The burqa and the blogger

I know I've dropped the ball in the last week on continuing to blog about proposals in France to ban the wearing of the burqa. It isn't because the story has died -- there have been a number of interesting developments in France, and also tons of play in the American media, from a Daily Show segment to an op-ed piece in the New York Times by an Egyptian-born Muslim feminist titled "Ban the Burqa." (The writer, Mona Eltahawy, refers to Sarkozy and obviously speaks in light of events there, but she's not just just talking about France -- she seems to be arguing for a ban here in the US, or maybe everywhere.) Some just plain bizarre and fascinating stories have also come out -- check out this fashion piece titled "Abayas get glam revamp from designers in Paris" about couture shows of head-to-toe Muslim women's outer garments that took place in Paris the same week as Sarko's endorsement of a ban on the burqa.

I'm following all this with interest (and occasional dismay), but I feel sort of weary every time I try to rev myself up to write about it. (Like, weary beyond what would be explicable based on the fact that I'm getting married this month and writing a dissertation and have been running around like crazy.) I was totally obsessed with the French controversy about the headscarf in schools back in the early-2000s. For a long time, I just didn't understand what the big deal was. Why were the French so upset, so passionate, so divided, about a few girls covering their hair in class? Why did they care? Why was this the issue that seemed to symbolize so much about the strength of the Republican model to so many people?

Trying to find some answers to those basic, naive questions led me down some surprisingly exciting intellectual paths -- many of them going back, back, back into French history as I worked to make sense of the present. Although I no longer do any academic research or writing directly related to my fascination with the veil controversy, in a number of indirect ways that obsession shaped who I am now as a scholar.

It also shaped my perspective on what it means to study a culture of which one is not a part. The questions I listed here are outsiders' questions -- questions that only someone who wasn't French, who lacked an intuitive sense of the culture, could think to pose.* Now, outsiders' questions can be spectacularly dumb. They can be ignorant, insulting, and silly, and they can miss the point by a million miles. Most of the time, they can be answered by people with insiders' knowledge with three sentences and a roll of the eyes. But I also think that occasionally, our attempts to find answers to them can result in fresh-eyed scrutiny of problems (or even the recognition of something as a "problem" for the first time), and thereby produce insightful and important work or reframe research agendas. France and Germany and Australia and India and China all have plenty of brilliant historians of their own, who operate with far more easy access to the archives and insider knowledge of their countries and regions than we Americans do -- so what can we offer that justifies working on their parts of the world? Outsiders' questions -- "what's the big deal?" "why do people here do this, and not that?" "why doesn't anyone ever talk about x?" -- are one of the few things, in my opinion, that we genuinely have to offer.

All of which is a very roundabout way of getting to the point that, right now, my intense interest in this particular issue in France feels a lot more academic (and, specifically, historical) than polemical. I've got no problem saying that I think this is a needless and deeply wrongheaded policy initiative. But I'm so fascinated by the fact that something like this is happening there at all, and with trying, once again, to understand the variety of historical and contemporary factors that have created this situation, that I just don't feel very inspired to extensively elaborate on what I think the absolutely "correct" position on all this would be. I'm more interested in why it matters so much to many people in France -- that is, in what they understand to be at stake in Muslim women's dress -- than in making the case for why those of them arguing one way are right and those of them arguing another other way are wrong.

So I think my weariness when I contemplated continuing to write about this stuff is because I've been feeling irrationally compelled to engage in punditry about it. But there's actually no need for me to do that -- there's no reason WB can't be a space for posing historical questions, not just critiquing contemporary policies.

So my plan is: (1) to continue posting factual updates and links to interesting coverage or commentary, especially in English, and (2) to also try to provide some historical info that I found useful when I was first stumbling around looking for answers to my "what's the big deal?" questions about the headscarf c.2003. (The stuff that still appears relevant this time around.) Some of that historical context is getting great attention in the English-language media -- Michelle Goldberg's piece in the American Prospect, for instance, which heavily cites Joan W. Scott, does a good job situating the controversy within the context of European countries' struggles with growing Muslim minority populations. One context that I do think has been missing from some of this coverage, though, is much mention of France's colonial history and the ways that Islam figured in it, so I'll focus on that. (If anyone thinks that struggles about the veil, with its immense symbolic weight, were born in the 1980s, go read Frantz Fanon's 1959 "Algeria Unveiled" (pdf) right now.)

A related question/plea: does anyone out there know how many of the Stasi Commission's original 2003 recommendations on laïcité besides the "conspicuous religious symbols in schools" one have been adopted? I would really, really love to know.


* Okay, I realize treating nation-states this way, as if there are 100% clearly defined insiders and outsiders, is problematic. Just bear with it as a device to help me make my grandiose generalizations.

Here we go again, cont'd. (Sarkozy edition)

So, in his major policy address today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke on the burqa a lot more forcefully than I'd expected him to. Here's the key section. (It's actually part of an interesting larger discussion of laïcité, which is itself only one element in a wide-ranging speech mainly focused on economic issues. You can link to the full text of the speech in pdf from below this summary article in Le Monde; for English-language stuff, there's a NYT article here about the burqua-related parts of the speech. The Guardian also has decent coverage, though it's headline, "Nicolas Sarkozy Says Islamic Veils Are Not Welcome in France," is bizarrely misleading -- the issue here really is the burqa specifically, not "Islamic veils.")

In the Republic, the Muslim religion must be just as respected as the other religions. The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. It's a problem of freedom and of dignity for women. It is not a religious symbol, it's a symbol of subservience, a symbol of abasement. I want to say it solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we cannot accept women imprisoned behind wire fencing, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That is not our idea of the dignity of women.

A moment later he added, "But I tell you, we must not be ashamed of our values. We must not be afraid to defend them." All of this obviously stands in some contrast to Sarkozy's comments last week in response to Obama's Cairo speech, when he emphasized that, outside of public schools, "any girl who wants to wear the veil can do so." I suppose that it could be argued that the burqa is an entirely different issue from the veil -- and in certain ways it is. But nevertheless this whole initiative strikes me as an abrupt blowback from the perceived criticism of "the French model" by Obama.

For the moment, I'll just note my sense, as I read the news in the last couple days, that despite my sense of déjà vu (and the "Here We Go Again" post titles), this may not actually play out as a replay of the massive French debates about the veil in the public schools. Beyond the obvious fact that we're talking now about a changed political landscape from that of 1994 or 2004, with new actors, there are also other differences. For one thing, the symbolically-charged space of the public schools aren't involved. For another, this puts on the table very different legal questions now, regarding what adults wear in the street, not in spaces administered by the state. (We're also talking about what a very small number of adults wear in the streets -- I've been looking in vain for an estimate of how many women in France actually engage in full-body veiling, but everyone seems to agree that it's pretty tiny. Of course, the numbers aren't the point here. They weren't with the veil in the schools, either -- that too was a very small phenomenon in statistical terms.) Also, there seem to be skeptical voices present in the debate already that are insisting that this stuff is a distraction from the very real issues around Islam in France; to my ear, at least (and I may be forgetting -- please tell me), they sound different than anyone did 5 years ago.

And yet...the déjà vu remains. We'll see.

Here we go again

Oy. On Friday a group of 65 French legislators called for the creation of a parliamentary committee to study, "in the name of secularism,"* the phenomenon of women wearing the burqa in France. Luc Chatel, the spokesperson for Sarkozy's administration, told France 2 tv that the government would consider the possibility of a ban on the wearing of the burqa in public. Other members of the government (Fadela Amara, Rama Yade, both of Muslim background) are receptive to the idea of such a law; the Minister for Immigration Eric Besson, however, has spoken against it, saying "It is necessary to fight against the spread of the burqa, but it must be done through education, through pedagogy, through dialogue." (Sarkozy himself has declined to say anything till Monday; we'll update once he does.)

Yes, according to Le Monde, it looks like this is at least somewhat a response to the fallout from Obama's Cairo speech comments that we posted on last week: "For some people," the paper says, "the parliamentary offensive also appears to be a resopnse to the M. Sarkozy's approbation for Barack Obama's comments about freedom to wear the veil for women living in Western countries, on the condition that it is a matter of 'free choice.'"

This is a giant can of worms for France, where for years now underlying struggles about Islam, tolerance, diversity, extremism, and so on have been playing out symbolically through fights about Muslim women's bodies and clothing. As Arthur Goldhammer observes here, in a great post about these developments, the burqa (and other forms of religious dress or veiling) can evoke visceral reactions of "horror" or upset that simply don't arise in the same way regarding other, less visible forms of religious observance. The large Muslim minority in France creates challenges to secular ideals that are extremely complex, and although personally I disagree with current French policy, as I wrote last week, I think that the French are justified in not being thrilled with offhanded comments about it from Americans. So (until I've had some time to really study what's being said on all sides) I won't get into my position on these issues, but will keep posting on what's happening in France as it develops.


* "laïcité," which does not have a great English equivalent -- "secularism" gets kind of close, but laïcité is more about the **absence** of state involvement in religion, and vice versa. Here's a nice little historical guide from the BBC. Good subject for another post.

France, the headscarf, & the Cairo speech

I've been wondering about the French response to Obama's remarks about the Muslim headscarf in the Cairo speech, but too busy to investigate. I tried to catch up today (a process that every time makes me hate, hate, hate Le Monde for claiming that articles from like 3 days ago are now in the "archives" and must be paid for).

What Obama said:
First, in the section where he was explaining that the rights of Muslims are protected in US, he said,

"That's why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it. (Applause.)"

Then, later:

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit -- for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism....

The sixth issue -- the sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.(Applause.) I know –- I know -- and you can tell from this audience, that there is a healthy debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. (Applause.)

Did the French feel like, just maybe, they were the "some in the West" being referred to here? Um, yes. (And they were. After years of tumult and wrenching debate over this issue, which for many French people came to symbolize the way that religious diversity was throwing the French secular republican model into crisis, in 2004 the French banned headscarfs -- and all noticeable symbols of religious identity -- from the public schools.) The Agence France Presse coverage related to Obama's speech came out under the title "Hijab: Obama égratigne la France," which basically translates as "Hijab: Obama Takes a Dig at France." Lots of prominent French sociologists, politicians, etc. who had been involved in France's debates over the veil in the 90s and early 2000s have criticized Obama's speech: for example, here's Patrick Weil, a very respected scholar who served on the special government-appointed commission responsible for crafting the law banning religious symbols in the schools (my translation):

This passage on the banning of the veil is annoying, because it shows a misunderstanding of the French situation. Muslim women can wear the veil here, even if the school has been made a sanctuary [from religion] and if the space of the State is neutral with regards to religion."

Fair enough: outside the public schools, Muslim women are free to wear headscarves in France, with some exceptions like certain government employees on the job. Personally I disagree with the French policy, for reasons I won't get into today, but it shouldn't be mischaracterized as a general ban on the hijab. Sarkozy, meanwhile, who is eager to emphasize the positive in the Franco-American relationship right now, has been making pretty much the same point as Weil but doing it without criticizing Obama: "I am totally in agreement with President Obama's speech, including on the question of the veil," he told reporters. "In France, a girl who wants to wear the veil can do so," with the exceptions I've noted.

So, flap over? Apparently. But a sore spot has definitely been touched. (If you doubt that, and you can read French, check out the "comments" section on the Le Figaro site article about this. Figaro is a conservative paper, but it's extremely mainstream and venerable -- think Wall Street Journal, sort of. Among the commenters there this appears to have sparked some serious anger. This stuff is a big deal in Europe, and European political dividing-lines around it don't map easily onto US Democrat/Republican thinking. It might be an area where Obama wants to tread pretty carefully in the future.