not have been accepted on the list of her party. For her, religion had to be separated from politics — it had to remain in the private domain and not disturb what she understood as the neutral realm of the secular Republic. Members of the French Right presented another type of argument, stressing that the young girl had been instrumentalised and manipulated by her own political party, as she lacked the rationality and the autonomy to be an independent agent of her actions (Zappi, 2010). In the midst of such a cacophony, Ilhem’s voice and political opinions were barely audible, and when they were they were quickly disregarded as a non-sense or an aberration. Her headscarf was sufficient, from the outset, to define her identity. After a few days, Ilhem finally reacted in an email to the turmoil she had created:

I am very sad to see 8 years of my life reduced to my headscarf. I am very sad to hear that my personal belief is a danger for others, when I am promoting friendship, respect, tolerance and equality between all human beings [ … ] I am a citizen like all others.

(Ilhem, cited in Gurrey 2010)¹

Ilhem’s discourse and responses to her detractors are a good illustration of the conundrums that pushed me to embark on this project. I began research for Refashioning Secularisms in 2006, not long after France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools (15 March 2004). Although the wording of the law seemed to affect all religions, it was quite clear from the start that its first aim was to ban girls from wearing headscarves in public schools. Women and girls wearing a headscarf were facing similar restrictions in Turkey where, after the ‘soft’ coup of 28 February 1997,² a ban on the headscarf was enforced not only in schools, but also in universities, public buildings, courts, and so on. In both countries, these bans have been justified as protecting and fostering secularism — or rather laiklik in Turkey and laïcité in France.³ More precisely, policy makers, as in the case of Ilhem, have articulated their narratives around different aspects attributed to laiklik and laïcité, such as the separation between religion and state, the neutrality of ‘public’ spaces, and/or respect for gender equality in these spaces. In so doing, they have ‘pushed’ these ‘overtly’ religious women back into the ‘private’ realm, participating in the (re)production of powerful binaries, where (in)visible religion coupled with gender delineates the frontiers between private and public.

Amidst these efforts to regulate the bodies of women wearing headscarves, what caught my attention was how these women reacted to this process of exclusion. In France, on the eve of the law, some of them protested in the street by wearing headscarves with the colours of the French flag and carrying banners, on which they proclaimed their belief in laïcité, and denounced this law as being a betrayal of the spirit of this principle. In Turkey, several activists positioned themselves against bans by making similar references to the ‘real’ essence of laiklik, arguing that bans were a direct infringement on their right to freedom of choice, self-emancipation, and gender equality. In other words, like Ilhem these activists were arguing that it was possible to be at the same time both secular and religious, to believe in the values conveyed by secularism while still remaining pious: ‘laïcité yes, my headscarf also. My headscarf yes and laïcité also’ (slogan in protests, in Bouzar and Kada, 2003: 134).

Being myself deeply influenced by the binaries around which dominant secular tropes have been organised,⁴ I was, at first, quite puzzled by these reactions: How could pious women argue that they were at the same time religious and secular? This felt like an almost visceral inconsistency. Their discourse, I thought, seemed to be blurring the sacrosanct dichotomy between the religious (and, in particular, Islam) and the secular present in many of the works that had marked my training as a social scientist. In effect, their argument was not located outside secularism, but rather within this discourse. I felt compelled to analyse more thoroughly how this could be the case. Thus, I embarked on a journey that was going to unsettle my own intellectual boundaries and in which I would seek to tackle several questions, including: How could these women challenge headscarf bans by making reference to the same aspects of secularism used by states to enforce them? What was their reading of the term and were they able to find space within it to accommodate their religiosity? What effect did this have on their understanding of religion and the right to religious freedom?

This book, therefore, does not offer a discussion of how Islamic modernities can be conceived in opposition to secular ones. Rather it embarks on an exploration of how challenges can be located within secularism. It invites the reader on a journey into the hegemonic power of secularism in Turkey and France. In so doing, it highlights the shifting character of secularism — a character that facilitates its (re)appropriation. By embracing a micro-approach in order to document the power of secular tropes on the lives on individuals, Refashioning Secularisms also offers a discussion of the importance of women and gender relations in the discourses of secularism. In fact, while I did not intend to focus on pious women at first, I realised that not only were they key to the articulation of secular tropes, but that they were also actively involved in the production of alternative discourses on secularism.

Locating refashioning secularisms

Excavating the power of secularism

I believe we must try to unpack the various assumptions on which secularism — a modern doctrine of the world in the world — is based. For it is precisely the process by which these conceptual binaries are established or subverted that tells us how people live in the secular — how they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses.

(Asad, 2003: 15–16 (author’s emphasis))

Throughout this project, I have remained amazed by the power secular tropes have been able to exercise on contemporary imaginaries. Not only was I surprised when I realised the role these tropes played in shaping policies both at the national and international levels, but I was also quite puzzled when I discovered that respondents were working within the frame of secularism. Yet, this is revealing of the ‘paradigmatic’ (Casanova, 1994: 17), or rather hegemonic, status of secularism. Scholars have not been immune to that spell. On the contrary, it has had direct consequences on how different disciplines in the social sciences have thought of and approached the relationship between religion and politics (on this see Wilson, 2012; Shakman Hurd, 2008).

In effect, many scholars, deeply influenced by the secularization thesis, have believed that with modernity religion would automatically retreat to the private realm, and that secularism would not only be the sole framework available to modern societies but would also be a prerequisite for democracy. Secularism in this story was imagined as corresponding to the separation of ‘church’ and state,⁵ yet the modalities of this ‘separation’ were left unexplored. This standpoint explains the lack of interest, particularly on the part of political and international relations scientists, in the study of religion as they understood it as an object located outside of politics; that is, outside their area of interest (e.g. Haynes, 2005: 399, 400). Secularism, in other words, was approached as a universal and static paradigm, and little effort was put into investigating how the concept was situated in history, how not all understandings of the term were compatible with democratic principles, and, finally, how rather than being opposed or superior to the religious it could articulate itself in relation to the religious.

It is only recently that scholars have started to problematize this ‘paradigmatic’ status, and have sought to understand how and why secularism has been able to acquire such power over our contemporary imaginaries (e.g. Shakman Hurd, 2012, 2008; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Scott, 2007; Cady and Shakman Hurd, 2010; Asad, 2003; Wilson, 2012; Knott, 2005; Calhoun et al. 2011). In so doing, secularism has been approached as a powerful discourse that ‘works across [ … ] institutional sites’ (Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008: 7), and one that is intimately related to understandings of religion and religious freedom. The reflections in this book are deeply indebted to this critical approach, and seek to contribute to this discussion. This standpoint is particularly interesting, inasmuch as it opens the door to exploring how the boundaries of what is understood as belonging to the categories ‘religion’ and ‘religious freedom’ shift in terms of secular narratives. It is based on the premise that there is not one model of secularism, but rather multiple modes of religious governance that differently shape assumptions about religion. In a sense, therefore, this viewpoint is less interested in evaluating to what extent religion is separated from politics in a particular country, and more with investigating how something comes to be constructed as religious and/or as political, and who is vested with the authority of (re)producing, and policing, those boundaries (Shakman Hurd, 2008: 16; Knott, 2005: 217). Rather than being about the retreat of religion, secularism is thus approached as a powerful mode of governance that shapes the boundaries of what is religiously acceptable. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd sums up this understanding nicely:

Rather than take secularism to be a neutral or natural space for politics that emerges once religion has been privatized, displaced, or diminished, it takes shape here as a contingent series of legal and political claims and projects that are deeply implicated in the definition and management of religion, religious freedom, toleration, diversity and so on. Secularism is not the absence of religion, but enacts a particular kind of presence. It appropriates religion: defining, shaping and even transforming it.

(Shakman Hurd, 2012: 955)

Many of these critical works have remained theoretical (e.g. Warner et al. 2010) or have chosen to adopt a macro and state-centred approach (e.g. Shakman Hurd, 2008; Kuru, 2009; Cady and Shakman Hurd, 2010; Calhoun et al. 2011; Bowen, 2007 a, 2007b; Scott, 2007; Wilson, 2012). Refashioning Secularisms proposes shifting the lens. It invites the reader to adopt a more micro perspective, looking not only at the consequences and authority of secular tropes on the lives of pious women in France and Turkey, but also at how these tropes shape the reactions of devout activists.

Going beyond Europe: comparing secularisms and secular policies

Until the last decade, few scholars had compared French and Turkish secularisms. In fact, those who had discussed the two cases had highlighted their great differences, and had almost ruled out comparison on that basis (Berkes, 1998 [1964]; Mardin, 1995). This lack of comparative studies was not surprising, as it was partly a consequence of the ‘paradigmatic status’ of secularism discussed above, in which it was approached as a unique, universal and static model. On top of that, the idea that the French and Turkish cases were incomparable due to their great differences has to be understood in the light of a strong, culturally essentialist narrative. In this account, ‘separation’ between ‘church’ and state was only ever possible in countries with a Christian heritage, as Christianity contained an open recommendation ‘to render unto Caesar, the things which are Caesar’s’ (Lewis, 1993:179). On the other hand, because no such advice was present in Islam, states in countries with an Islamic heritage saw themselves forced to ‘control’ religion to ensure that it would not disturb or take over state affairs (Lewis, ibid.; Gellner, 1983). This ‘control versus separation’ thesis has come under serious criticism in recent scholarship for overlooking the diversity of models of religious governance that exist across countries with similar religious traditions (Keddie, 1997; Lapidus, 1996), as well as for working with a static and essentialist reading of ‘religion’ (e.g. Kuru, 2009). Yet, as it will be discussed later in the book, it remains a powerful narrative, including at the policy level.

Over the last decade, a comparative tradition of secularism has started to gain ground. Scholars here are not only proposing a study of ‘secularisms’ (e.g. Shakman Hurd and Cady, 2010; Calhoun et al, 2011), but are also embarking on projects, in which they debunk essentialist narratives (e.g Kuru, 2007, 2009; Stephan and Kuru, 2012; Elver, 2012). For instance, Kuru (2007, 2009, 2012) and Shakman Hurd (2008), in their attempts to classify different models of secularism, have made the case that, despite their different religious heritage, the French and Turkish models belong to the same category — that is, ‘assertive secularism’ (Kuru, 20...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: the hegemony of secularism, gender and space
• 2 A tradition of regulations: shedding light on the paradoxes of the languages of secularism
• 3 The slow exclusion of pious women from French and Turkish societies: (re)producing spaces
• 4 French Muslim activists: promoting a laïcité ante
• 5 Turkish devout activists: reconfiguring laiklik with human rights
• 6 A rights-based discourse: a door to multiple sites of challenges
• Conclusion: an invitation to transcend the secular/religious divide
• Bibliography
• Index