'Dans les écoles, les collèges et les lycées publics, le port de signes ou tenues par lesquels les élèves manifestent ostensiblement une appartenance religieuse est interdit. Le règlement intérieur rappelle que la mise en oeuvre d'une procédure disciplinaire est précédée d'un dialogue avec l'élève'
Article 1 de la loi n° 2004-228 du 15 mars 2004, inséré dans le code de l’éducation.
In February 2004, French MPs voted 494 to 36 in favour of legislation banning ostentatious religious symbolism in schoolwear. Could anything have been worse – one might ask – than such a large consensus among the political parties to promote a law that, in much of its implementation and outcomes, generates exclusion from state schools (47 individuals since September 2004), accentuates gender inequality by being directed mostly at women, and exacerbates indirect discrimination (did it occur to no one to remember the Sikhs during the preparation of this law)? But let us ask: would there have been a better result had more women been sitting in the French Parliament when these decisions were taken?
In 2004, only 12.3% of the seats in the National Assembly were occupied by women: 17% in the Senate. To be sure, this is rather better than the record immediately after World War II (less than 2%). But still, in 2004, equal rights (i.e. to vote and to be elected) had not put an end to patterns of exclusion. So could better quantitative representation of women in the legislative institutions have altered the final decision, or even modified the apparent consensus in favour of the exclusion of religious insignia from our state schools?
My first response, speaking frankly, and abjuring such essentialist sentiments as the assumption that women are somehow inherently more pacific, is that I really doubt it. It would have modified the structure of the discussion – men talking about women – by re-establishing, at least numerically, a kind of gender balance. But if we consider the nature of the French controversies around the headscarf, it is difficult to think of any women MPs who would have taken it upon themselves to defend the rights of the veiled students and the entitlement of Muslim French citizens to wear the headscarf at school. More women sitting in the parliament would have guaranteed neither warmer support nor better defence for this cause. All women do not share similar interests, any more than they adopt existentially identical positions towards issues such as abortion, equal opportunity or affirmative action. There is no single women’s position on the headscarf ban: there are many. There is not even unity amongst feminists. Just as there is also no single justification provided by Muslim women for wearing it. So why should women have better defended those who wish to wear the hijab if they had secured more influence over policy-making?
Whom are you talking for?
If we want to move to a more nuanced overview, we must ask: how was it that the headscarf became the symbol of women’s oppression, religious blindness, and the foremost threat to the French republican public space of communalization, all in one? Suddenly, after 15 years of intense discussion and fluctuation between total silence and passionate public drama, hundreds of girls wearing an Islamic headscarf became a public problem for the nation. And how did a debate primarily concerning women end up as a discussion between men?
What you discover if you try to map the different voices of women in these recent discussions, is the striking predominance of male voices, starting with those policy-makers and MPs who early in 2003 took the initiative of requesting a change in the education code. Who was asked to talk during those fervent debates on the wearing of religious insignia? Mostly men. Or women not normally directly concerned with educational reform. From the first, the violence of the rhetoric was noticeable: denying the meaning of the veil really amounted to negating the right of those who wear it to exist. Some feminists even ended up using this public platform to attempt to draw the line between good and bad Muslim girls, depending on their decision about appearing with or without the veil. P Tevanian’s recent analysis of how the French media covered the debate is very revealing on just this question of the strong predominance of men on the scene.
This does not mean that women were excluded from it. But which women were there? In the consensus that emerged mid 2003 in the run-up to the vote, those women who were frequently heard on TV and regularly invited onto talk shows rather inclined to speak from the pro-law side. They were certainly not Muslim students on their way to exclusion. Many commentators were heard to point out that, after all, the ‘veil spoke for the veiled’. Some time ago, an Islamic scarf on the head of a French citizen ceased to express an otherness that deserved further enquiry: there was nothing more to be said than that they were French. Instead, a political republican religiosity was constructed, in which feminist figures from leading institutions played the part of the valiant defenders of the public order. How this came about cannot be grasped fully without some provisional answer to the question: whom did the women who spoke against the veil represent? Activists who condemned the adoption of the veil were mostly white and wealthy. Minorities in general were at least silent if not completely absent from the public arenas of debate.
Good manners
The veil elicits a range of responses. Indeed the reaction towards its presence in our schools has provoked a profound split in the women’s voice on this question. Any overview of their response is multiple and rather self-contradictory. But we can observe that a dominant view, shared by most “establishment upper class feminists”, was based on a uniform perception of the signification of the headscarf. By considering it as quite simply a symbol of women’s oppression, most leaders in French feminist thinking adopted a neo-colonial attitude towards the veiled Muslim girls: if you don’t know why you should take off your headscarf, I’ll tell you.
Headscarf debate on openDemocracy:
“France unveiled: making Muslims into citizens?”, Johannes Willms, February 2004
“A nation in diversity: France, Muslims and the headscarf”, Patrick Weil, March 2004
“Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims”, Svend White, April 2004
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Orientalism became the hallmark of institutional French feminism on the headscarf issue: women of Muslim descent are beautiful, the veiled ones should be emancipated from patriarchal domination and get back to an autonomous management of their own bodies in all their bodily integrity. This neo-colonial representation of what Muslim women should do for themselves was no sooner enunciated than it led to the accompanying notion that they may not be able to defend themselves. Confrontation with the veil in no time reached epidemic proportions: this is the mark of oppression and alienation, and we emancipated women, as activists, must denounce it and fight against it.
In that context, a movement such as Ni putes ni soumises, contributed to the emergence of a new aesthetic regarding what a good, young, emancipated and Republican Muslim French citizen should look like, and how she should conduct her sex life. This is probably one of the least savoury aspects of the French controversy over the headscarf: it was less concerned with religion or with belief than with the stigmatisation of bad behaviour, particularly in its bearing on the relationship between men and women. The idea that women might wear a headscarf because they believed in its meaning and symbolism simply never arose.
However, it is ultimately impossible to assess a symbol without taking its full context into consideration. In some Muslim countries there is vigorous opposition to a political system that imposes the headscarf on women. But this cannot be equated with the exclusion of young French Muslim citizens from state schools. The case was not heard of those activists from Algeria, Iran or Egypt who fight against the veil in their country, but, once in France, think that a ban is much less likely to be understood by the targeted section of the population as a signal that their rights were being defended, than as the obligation to conform to a pattern of behaviour. In other words, wearing a headscarf in Afghanistan and wearing it in France do not carry the same meaning, either for society, or for individuals.
Feminist discourse, even if it was divided on how to deal with such new challenges, ended up adopting a rather uniform, culturalist stance in which it was assumed that the only alienation signalled by the headscarf was that experienced by those who submitted themselves to wearing it. By reducing the complexity of the phenomenon to a politically correct international iconography (headscarf = symbol of the male authority over female’s bodies), well-known French feminists joined the chorus in favour of the ban.
Once the Stasi commission submitted its report to the President, the public debate took a turn for the worse. Leading figures of feminism and the fight for women’s rights seemed to dictate to Muslim women (who were, however, French citizens) how they should dress. Nacira Guénif has noted the gap in comprehension between the feminist discourse on the veil (which argued that they wear it as a sign of their acceptance of male domination) and the pronouncements of the girls wearing it (who suggested that gender precisely disappears with the veil). The same experts also set about judging Muslim males (‘Arabs’) on their bad sexual behaviour-patterns. So the discussion not only consolidated the dominant stereotype of the headscarf (symbol of oppression that makes Muslim women the victims of their male partners), but also confirmed the stereotypical perception of the Arab men who are responsible for this alienation and oppression of women.
Religion itself has rarely been the basis for public debate. It was not the issue now. The Islamic headscarf was largely evaluated as a gender and security issue, violence against women (physical, symbolic or sexual) being the key. The headscarf debates can conceive of only one category of men, Muslims of Arab descent unable to control their sexual urges and unable to relate to women in a way that is non-violent (as if non-Muslims are perfect when it comes to women’s equality).
Many problems were being raised behind the dominant discussion, which focused almost exclusively on the Islamic headscarf: violence against women, the oppression of women, the emancipation of women, the regrettable sexual behaviour of Arab boys. But while the March 2004 law covers a large spectrum, including all types of religious insignia (Jewish skullcaps, large crosses, Sikh turbans and veils), Islamic headscarves remain the primary target because they are supposed to signal an attachment to and support for Islamic fundamentalism and the proselytizing spread of such beliefs.
It is difference that makes the difference
Returning to whether more women as MPs or senators would have ‘made a difference’ in this national debate, no doubt a larger presence of women in the national assembly and the Senate would eventually have altered the terms of the discussion. The sheer diversity of women’s voices on the subject would have shed light on issues that have now almost disappeared from the agenda – such as the negative effect of exclusion from school, the damage to individual trajectories of such exclusions, and the denial of the fundamental right to education. This is not because women have a particular propensity for relating to such issues. Rather, it is because these problems of having access to education and to schooling have been close to the heart of the French feminist movement since its inception.
On its fifth anniversary, openDemocracy asks, “what has UN Resolution 1325 achieved?” Other articles in the debate include:
Srilatha Batliwala, “Women transforming power?”
Lesley Abdela, “1325: deeds not words”
Jeremy Greenstock, “Illuminating gender – 1325 and the UN”
Elisabeth Porter, “Women and security: ‘You cannot dance if you cannot stand’”
Maj Britt Theorin, “Women among paper tigers”
Nicola Johnston-Coeterier, “When women and power meet”
Nicola Dahrendorf, “Mirror images in the Congo: sexual violence and conflict”
Maria Livanos Cattaui, “The Women Vector”
Susanne Zwingel, "CEDAW: the women formula"
Mobina Jaffer is interviewed by Rosemary Bechler
Meanwhile, what has happened in France during the latest contretemps with the Islamic headscarf is a collective reassessment of our attachment to certain norms. The inviolability of the principle of laïcité as national patrimony has been reaffirmed and its ‘no trespass’ limits redefined with clearer labelling of what is considered transgressive in terms of due public order. This has created a paradoxical situation for Muslims, asking them to be more discrete in public, while obliging most of them to speak up about their religious feelings – what I like to refer to as the public pressure to ‘come out’ as a Muslim in the French public space. If you want to be recognized as a good citizen, male or female, you should clearly state your views and feelings with regard to the headscarf.
The fact remains that the real problem is less the full representation of women as such, as of ‘the others’ – any others – that is, of individuals identified by cultural and religious external visible markers as not belonging to the dominant elite.
Riot in the Republic
The entire notion of Republican equality must now be revisited and reassessed in the light of the mistakes and failures that led to the current riots. This will be no easy matter. The March 2004 law obviously restricts the rights of certain citizens, not only women, to wear a specific headdress at school. In the EU member states, meanwhile, the principle of religious liberty is quite unassailable. With the best will in the world, it seems difficult to reconcile the principle of equality with the fact of ‘difference’ when it comes to religion.
When we consider the Islamic headscarf in terms of religious rights, we immediately have to deal with people’s fears, the sense of threat, competition and distorted representation people have of any alien denomination. Stereotypes and representations have polluting effects on the discussion when it comes to Islam. Of course, not everything is ‘good’ in culture and traditions that are, nevertheless, protected internationally. But should that justify not listening to the voices of the main protagonists of the headscarf debate (the young students wearing it) and focusing instead on violence against women in certain urban settings (‘les banlieues’ where the current riots are taking place)? The tension is extreme: you have individuals looking for recognition, alongside a set of institutions and politicians defending the core of the social cohesion of France as a nation state – that is, laicité as a transcendent topic, something we French citizens should be able to commit ourselves to collectively and thus defend, body and soul. But it is this very myth of a Republican equality grounded in laïcité that has led us to our collective blindness.
Where now? The challenge of better representation of the interests of French society should not be limited to equal opportunity as regards gender, but extended to include all minority populations. Ethnic, racial and religious difference can no longer be thought of independently from class and gender distinctions. MPs from Muslim and Black communities, but also children of migrants sitting in the Parliament: that would have made a real difference. It could at least have slightly modified the perception of the law entertained by most young Muslims in France today, boys as well as girls – that is, their suspicion that France does not want them.
