Politics of De-veiling

In February this year, the French Parliament voted by a massive majority to ban the ‘Muslim’ headscarf and (almost as an afterthought) all other religious symbols from state schools. The parliament’s decision follows more than a decade of heated debates, demonstrations, court hearings and repeated buck-passing between schools and the central government that pitted significant sections of France’s Muslim community against the avowed defenders of a strict version of laïcité ( A French word that can only partially be translated as secularism; it refers to a militant republican ideology that sought to dislodge the authority of the Church during the struggle that culminated in the French Revolution). Apart from concerns about preserving social cohesion and the secular character of the public sphere, one major argument mustered in support of the ban has centered round the role of state education as a cultivator of autonomy and free agency. On this view, emanating from the perfectionist strand of laïcité, it is considered legitimate for the Republican state to attempt to create rational, free-thinking, autonomous citizens. Since the wearing of the Islamic headscarf by school girls is an unquestioning reproduction of a religious convention symbolizing women’s invisibility and subordination, the argument goes, it is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of state education. ‘Even if it is a free choice’, supporters of the ban would hold, ‘it is one which impairs the very possibility of the girls’ future free choices’.

This position, I would suggest, is problematic on both normative and pragmatic grounds. To begin with, the autonomy argument is deeply flawed from the standpoint of liberal political theory. In assuming that veiling by school girls is a result of family pressure, the supporters of the ban, turn a blind eye to all the pressures within the French society not to wear the hijab as a background condition of free choice. If the consideration is whether a decision is being made autonomously or non-autonomously then it shouldn’t matter if the pressure comes from the family or the peer group or some other source. The proponents of the autonomy argument seem to have conveniently side-stepped this issue. There are no convincing answers forthcoming as to why the adoption of say, punk culture should be more tolerable than the wearing of headscarves. It might actually take a high level of autonomy and personal responsibility on the part of the girls to wear a headscarf to school given social pressures predominantly in the other direction.

If schools are a place where ‘tomorrow’s citizens are trained in the arts of criticism and dialogue’, as French President Jacques Chirac would have us believe, then ruling out certain questionable patterns of behavior seems contrary to the very spirit of the promotion of autonomy that is presumably so central to the French education system. In the absence of a convincing argument as to why wearing a headscarf is considered a non-autonomous choice while other forms of dress are not only tolerated but promoted, imposing a ban on the former seems simply to be a case of cultural imperialism.

By thrusting on pupils its own assumptions about what women should wear and what an autonomous way of life is, the state actually limits the potential capacity for autonomy and free-thinking. In other words, it takes away with one hand the very possibility of what it wants to give with the other.

Even when seen from that classical viewpoint advanced by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty, which would allow for suspension of liberty in the case of children, paternalistic intervention in the headscarf case seems dubious at best because there is no clear evidence of any harm done to a person or the society at large. However, forcible removal of hijab, clearly has the potential of reducing girls’ own development as rational, autonomous citizens because it catapults them into a dichotomized and alienated existence of strictly separate identities at home and school.

To those acquainted with the histories of colonisation and de-colonisation, veiling and de-veiling, affaire du foulard or the headscarves issue has an eerie sense of déjà vu. It is profoundly reminiscent of the policies of the French colonisers in Algeria who, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered’. It also reminds us of Iran under the Shah, when veiled women were chased off by state police and their veils torn off. As Nancy Hirschmann has argued, these attempts ‘to liberate women by removing the veil simply re-inscribed women’s bodies as symbols of culture rather than as individual agents’. And that brings out yet another contradiction inherent in the paternalist autonomy-based argument for a ban on headscarves: it simply replaces one form of social control with another. Seen this way, there is not much difference between the theocratic regime in Iran which forces women to cover their heads and the French state which removes headscarves forcibly.

The way in which the headscarf issue has been set up as a mutual opposition between laïcité and Islam, autonomy and non-autonomy, and corresponding covered and uncovered heads, has only served to reinforce misconstrued colonial assumptions about the practice of veiling. Even well-meaning western writers, who have argued against the ban on headscarves, continue to operate within this restricted framework of a moral orientalist view of Islam. Their discussions on the issue invariably seem to be filtering through andocentric colonial images of hapless, passive and hopelessly oppressed Muslim women. In the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam, the veil continues to occupy an obsessive core.

There is no denying that the veil in some Muslim communities is indeed symptomatic of women’s subordination. There is no denying either that Islam (like Christianity and Judaism) is a patriarchal religion. However, the varied contexts in which Muslim women adopt the veil, its multi-layered meanings, constant adaptations and changing functions call for a more sophisticated analysis. To regard all veiled women as ipso facto subservient beings is extremely naïve and spurious. What needs to be questioned here then, in the words of cultural theorist Homi K. Bhaba, ‘is the mode of expression of the otherness’.

Anthropological evidence seems to disprove the supporters of the ban who must reduce the meaning of the veil to a lack of autonomy. It is a practice that is motivated by a range of complex factors. In Arab societies, for example, the veil existed before the advent of Islam and was traditionally a symbol of privilege. It was about privacy, identity and class status. In some tribal societies of the Middle East, the veil is not gender specific at all: both men and women cover their heads and faces as a mark of honour and identity. In many Muslim countries, the widespread adoption of the veil by ordinary Muslim women is arguably a reaction against colonization and forced westernization. The adoption of the veil as a form of protest belies the western image of the subservient Muslim female confined to the social margins of her society.

A number of writers, most notably Leila Ahmed (1992), Nancy Hirschmann (1998) and Homa Hoodfar (2001) have convincingly argued that Muslim women throughout history in various contexts have been able to use the veil not only to establish identity and autonomy but to resist patriarchy as well. To quote Leila Ahmed, ‘the veil may actually stand for a feminist position supportive of female autonomy and equality articulated in terms totally different from the language of Western and Western-affiliated feminisms’. In the context of contemporary Canada, Soniya Dayan Herzburn, has pointed out that ‘many immigrant Muslim women use the veil and reference to Islam to resist cultural practices such as arranged marriages or to continue their education away from home without alienating their parents and communities’. The following comments by a young Canadian-Algerian woman quoted by Herzburn are illuminating:

The idea of the headscarf first came into my head when I started to ask myself about the relationship between men and women, and women’s equality and freedom. I arrived at the conclusion that the headscarf was the best means for me to acquire my freedom… In covering my body, I present myself in such a way that men are only interested in my character and behaviour; in short they consider me a human being. In freeing myself from the male gaze I affirm my liberty.

The headscarf then is also a marker of agency and individual freedom. In many cases, it is a well-thought out compromise between traditional customs and aspirations to autonomy, work and education. It allows many young women to negotiate the strictures of patriarchal norms, to assert their independence and to carve out a space for themselves in the public domain. Veiled Muslim women are not necessarily passive victims; they actively argue their case and seek to widen their opportunities. Additionally, the measure of whether Muslim women are liberated or not does not necessarily lie in whether they are veiled or not. As Hirschmann has pointed out, ‘it is not the veil per se that indicates whether women are free or not; rather, it is the patriarchal use of the veil to control women that indicates their freedom or lack thereof ’. What needs to be considered then is the coercion behind the practice. Compulsory de-veiling under the Shah’s regime in Iran, for example, led to a large number of women rendered unemployed as they would not go out without their heads covered. Thus women were just as oppressed and disempowered by the Shah’s mandatory de-veiling as they were by the subsequent mandatory re-veiling by Islamic revolutionaries.

Against the foregoing discussion, the ban on headscarves, which seems to be a repetition of the French colonial behaviour in Algeria, is at best a dubious measure to liberate young women from a ‘non-autonomous’ way of life. The abiding western interest in the veil and the missionary zeal to put this practice to an end has resulted in a situation where abandoning the veil is now identified with Westernization and imperialism. This only limits the capacity of Muslim women to criticise their own cultures, catching them between the rock of being ostracized as Western sympathizers and the hard place of not having their concerns heard.