The Deep Historical Roots of France’s Obsession with Muslim Women’s Dress
The French have found it impossible to move beyond their fixation with policing the dress of Muslim women. The latest demonstration of Islamaphobia, sexism, racism and political opportunism has revolved around Maryam Pougetoux, a French student union leader who happens to be Muslim.
What was her offense? She wore a hijab during an interview for a documentary about student protests against the French President’s educational reforms. Yes, the focus has been on what she was wearing, not her views on the student protests as the leader of a student union (Unef) at one of France’s top universities, Paris-Sorbonne IV. Student protests that are occurring on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 students and workers unrest.
This spectacle follows a pattern of incidents that showcase France’s entrenched bigotry. Most recently, in December 2017, Rokhaya Diallo, a journalist, anti-racism activist and feminist was appointed to a new digital council created by the French President Macron. Diallo’s appointment was short lived though. It was rescinded quickly when members of the government lobbied for her removal because of her anti-racism views and her defence of the hijab. Diallo herself does not wear one but asserts the right of those who choose to do so.
At the end of August 2016, social media erupted with the circulation of a photo showing a Muslim woman surrounded by French policeman on a beach in Nice and being forced to take off her burkini. That horrendous act of bullying by the French state had followed a burkini ban by approximately thirty coastal towns in France. Rights groups had challenged the ban in lower courts but were defeated. A question related specifically to a ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet was then taken to the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court. The court overturned that ban ruling it “a serious and illegal attack on fundamental freedoms”.
The argument during each furore is the familiar one about protecting France’s national identity that is based on laïcité or secularism. The usual speechifying about women’s rights is spun in. It is the same justification employed since the late 1980s when the French Government began to police Muslim women’s dress aggressively. In 1989, France became embroiled in “the headscarf affair” when three girls were expelled from school for wearing hijabs. The principal argued that public schools were the cradle of laïcité where French republicanism values were nurtured and had to be protected from “insidious jihad”[1]. The matter attracted significant attention as the head dress of Muslim girls came to symbolise Islam’s affront to French universalism, laïcité and national unity[2]. The issue arose again in 1994 and 2003 leading President Chirac to appoint the Stasi commission to explore the feasibility of enacting a law. In December 2003, the Commission’s Report reaffirmed France’s secular traditions and recommended the outlawing of all conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools. The recommendation became law in 2004[3].
The French state’s policies on assimilation and national identity did not end with how students symbolised their faith in schools. They extended further into determinations of French citizenship. In June 2008, the Council d’Etat refused the citizenship request of a Moroccan immigrant married to a French citizen with whom she had four French-born children. The Council argued that her wearing of a niqab was incompatible with the essential values of France[4].
In June 2009, sixty-five members of parliament called for a parliamentary commission to examine whether covered Muslim women undermined France’s secularism and women’s rights. A week later, President Sarkozy delivered an address to both Houses of Parliament describing the “burka” as unwelcome on French soil and a violation of the French republic’s idea of the dignity of women. In December 2009, Immigration Minister Besson, in a hearing before the parliamentary commission inquiring into veils, stated that he wanted the wearing of the full veil to be considered as proof of insufficient integration into French society. The commission issued its report in June 2010, saying that the veil was a challenge to the republic. It did not call for a ban but only for women to show their faces when receiving public services. Nevertheless, by September 2010, an Act was passed prohibiting the wearing of the niqab in public. Since coming into force in 2011, there have been arrests and fines for women “defying” the ban and the dress of Muslim women continues to occupy a central place in French news and politics.
In early 2016, the French Minister for women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, compared Muslim women who covered to American “Negros” who “accepted slavery”. Manuel Valls, then French Prime Minister, repeatedly declared his support for the burkini ban and in disagreeing with the ruling of the Conseil d’Etat declared that the debate on the burkini ban was not closed. He then outdid himself a few days later when he asserted in a speech that the bare breasts of Marianne, a French national symbol, were more representative of France than a headscarf. Former President Sarkozy who at that time had been eyeing a return to the political arena had in quite vicious language said that he would ban the burkini nationally if he became President again.
The opposition to Rokhaya Diallo’s appointment was led by mainstream right wing party, Les Républicains but found support across the board. Left wing socialists, like their right wing colleagues, found her outspokenness about institutional racism and Islamaphobia and her feminism to be objectionable. French Ministers also hurried to join in condemning Pougetoux after a Facebook post by a cross party group claiming to promote secularism, Printemps Républicain, attacked her. As far as Printemps Républicain is concerned, it is a contradiction for Pougetoux to defend feminist principles while displaying her religious beliefs! The real contradiction however came from the French Minister of Equality, Marlene Schiappa. She claimed on the one hand that adult women had the right to wear what they wanted to but then stated absurdly that Unef as a feminist union was allowing the promotion of political Islam because Pougetoux wore a hijab. She went on to question what values Unef stood for and asked the union to state clearly if it promoted secularism and emancipation of women. The Interior Minister, Gérard Collomb, chimed in that Pougetoux’s appearance in a hijab was “shocking”, a form of “proselytism” and an example of people who through their religious signs were trying to be “provocative”. According to him, Islam needed to decide if it wanted to converge with French culture.
As observed above, the French Government has utilised rhetoric centred on the threat to laïcité to control what Muslim women wear. However, the small numbers of women wearing hijab, niqab and burkinis fail to explain the inordinate amount of attention devoted to the issue[5]. It is important to recognise that this obsession of the French Government with Muslim women’s bodies and dress did not begin in the 1980s. In order to understand France’s attitude, one must return to the country’s history of imperialism and colonialism in Muslim North Africa and the universalising tendencies of its modernist teleology that persist in the form of laïcité.
France’s relationship with Islam and Muslim people goes back centuries. The emergence of European colonial powers saw France maintaining important colonies in Islamic lands in North and West Africa. European and French capitalism, imperialism and colonialism were all intertwined deeply and while European imperialism and capitalism were capitalist ventures, culture, religion and notions of civilising the barbaric were all central to the colonial/imperial enterprise.
Muslims and Arabs were regarded as lesser people incapable of improvement and therefore assimilation into the French way of life. Traits such as religion, family organisation, presumed sexual proclivities and dress (fez, veil) were singled out to represent otherness. An entire tradition of “scholarship” stressing the inferiority of Arabs and Muslims was developed in which these barbaric, traditional, irrational people were matched against French modernity. Central to this was the representation of women and the veil. Women were depicted in a highly sexualised manner combining fantasies of harems, conquests and innate sexuality. The veiled woman was a sign of the inability of French imperialism to dominate totally the culture of the colonised. The unveiling of the Muslim woman was seen as penetration into the heart of Arab culture, a sexual disrobing and a striking down of a barbaric practice[6]. During the Algerian War, the veil assumed even more prominence. Algerian nationalists saw it as an identity indicator and a form of resistance to the French. The transportation of weapons and information by women who veiled and unveiled as strategically necessary also led to France regarding the veil as a security threat[7].
The post-World War Two labour shortage in France witnessed an influx there of persons from France’s former North African colonies. These immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, were actively recruited by France to perform mostly low-paying jobs[8]. When the economic boom ended in the 1970s, many of these people became unemployed and were forced into public housing, segregated from the rest of the population[9]. As women and children immigrated under a family reunification policy, Muslim women’s dress became more apparent, and by the 1980s, Islam had become the second largest religion in France after Roman Catholicism[10].
The large and visible Muslim population with its associated socio-economic problems gave rise to a national identity crisis in the 1980s as concerns over immigration were manufactured by the far-right and used to gain political ground by all parties across the divide[11]. As Muslims began building more mosques and opened halal butcher shops and cemeteries and media attention began to focus on the rise of political Islam after the 1979 Iranian revolution, the compatibility of Islam with French identity began to be questioned[12]. The crisis of national identity with respect to Muslims continued to grow in the 1980s and by the end of the decade France was enveloped in the “headscarf affair”.
In the face of perceived threats to its identity from “immigrants” and now “terrorists”, France draws on a particular version of its history. A mythical notion of nation has been pitted against a negative portrayal of Islam, with Muslim women’s dress being the signifier of the religion. The veil re-entered French popular imagination in the 1980s as a screen onto which images of strangeness and danger could be projected- representations that were easy to rekindle in a country with a history of colonialism and racism.
The confidence in French superiority that stems from colonialism and which is embodied in the French state apparatus continues to manifest itself today in the debates and policies on immigration and integration. While the racist discourses of the past are not as blatant now, rhetoric about incompatibility, cultural difference, Islamic threat and French identity perpetuate the boundaries between the dominant group and the Islamic other. Socio-economic problems are blamed on the inability of post-colonial migrants to assimilate rather than on a failure by the State to tackle youth marginalisation and economic inequalities. The far-right has grown significantly and has been able to draw the mainstream political parties closer to their outlook instead of the mainstream denouncing them. The positions of mainstream parties on immigration, security and citizenship have shifted to the right and the discourse has become more extreme[13].
One cannot also stress enough the damage inflicted by those feminists who in taking it upon themselves to speak on behalf of “subjugated” Muslim women, have only served to reinforce racialised boundaries and cultural hierarchies. French feminists by equating of the scarf/veil with the oppression of women have succeeded in turning the veil into an over-determined patriarchal and cultural signifier, negating the agency of Muslim women while at the same time making her a dangerous agent of civilizational threat to the republic [14]. In seeking to “liberate” these supposedly oppressed women, feminists reinforced the multiple social exclusions these Muslim women are faced with in France- gender marginalisation, racial and ethnic marginalisation, religious marginalisation and socio-economic marginalisation.
The creation and perpetuation of an “other” that is opposed to France has meant that persons who fit this depiction are always regarded as not being French. Their presence in France for generations and attainment of citizenship has not been enough to become French as evidenced in the debates over women’s Islamic dress where Muslim citizens continue to be regarded as immigrants. While French universalism, laïcité, republicanism and assimilationist values are all cited in the engagements related to French populations of colour, the reality is that French roots of exclusion run deep. The French state has still not come to terms with the reality of diversity in its territory and continues its attempts to exclude the other. The continuing use of women’s Islamic dress as a political tool and the abhorrent comments of mainstream politicians like Valls and Rossignol are telling.
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Notes
[1] Wallach, 2007, p. 22–23
[2] Malik, 2004, p. 129; Wallach, 2007, p. 22–23
[3] Wallach, 2007, p. 26–35
[4] Bienkowski, 2010, p. 438
[5] Wallach, 2007, p. 3; Unveiling the Truth, 2011, p. 21
[6] Said 1978; Fanon, 1989, p. 36–67; Mcmaster and Lewis, 1998, p. 121–127; Boariu, 2002, p. 182–184; El-Guindi, 2003, Ch. 3; Wallach Scott, 2007, p. 45–62
[7] Fanon, 1989, p. 36–67; Mcmaster and Lewis, 1998, p. 121–127; Boariu, 2002, p. 182–184; Wallach Scott, 2007, p. 45–62
[8] Malik, 2004, p. 125, Barbibay, 2010, p. 167
[9] Bienkowski, 2010, p. 441
[10] Bienkowski, 2010, p. 441–442
[11] Malik, 2004, p. 125–126; Winter, 2008, p. 89
[12] Haddad, 2002, p. 37
[13] Juge and Perez, 2006
[14] Bilge, 2010, p. 18
References
Barbibay, Yael, 2010 “Citizenship Privilege or the Right to Religious Freedom: The Blackmailing of France’s Islamic Women”, Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law, vol. 18, 159–205
Bienkowski, Sarah, 2010 “France Taken Assimilation Too Far? Muslim Beliefs, French Values and the June 27, 2008 Conseil d’ Etat Decision on Mmm. M.”, Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, vol. 2, (Spring, part 2), 437–458
Bilge, Sirma, 2010, “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 9–28
Boariu, Maria, 2002 “The Veil as Metaphor of French Colonised Algeria”, Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, no. 3, Winter
El- Guindi, Fadwa, 1999, Veil. Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Berg)
Fanon, Frantz, 1989, “Algeria Unveiled” in Fanon, Frantz, 1989, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (Earthscan Publications Ltd.)
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck (ed.), 2002, Muslims in the West. From Sojourners to Citizens (Oxford University Press)
Jugé, Tony S. and Perez, Michael P., 2006, “The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France”, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, volume 12, no. 2, 187–212
Macmaster, Neil and Lewis, Toni, 1998, “Orientalism: From Veiling to Hyperveiling”, Journal of European Studies, 121–135
Malik, Iftikhar H., 2004, Islam and Modernity. Muslims in Europe and the United States (Pluto Press)
Scott, Joan Wallach, 2007, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press)
Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women in France Wear the Full-Face Veil, Open Society Foundation, April 2011, available at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/a-unveiling-the-truth-20100510_0.pdf
