Why the French Don't Like Headscarves : Islam, the State, and Public Space.

The culture and politics of the French ban on Muslim head scarves in schools. "AFFAIRS" - that's what the French call public controversies. And in recent years, Europe, not just France, has been full of affairs, especially concerning the West and Islam. After the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and the riots in poor, heavily Muslim French suburbs later that year, furies flew against a Danish daily for publishing cartoons depicting Islam's prophet. Then the pope made, well, not quite amends after demonstrators raged against his citation of a centuries-old remark disparaging Muhammad. Then concerns about Muslim protests led to the cancellation (and then rescheduling) of a staging of Mozart's "Idomeneo" in Berlin that featured a severed head of the prophet. Then threats forced a French teacher into hiding for an (intemperate) article on political Islam. Then British political leaders provoked anger by suggesting that veils on Muslim women were a form of segregation. These are a lot of "thens." What about the "whys"? Why are these affairs happening, and why now? Are they due to deep crises within Islam and its difficulties with liberal norms of free speech and gender equality? Or are they the result of a European inability to cope fairly with immigrant minorities? France's "head scarf affair," the subject of John R. Bowen's "Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space," began in 1989, when school administrators objected to Muslim girls' wearing hair covers to school as a violation of laïcité (secularism), the Republic's vigorous separation of state and religion. The controversy went through several phases. A law was finally passed in 2004 that barred conspicuous religious apparel in public schools. This included large crosses and Jewish skullcaps, yet everyone knew the issue was France's four to five million Muslims. Many Muslims protested: the state, they insisted, should not tell young women how to dress. In the meantime, stories of girls forced to wear scarves by tradition-minded fathers abounded. When lawmakers tugged at those scarves, they found underneath not just Muslims demanding the freedom of religious expression, but barbed questions about citizenship. Does a girl's right to an education belong to her parents? Or to her as a future adult, a citizen whose education should enhance her ability to choose her own life? "The school is a place where we share universal values of freedom, equality and fraternity" says a teacher in this book. "The school's mission has a liberating ambition: to give citizens-in-the-making the means to free themselves from social, cultural, ethnic or gendered determinism." One poll reported that 49 percent of Muslim women in France supported the law, 43 percent opposed it. Bowen, who teaches at Washington University, defines his project as "an anthropology of French reasoning." He provides a useful account of the controversy itself, but he also commits some odd factual errors. He describes the writer Régis Debray, a member of the commission whose recommendations led to the 2004 law, as a leader of France's May 1968 upheaval, though it is well known that at the time, Debray was in a Bolivian prison as a comrade of Che Guevara. More problematic is Bowen's wobbly approach to French republican ideas. He is irritated by "the postulate of French political philosophy that citizens must all subscribe to the same values in the public sphere." But the French republican retort is obvious: no country can survive without some basic, common values. How can a republic balance shared citizenship with cultural pluralism? It's a tough question, and France is having considerable difficulty answering it (after all, a secular republic won't necessarily capsize if some students wear religious symbols). But Bowen never poses it adequately. Instead, he follows an unfortunate academic fashion by contending that terms like "laïcité" and "Islamism" have no "firm ground" (because nothing does). For him, the true problem is the "construction of 'Islamism' as a unified, political object" of "discourse." Only flawed Western "logic" links turmoil among Muslims around the world to the spurious notion that a Muslim head scarf has "true meaning" in France. Ouh là là! I can imagine a French secularist responding to Bowen: "Wouldn't it be more helpful to say that there is a new global assertiveness among many Muslims; it is multifaceted but also harbors some dangerous extremism. Call it 'Islamism' or whatever, but we need to distinguish extremists from the majority of Muslims, who seek common ground with non-Muslims." A Moroccan-French feminist once said to me, "I am against the head scarf and the head scarf law." Just so. Mitchell Cohen, the co-editor of Dissent magazine, teaches political science at Baruch College and CUNY Graduate School.