The Politics of the Veil

Joan Wallach Scott

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400827893
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia francese

In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all.
Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She examines the long history of racism behind the law as well as the ideological barriers thrown up against Muslim assimilation. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate--how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French. Scott maintains that the law, far from reconciling religious and ethnic differences, only exacerbates them. She shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France--or the West in general--and how it creates the very "clash of civilizations" said to be at the root of these tensions. The Politics of the Veil calls for a new vision of community where common ground is found amid our differences, and where the embracing of diversity--not its suppression--is recognized as the best path to social harmony.

1

THE HEADSCARF CONTROVERSIES

In France, debate about whether girls could wear Islamic headscarves in public schools erupted at three separate moments: in 1989, 1994, and 2003. The chronological sequence does not reflect a steady increase in the number of headscarf-wearing girls or in acts by them which might be called disruptive. The girls were usually good students, with no disciplinary records. The only objection to them was that they insisted on wearing the hijab—the piece of cloth that became (as we shall see in what follows) a symbol of the “problem of Islam” for the French republic. What the chronological sequence does reflect is a hardening of the government’s position in reaction to the steadily growing political influence of the anti-immigrant far right. From an early official inclination to tolerate expressions of individual religious conviction, there emerged a consensus that headscarves were dangerously political in their challenge to the principles of the secular republic and in their necessary association with Islamism and terrorism.

1989

The events that became known as the affaires des foulards began on October 3, 1989, when three Muslim girls who refused to remove their headscarves were expelled from their middle school in the town of Creil, about thirty miles outside of Paris. The school is in a “priority educational zone” (ZEP), one that is poor and ethnically mixed, with a high turnover in the teaching staff and a great deal of class, religious, and cultural tension. The principal, Eugène Chenière, once referred to it as “une poubelle sociale” (a social garbage pail). When he expelled the girls, he claimed to be acting to enforce “laïcité”—the French version of secularism. According to Chenière, laïcité–a concept whose meaning would be furiously debated in the months and years that followed—was an inviolable and transparent principle, one of the pillars of republican universalism. The school was the cradle of laïcité, the place where the values of the French republic were nurtured and inculcated. It was, therefore, in the public schools that France had to hold the line against what Chenière later termed “the insidious jihad.”¹

What would at other times have been a minor incident—a school principal disciplining a few of his students—quickly became a major media event, tapping into, and at the same time inflaming, public uneasiness about the place of North African immigrants and their children in French society. Although many of these “immigrants” had long lived in France—indeed, some had even been born there and were citizens—they were seen as strangers to the dominant culture. They were, for the most part, poor; they lived in suburban enclaves on the outskirts of major cities; and many were Muslims. At a moment of international attention to Islam and to Arab militancy—as exemplified in the Iranian ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the start of the first Palestinian intifada against the Israeli occupation—as well as of national concern about the emergence in France of a few small militant Islamist groups, the anxiety about Islam in France (said now to be its second largest religion) was intense. Press coverage of the expulsion of the three girls, and then of other conflicts about headscarves in other schools with similar populations, served to focus that anxiety, making a few schoolgirls’ choice of attire the symbol of a challenge to the very existence of the republic.

On the face of it, the hubbub generated by the press seems exaggerated, but in fact it exposed the crisis the nation was confronting: how to reconcile an increasingly multicultural population with a universalism that precluded the recognition of cultural and social differences. The celebrations of the bi-centennial of the French Revolution in 1989 insisted that universalism was a defining and enduring trait of republicanism, the key to national unity. In many oped pieces, commentators warned that tolerating displays of Islamic affiliation would lead France down the disastrous path of American multiculturalism: ethnic conflict, affirmative action which put race above merit, social fragmentation, and political correctness. The distorted depictions of the American experience offered a warning that France must resist all efforts to address the realities of its social and cultural pluralism.

In the press accounts, the Muslim hijab referred to in French as a headscarf (foulard) quickly became the veil (voile), or more dramatically, the chador, this last evoking the specter of an Iranian-style Islamic revolution. Predictably, perhaps, Catholic leaders (as well as Protestant and Jewish) joined some of their Muslim counterparts in decrying the expulsions, arguing that laïcité meant respect for and toleration of differences of religious expression among students. Less predictable was the split between the two leading anti discrimination groups: one condoned, the other deplored, the expulsions, both in the name of the secular principles of the republic.² Demonstrations organized by Islamists to support the girls from Creil exacerbated the controversy; pictures of veiled women marching to protect their “liberty” and their “honor” only reinforced the idea of revolutionary Islam on the rise. The voices of calm and reason—those pointing out, for example, that radical, politicized Islam could be attributed to only a tiny minority of French Muslims, or that the number of headscarves in schools was hardly a widespread phenomenon—were drowned out by a growing hysteria fed by the pronouncements of some leading intellectuals. In an article published in the left-leaning magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, five philosophers ominously warned that “only the future will tell if the year of the bicentennial will also have been the Munich of the republican school.”³ The apocalyptic tone of their manifesto was, given the reality of the events, astonishing: “The foundation of the Republic is the school,” they insisted, “that is why the destruction of the school will lead to the fall of the Republic.” From this adamantly republicanist perspective there could be no accommodation with Islam.

Initially, however, there was accommodation. Overriding criticism from within and outside his party, Socialist minister of education Lionel Jospin managed to contain the situation by referring the matter to the Conseil d’Etat—the highest administrative court in France, whose task is to deal with the legality of actions taken by public bodies. On November 27, the council ruled that the wearing of signs of religious affiliation by students in public schools was not necessarily incompatible with the principle of laïcité, as long as these signs were not ostentatious or polemical, and as long as they didn’t constitute “acts of pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda” that interfered with the liberties of other students.⁴ Students could not be refused admission to school for simply wearing headscarves; this would be a violation of the right to individual conscience, which included religious conviction. Their behavior (putting pressure on other students to wear headscarves, refusing to participate in athletic activities or to attend classes that conflicted with their religious beliefs) also had to clearly challenge or disrupt public order before it could be legitimately restrained. Those best able to interpret this behavior, the council concluded, were the teachers and school administrators, who knew their pupils. In a ministerial circular based on the council’s ruling, Jospin left it to local school authorities to decide, on a case by case basis, whether headscarves were admissible or not.

Despite some condemnations, the ruling did in fact calm things down, and media attention moved elsewhere. There was hardly any coverage of various local negotiations, except for the conclusion of the story of the girls from Creil. Two of the three (sisters of Moroccan origin) were convinced by the King of Morocco, whose intervention had been sought by some French Muslim leaders, to take off their headscarves when they entered a classroom. It is interesting to note in this connection that the pressure that was brought to bear from their “community” forced the girls to abandon their choice of religious expression in favor of accommodation to secular authority. The compromise—and indeed it was a compromise—didn’t actually remove headscarves from schools; it just bared the heads of the girls for the duration of each class. In a clear demonstration of their personal religious conviction, they continued to wear the hijab in the school’s hallways and courtyards. But upon entering a classroom they were required, repeatedly, to enact deference to the secular rules that their deportment and dress refused. The compromise, in other words, did not resolve but rather made manifest the tension between France and its Muslim citizens. I do not qualify the term Muslim, despite the fact that as many as 45 percent of Muslims polled at the time agreed that the hijab should not be worn in school. Those republicans who wanted headscarves banned made no distinction between one Muslim and another. For them the headscarf was a symbol, not only of those who defined themselves as orthodox followers of Islam, but of the entire Arab/North African/Muslim population in France.

1994

In 1994, Eugène Chenière again raised the question of headscarves in schools. Now he was a deputy representing the department of the Oise for the center right party, the Raillement pour la République (RPR). Elected to office as part of the sweeping triumph of the right in the legislative elections of 1993, Chenière immediately offered a bill that would ban all “ostentatious” signs of religious affiliation. After a year of what one news account referred to as “Chenière’s crusade,” during which there were several conflicts in schools (among them a strike by teachers at one school in support of a gym instructor who claimed that headscarves were dangerous to wear during physical activity), the minister of education, François Bayrou, decreed on September 20, 1994, that “ostentatious” signs of religious affiliation would henceforth be prohibited in all schools.⁵ The behavior of the students need not be taken into account, he asserted, because certain signs were “in themselves” transparent acts of proselytizing. Bayrou drew a distinction between “discreet signs,” those that demonstrated personal religious conviction, and “ostentatious signs,” whose effect was to introduce difference and discrimination into an educational community that, like the nation it served, ought to be united. Indeed, the nation was the only community which could command the allegiance of its citizens. “The nation is not simply a collection of citizens with individual rights. It is a community.”⁶ Discreet signs were tolerable; ostentatious signs were not.⁷ The ministerial pronouncement was followed by the expulsion of sixty-nine girls wearing what were increasingly referred to as “veils.”

As in 1989, there was a huge media controversy, and many of the same arguments were rehearsed.⁸ As earlier, the situation was likened to the Dreyfus Affair, the dispute over what turned out to be a spurious charge of treason brought against a Jewish army captain at the end of the nineteenth century. Each side was adamant. Those supporting Bayrou came from across the political spectrum; their tone was urgent. They inevitably linked events in France to the violent civil war then raging in Algeria. A principled defense of the republic required decisive action, they insisted. One could not tolerate the expression of a religiosity that was itself inherently intolerant and oppressive. Those opposing the minister’s decree included a handful of academics and (again) representatives of France’s religious establishment. Sociologists Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar interviewed girls who wore the hijab in an effort to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of their motives. “If one accepts the postulate that the royal road to liberation is through education,” they wrote, “then to reject girls with veils . . . is to penalize them . . . by denying them the possibility of becoming modern.”⁹ Although Gaspard and Khosrokhavar were often attacked as proponents of the veil, in fact their argument accepted the same opposition between tradition and modernity, religion and enlightenment used by those who favored expulsion of veil-wearing students. The difference was more than tactical, however. Bayrou and his followers were engaging in symbolic politics (France takes a stand against Islam), while Gaspard and Khosrokhavar were interested in practical outcomes: they believed that negotiation, not exclusion, would lead to the desired end of integrating Muslims into French society as well as promote feminist goals of education and emancipation.

Bayrou’s decree was challenged by some of the girls who had been expelled from school, and it was overturned by various courts and by the Council of State, which reaffirmed its 1989 ruling. The council rejected Bayrou’s claim that certain signs could be separated from the intentions of those who carried them and again left it to teachers and administrators to interpret the actions of their students. In the wake of this ruling, Simone Veil, the minister of social affairs, appointed a woman of North African origin, Hanifa Chérifi, as official mediator for problems linked to the wearing of the veil. Chérifi’s work seems to have borne fruit: the number of disputes dropped dramatically (from about 2,400 in 1994 to 1,000 in 1996), and only around a hundred students were reported to be wearing headscarves to class. In some schools, girls were permitted to wear bandanas to cover their hair (although there were often intricate negotiations about size and color); in others, headscarves could be worn in the school building as long as they were dropped to the shoulders upon entering a classroom. As in 1989, the compromises did not resolve the tension but embodied it.

The controversy again died down, although it continued to receive government attention, in no small part because of insistent pressure from the increasingly visible, far-right populist party, the National Front. In 2000, the High Council on Integration, a body appointed by the government to address issues of immigration, made a number of recommendations about how to deal with “Islam in the Republic.” In what political scientist Marc Howard Ross calls a “soft” republican approach, and what seems to me to be an exercise in equivocation, the report recognized the difficulty of excluding students with headscarves at the same time that it defined the wearing of these as antithetical to the goal of “integration.”¹⁰ It endorsed efforts at mediation rather than the passage of laws. But it did not resolve the ongoing tension between the definition of France as a nation “one and indivisible,” in which difference was rendered invisible, and the increasing social and cultural diversity of its population.

2003

In 2003, the question of headscarves was first brought to national attention when the minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, insisted that Muslim women pose bare-headed for official identity photographs. (Concern about terrorism after the attacks of September 11 in the U.S. was one of the justifications for this ruling.) In the wake of the controversy generated by the policy, schools once again became an issue, and politicians from the major parties rushed to declare their fealty to the republic. Socialist deputy Jack Lang presented a bill to the National Assembly that, in the name of laïcité (and in the interests of not being perceived as discriminating against Muslims), would outlaw signs of any religious affiliation in public schools. In June the assembly created an investigative body to gather information, and in July President Jacques Chirac appointed a commission headed by a former government minister and deputy, Bernard Stasi, to explore the feasibility of enacting a law.¹¹

While the Stasi commission was meeting, press attention turned, at the end of September 2003, to two sisters in the sub-urban town of Aubervilliers (just outside of Paris). Alma and Lila Lévy were expelled from their high school when they refused either to remove their headscarves or to accept in its place a head covering the school administrators called “un foulard léger” (a headscarf “lite”!), which revealed the neck, earlobes, and hairline. (I will return to the question of what is covered and what is exposed in chapter 5). The girls had recently converted to Islam, much to the consternation of their parents and paternal grandmother, all of them leftists and avowedly secular. The father, a lawyer, referred to himself as “a Jew without God”; the mother, a teacher, was ethnically a Kabyle (a Berber, not an Arab) from Algeria who had been baptized as a Catholic but who did not practice her religion. The parents were separated, one of the reasons for the girls’ dismaying decision to convert, according t...