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

Author:John R. Bowen [Bowen, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2010-05-22T22:37:00+00:00

PERHAPS it is now clear why a law against the voile, pretending to deal evenhandedly with "religious signs," would have proved so appealing to politicians: a thorn in the Republican side of teachers and, increasingly, public opinion, the voile was an easy target for deputies feeling a need to "do something" about France's problems. The voile could be construed as violating at least the spirit of laicite, and the new law would appeal to the French penchant for legislation and it would survive eventual legal challenges.

But this account rests at the surface of things. Why was it that so many people became so concerned about "a bit of cloth"? We need to see how the voile touched several raw nerves at once, that these were nerves of some philosophical depth, and that the French news media did their best to inflame the resulting anxieties.

By early 20(12, many French journalists, intellectuals, and officials increasingly linked the problem of scarves in schools with three other problems of society: communalism, Islamism, and sexism. Many in France became deeply worried and frightened about these problems, and therefore about the social effects of the voile. We can understand the degree of popular and intellectual support for the law-including support among Muslims-only if we appreciate the ways in which television, radio, and print media played up these broad social dangers said to be posed, or represented, by the voile, and if we appreciate the important social and philosophical issues raised by the voile. Perhaps in no other country does applied philosophy intertwine with media campaigns to the extent it does in France. Perhaps also nowhere else are print and televised media as intertwined through overlapping directorships and gatekeepers as in France.'

Each of the next three chapters examines the ways in which these linkages were made in public life. The three fears are deeply interrelated, but they draw on distinct strands of French self-understanding. Communalism (communautarisme) means the closing in of ethnically defined communities on themselves, a repli communautaire (literally, a "folding-in"), and the refusal of integration. Communalism threatens the processes of direct communication between the state and citizens that underlie French political philosophy. It separates citizens by valuing their affiliation to communities over their collective participation in the nation. Once safely distant in "Anglo-Saxon societies," communalism now appeared closer to home, in the poor suburbs of Paris and Lyon and in small communities taken over by Islamists. It threatened to pervert the public schools, those crucibles for molding citizens out of assorted humans, by introducing religious identity, marked by the voile, to divide children against themselves.

Islamism (islamisme) has become a usefully ambiguous term for some French social scientists and journalists. It is used to refer to movements that advocate creating Islamic states as well as to those that merely promote public manifestations of Islam. What both references share is a negative feature, the denial of a European notion that religion properly belongs in the private sphere. The ambiguity permits writers to draw on fears of totalitarian

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