In 2004 the French government passed a law effectively banning the wearing of headscarves, which are primarily donned by Muslim girls and women, in public schools. France considers itself a secular society, and the logic behind the ban was that wearing something so affiliated with a particular religion in a public school was not in keeping with “laicite, the French version of secularism” (15). Joan Wallach Scott's book is an eye-opening, well-researched, balanced investigation into the French law and the responses engendered by its passage.
The law has been highly controversial, to say the least. Scott explains the various responses to the law and in particular pays careful attention to the multiplicity of Muslim women's views. As she makes abundantly clear, there were many more than two sides to this issue and many groups weighed in — or wanted to — on the discussion. Scott also illustrates that while the issues of the mixing of religion and politics and the ways in which secular states should respond to religion were obviously critical components of the controversy, the headscarf debate was about more than religion. What Scott does so well in the book is to explain the various responses, both religious and non-religious, to the headscarf debate.
One reason why the headscarf controversy arose in France had to do with cultural understandings of how it is that one is or becomes “French.” Scott suggests: “France insists on assimilation to a singular culture, the embrace of a shared language, history and political ideology” (12). Thus, anything that is associated with another culture or country is bound to have a hard time being accepted as authentically French. Given modern French history regarding the colonization of Algeria and Morocco and the recent popularity of anti-immigration politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, there has been a growing hostility in some sectors of France to Muslim immigrants and their “distinct” culture, of which the headscarf is emblematic. Thus, for French followers of Le Pen, wearing the headscarf — or supporting its wearing — illustrates the failure of some Muslim immigrants to blend in or to become truly “French.”
However, as Scott is quick to note, one cannot “blame” Le Pen for the headscarf debacle, as the debate is far more complicated than an easy assignment of blame might suggest. Interestingly, current French President Nicolas Sarkozy previously served as the Minister of the Interior; he requested that Muslim women pose bareheaded for official French identity photographs after September 11, 2001. From that point on, the issue of what one could wear in public quickly spread from questions of posing for photographs to attending public school.
The headscarf controversy is both badly named and poorly understood. Scott's book is titled The Politics of the Veil, but as she illustrates, in reality what was really at issue was a head covering, not a face covering, or a full body covering. No matter, covering any part of the female body for religious reasons in public schools could not withstand France's conception of itself as a secular society.
Scott targets racism, individualism, secularity, and sexuality as factors that must be understood in order to appreciate why the headscarf law was passed and what it means. Obviously, women were targeted. Males were allowed to wear religious symbols in public schools if they were discreet, such as “medallions, small crosses, Stars of David” (151). The primary problem with the headscarf was that it was “conspicuous” (151) and therefore needed to be banned. At its core, many of the law's supporters argued that the ban would liberate Muslim women from the sexual slavery that being veiled implied.
One of the best parts of this book is the way in which Scott challenges the notion that veiling equals sexual slavery. To do so, she begins with a discussion of the “affaire du string” (112), which occurred in October 2003, around the same time that the headscarf debate was raging. The affaire du string concerned young girls who were being sent home from public schools because they were improperly “dressed” (really underdressed) in deeply revealing thong underwear. As Scott notes, “the string and the veil [were] opposite sides of the same coin…. Girls wore the string to make themselves sexually attractive to boys; they wore the veil to refuse that possibility” (112). But, as she points out, as outraged as many parents and feminist commentators were over the string incident, no one called for banning thongs; on the other hand, the outrage over the headscarf did result in such legislation. It is fascinating to contrast which kinds of potentially offensive behaviors a secular society will legally ban and what kinds it will allow.
This, of course, brings us back to the fact that the headscarf is a religious symbol and is therefore “offensive” to some forms of secularity (and obviously to the French conception of its own secularity). The thong is not a religious symbol, however offensive some may find it. In short, Scott's book is a wonderful discussion about how well and how badly societies respond to religious challenges. I strongly recommend it.
