In 2004, France passed a law that banned “conspicuous” religious attire in schools. This law came to be known as the “hijab ban.” The law reads as follows:
In public elementary, middle and high schools, the wearing of signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliations is prohibited. Disciplinary procedures to implement this rule will be preceded by a discussion with the student. [1]
The law included a few examples of what counted as “conspicuous” or not.
The clothing and religious signs prohibited are conspicuous signs such as a large cross, a veil, or a skullcap. Not regarded as signs indicating religious affiliation are discreet signs, which can be, for example, medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Korans. [1]
While France did mention other religions (crosses for Christianity or the Star of David for Judaism), Islam in particular was the government’s main target. Indeed, the law affected Jewish and Sikh boys who wore head coverings. But as time would tell, these students were not the primary focus of French political developments.
Further Prohibitions
In 2010, France banned the niqab. (A little bit of religious literacy training. The hijab is a single piece of clothing which covers a woman’s hair and neck. The niqab, however, covers the full body.)
For reasons that will become apparent in the course of this article, the niqab was prohibited in public places. Muslim women could still wear it at home or at the mosque. The so-called “niqab ban” led to unintended consequences: masks and motorcycle helmets were also prohibited, which the government worked to provide exemptions for.
Then, in 2016, the burkini (beachwear marketed towards Muslim women) was banned as well. As Brian J. Bowe and colleagues note, this ban came on the heels of the Bastille Day attack earlier that year. [4] Designed by the Australian Aheda Zanetti, the burkini covers the wearer from her head to her ankles. The intention is to combine modesty and swim, allowing practitioners the opportunity to sacrifice neither.
There have been a whole host of other legal exclusions against Muslims in France. Journalist Rokhaya Diallo mentions a couple:
- Muslim athletes cannot join teams, publicly practice, or even participate in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
- The French football federation does not allow players to fast during Ramadan.
Observance and Belonging
The burkini is an example of how religion changes over time. When broader cultures develop different views of acceptable dress in contexts like the beach, religious practitioners will adapt their own customs to maintain their religious practice.
Thus, the burkini can be read as one instance of when religion adapts to culture and society. It allows Muslim women to practice the virtue of modesty, while also enjoying the beach or the pool. And the effort to combine religious observance with social belonging is not uniquely Islamic.
Evangelicals have been known to create entire markets for their own practitioners to enjoy rap (Christian Hip-Hop), contemporary music (Christian Contemporary Music), rock (think Skillet), and now nightclubs. Catholics now have DJs playing EDM in Lisbon.
While strange to religious outsiders, these efforts to combine observance and belonging are positively received by many in religious communities. They allow practitioners to remain faithful to their tradition, while also enabling them to partake in what is deemed cool or enjoyable in their social settings.
Not Just in France
In our analysis of French anti-Muslim law, we must not loose the broader picture. France is not the only Western country taking exclusionary measures against those who adhere to Islam.
Turkey (a secular democracy modeled on France with a mostly Muslim population) bans headscarves for those who hold elected office, civil servants, and students in schools and universities. Bulgaria in 2007 was considering putting headscarf prohibitions into law. Bulgaria, Belgium, Australia, and Holland are all European countries who have proposed similar hijab bans as France has. [4]
As Joan Wallach Scott writes, “there seems to be a consensus about the meaning of the headscarf and the challenge to secular democracy that it represents.” [5] This is what journalist Angelique Chrisafis calls an “identity crisis.” It is a crisis manifesting in France, but certainly not limited to France.
And since the 2004 law, according to Scott,
the French law seems to have inspired other countries to follow suit in what is fast becoming a . . . clash between “Islam” and “the West.” The inability to separate the political radicalism based in the religion of the few from [the religion] of the many has alienated diasporic Muslim populations, even those who want nothing more than to become full citizens of the lands in which they live. [6]
We would do good to keep this broader context in mind as we proceed.
France’s Stereotypes and Statistics
If the project is to fight Islam, why focus on head coverings? The obvious anti-Muslim response would be that coverings like the hijab are ubiquitous with Islam. But most Muslim women who immigrate to the West do not wear any sorts of head coverings.
- Prior to the 2004 law, 14% of Muslim women actually wore a hijab out of the 51% who claimed to be practicing in France. [7]
- According to Chrisafis, out of France’s 5 million Muslims, only a few hundred actually wear the niqab.
- The Netherlands proposed a burqa ban even though 0.01%-0.005% of Muslim women wear it (in other words, 50-100 Muslim women out of 1 million in total). [8]
As Scott writes, “Banning the headscarf or veil is a symbolic gesture; for some European nations it is a way of taking a stand against Islam, declaring entire Muslim populations to be a threat to national integrity and harmony. The radical acts of a few politically inspired Islamists have become a declaration of the intent of the many.” [9]
Reifying Patriarchy?
European politicians and some Western feminists claim that these laws are liberative for women. Yet, these laws seem more about preserving native European identity rather than actually protecting women. And this effort of preservation also just so happens to impact Muslim women the most.
When French legislators and their feminist supporters claim to be fighting patriarchy, they make the mistake of taking religion to be the problem. Diallo writes about her experience with predominantly white feminists in the early 2000s.
Diallo’s colleagues, she found, strongly supported the 2004 hijab ban. I quote Diallo at length:
Many white feminists thought it was their mission to help emancipate Muslim women and girls from a particular type of patriarchy tied to Islam. I quit the group. If Muslim women were enduring a specific form of patriarchal oppression, . . . how would it help them to exclude them from schools and access to emancipatory knowledge?
To me, the preoccupation with the hijab seemed to be a condescending way of singling out a mainly non-white group of females as if they were not affected by the same forms of patriarchy as other women. I took the view that we had to listen to what women and girls wanted for themselves before explaining their experience through the lens of cultural domination.
Is Islam really the cause of patriarchy? It can certainly facilitate it. But when Westerners, and particularly Western men of power blame Islam for patriarchy, they miss how their own (even secular) traditions have subjugated and commodified women for centuries.
France’s Theory of National Identity
France, according much of the literature on French nationalism, is staunchly against the idea that group identity takes priority above national identity. (This priority of the group is called communautarisme, or “communitarianism.”) For France, national identity takes priority over all other facets of the individual. [9] It is in France’s national self-understanding that we find the reason for the prevalence of anti-Muslim laws.
French national unity and peace is achieved “by making one’s social, religious, ethnic, and other origins irrelevant in the public sphere.” [10] Yet, certain identities are privileged in the public sphere more than others. Namely, whatever facets of one’s identity mesh with what is traditionally and hegemonically thought of as “French” is acceptable in public. All else must be kept private. In France, national identity depends upon either invisibility or assimilation.
This is precisely what the veiling bans seek to accomplish. Any “conspicuous” religious attire is to be left at home, in private. Students, to be good French students, must present themselves rid of anything that is not “French.” Muslim women wearing burkinis to the beach threaten the national harmony of “French” swimwear. And French athletes can ruin France’s cohesive image by displaying Islamic attire at the Olympics.
This is no mere scholarly theory on part of Scott. France’s national census does not measure religion, ethnic background, nor nation of origin. And historically, this specific type of nationalism rose out of the 1789 Revolution. In response to a hierarchical feudalism, France wished for all to be one. [11]
The Injustice of Sameness
The French emphasis on sameness initially arose out of a desire for equality. During the feudal period, according to revolutionary history, women and slaves were not considered real individuals with interests and needs. [12]
Yet, as time went on, this intractable love for sameness revealed its own bad fruits. “Frenchness,” it was soon discovered, was a stand-in for native-born French men. Frenchness as such was challenged by those it marginalized: women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people who were considered “immigrants” even after they had already become immigrants. (Those of North African descent fall perpetually into this last category, resembling the “perpetual foreigner” stereotypes that Asian Americans face in America.) [13]
Sameness, while politically simple, is not politically just. Sameness requires one of two things. On the one hand, there is exclusion/removal. Through this first route, outsiders are excluded from the political process (like with enslaved Africans throughout the nations complicit in the Transatlantic slave trade who could not vote, even generations after emancipation). Or, they are forcefully removed from their lands. This is the route that many settler colonial projects have taken on, and can be seen in the Nakba of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. A last option would be invisibility, which France demands by requiring particular distinctions to be kept at home.
On the other hand, outsiders can be assimilated. The prevalence of Canadian boarding schools designed to “reform” Native children, as well as the bans against Muslim female wear across Europe, are examples of assimilation. These two roads lead to sameness in perpetuum.
Pluralism and Democracy
It is here that we turn to the serious reality that many democratic societies face.
As Scott writes, “we need to recognize and negotiate differences.” [14] To recognize these differences, we must not be “color-blind” to the plurality of viewpoints, aesthetic expression, custom, and political orientation that constitutes our societies. Ignoring difference does not do difference justice.
To negotiate these differences is even more important. In most of our situations, the question is not whether we shall accept pluralism. Pluralism is already (and has already been) here with us, whether we want it or not—and there are many, many people who wish that their societies were filled with people like them.
Rather, the question is how we shall negotiate pluralism. Through violence? Exclusion? Mutual deliberation?
As political philosopher Chantal Mouffe writes in The Return of the Political,
Citizenship is vital for democratic politics, but a modern democratic theory must make room for competing conceptions of our identities as citizens. [15]
For Mouffe, politics is not easy. It is “agonistic” and difficult. Differences are inescapable, yet negotiable. To be French, to be American—these identities must not be singular and final. If they are, they become exclusive. Not just conceptually, but politically and legally as we have seen. France and other increasingly diverse countries have what Mouffe calls “a social structure that is impossible to describe from the perspective of a single . . . point of view.” [16]
What if diversity is not a threat, nor even necessarily a good, but rather constitutive of the societies that we inhabit and share?
Conclusion: France and Beyond
To say that difference constitutes modern democracies is to radically undermine the hegemonic ideologies of sameness that characterize much of the Western response to global others. In structuralist philosophy (which fittingly has French philosophical origins), words themselves do not have meanings. Rather, their meaning derives from each word being different than all the others. For example, we know what “up” means because we know what “down” means, and “up” and “down” derive their meanings from each other. [17]
Similarly, in politics, individuals and communities only derive their meaning by being different from each other. The Right is the Right because the Left is the Left, but these facts are only true because the Right is not the Left. We cannot be ourselves without each other. How absurd is it, then, to want to exclude or even destroy each other?
In their analysis of how media outlets covered the 2016 burkini ban, Bowe et al. found that
Muslim women were portrayed as symbols whose actual beliefs, thoughts, and needs were not of primary concern. As is often the case, they were observed more than they were listened to. (Bowe 1093)
If structuralism can be applied to political life, we cannot afford to not listen to people. If we become ourselves through our differences with others, listening is utterly important. For it is through misunderstanding others that one misunderstands oneself. And by truly understanding each other, we can finally answer what it means to be “us,” in all our glorious difference.
For more on the basic approach of “Faithful Politics,” see our first article on what it means to practice faithful politics.
References
1. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1.
2. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 1.
3. Brian J. Bowe, et al., “Personal Choice or Political Provocation: Examining the Visual Framing and Stereotyping of the BurkiniDebate,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 96.4 (2019): 1077.
4. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 2-3.
5. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 3.
5. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 19.
6. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 3.
7. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 3.
8. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 3.
9. Bowe et al., “Personal Choice or Political Provocation,” 1079.
10. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 11.
11. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 12.
12. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 12.
13. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 13.
14. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 8.
15. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York, NY: Verso Books, 1993), 7.
16. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 11.
17. This is the argument that runs throughout Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense.
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