In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an “imagined France,” one that was “secular, individualist and culturally homogenous” and “whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation.”
Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were “strikingly absent from the debates” in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous “other” (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali’s words, a “successor to the Berlin Wall”).
The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged “sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France.” Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists — self-proclaimed “liberals” as well as unabashed right-wingers — rhetorically ask whether “Islam,” which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with “European” values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).
This is part one of a two-part article. The second half will run tomorrow.
RSS