Beyond the Veil (Page 2)

In order to understand how a small piece of cloth became a national obsession (compared, by philosophers no less, to terrorism), one must go back quite a few years in French history, to the era that current French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently told his compatriots they must stop repenting for: colonization. Indeed, Scott argues, it is impossible to understand modern-day attitudes in France toward the foulard without delving into the history of racism in that country, because the headscarf has played a "significant part as a continuing sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France" and is perceived to express "not only religious incompatibilities but also ethnic/cultural ones."

When the French government invaded Algeria, in 1830, it started a vast campaign of military "pacification," which was quickly followed by the imposition of French laws deemed necessary for the civilizing mission to succeed. Women were crucial to that enterprise. In articles, stories and novels of the day, Algerian women were universally depicted as oppressed, and so in order for civilization truly to penetrate Algeria, the argument went, the women had to cast off their veils. General Bugeaud, who was charged with administering the territory in the 1840s, declared, "The Arabs elude us because they conceal their women from our gaze." Algerian men, meanwhile, were perceived to be sexual predators who could not control their urges unless their womenfolk were draped in veils. Colonization would solve this by bringing the light of European civilization to Arab males, who, after a few generations of French rule, would learn to control their urges. The governor-general of Algeria remarked in 1898 that "the Arab man's, the native Jew's and the Arab woman's physiology, as well as tolerance for pederasty, and typically oriental ways of procreating and relating to one another are so different from the European man's that it is necessary to take appropriate measures." As late as 1958, French wives of military officers, desperate to stop support for the FLN, which spearheaded the war of liberation against France, staged a symbolic "unveiling" of Algerian women at a pro-France rally in the capital of Algiers.

Decades later, millions of French citizens with ancestral roots in North Africa are being told much the same thing: in order to be French, they must "integrate" by giving up that which makes them different--Islam. The religion, however, is not regarded as a set of beliefs that adherents can adjust to suit the demands of their everyday lives but rather as an innate and unbridgeable attribute. It is easy to see how racism can take hold in such a context. During the foulard controversies, it did not appear to matter that 95 percent of French Muslims do not attend mosque, that more than 80 percent of Muslim women in France do not wear the headscarf or even that the number of schoolgirls in headscarves has never been more than a few hundred. The racist notion of innate differences between French citizens of North African origin and those of European origin defined the debate. For instance, the Lévy sisters were sometimes referred to in the press as Alma and Lila Lévy-Omari, thus making their ancestral link to North Africa (on their mother's side) clearer to the reader.

If racism has been the subtext of the foulard controversy in France, Scott argues, then laïcité was its expression. Those who supported the ban on headscarves argued that laïcité was not simply secularism but a universal notion that was also unique to France. They called it une singularité française. Upon closer scrutiny, however, this particular notion seemed to be quite accommodating to Catholics and rather intransigent to others. For instance, the 1905 law that separated church and state allowed students to have Sundays off to attend church and gave them an additional weekday for religious instruction in the church. The French government currently contributes 10 percent of the budgets of private Christian schools. The school calendar observes Catholic holidays only. Still, despite the discrepancies with which laïcité is applied in schools, those who opposed the foulard fervently claimed their attachment to laïcité and its necessity for the survival of the Republic. Laïcité was what made France unique. Therefore, to support the freedom of girls to dress as they please could only mean being an apologist for the oppression of women and an enemy of laïcité, and to uphold laïcité meant being in favor of a ban on the foulard.

At the height of the controversy, everyone seemed to have an opinion about the law. More than sixty public personalities--including actresses Emmanuelle Béart and Isabelle Adjani, philosopher Élisabeth Badinter, former government ministers Corinne Lepage and Yvette Roudy, and activist Fadela Amara--appealed to Chirac in the pages of Elle magazine to pass a law banning the foulard. Few voices were heard in defense of both laïcité and Muslim girls' civil right to attend school. Among these were comic book artist Marjane Satrapi, who wrote in the Guardian that to forbid schoolgirls to wear the veil was as repressive as forcing them to wear it, and philosopher Pierre Tévanian, who argued that laïcité applied to institutions, not people.

In The Politics of the Veil, Scott does a good job of conveying the hysteria that surrounded the foulard debate in France, although the book could have used some copy-editing. For instance, Ernest Chénière, the high school principal who started the 1989 controversy, gets rebaptized, becoming Eugène Chenière. In addition, Scott neglects to mention an important postscript to the affaires des foulards: the kidnapping, in August 2004, of French journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot by an obscure Islamist group in Iraq, and the group's demand that the law be repealed. (French citizens, Muslim and otherwise, rejected the intrusion into their internal affairs.) But Scott's broad and exhaustive research makes for a bracing account of the debate.

Aside from prevalent racism and a rigid understanding of laïcité, a third reason for the focus on the foulard is a narrow conception of individualism. Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were primarily affected by the law on the foulard, were "strikingly absent from the debates." The Stasi commission interviewed just a few girls, and in private sessions only, so that their voices and opinions were never part of the larger public discussion. While acknowledging that some girls may have worn the foulard for reasons other than pressure by fathers or brothers, commentators viewed it simply as a symbol of "the alienation of women." However much the girls or opponents of the law insisted that the foulard was "an expression of individual conviction," the state and supporters of the law declared that "this could not logically be the case," because the headscarf could only mean "an abandonment of individuality and a declaration of one's primary allegiance to communal standards and obligations." In order to be truly French, therefore, Muslim girls had to renounce the foulard, since in this view it was a signal that they were neither loyal to France nor individuals capable of free thought.

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