In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe
  • Jane Freedman
Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe. By Dominic McGoldrick. Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2006. xx + 320 pp. Pb.

Dominic McGoldrick's book aims to engage in the legal and political debates concerning the right of Muslim women to wear a hijab or headscarf in schools in Europe. He asserts that human rights thinking can 'provide a language, discourse and, in some cases, institutional structures for mediating and resolving headscarf- hijab disputes'. The book covers a wide range of comparative case studies, [End Page 120] starting with a discussion of the various debates that have taken place over the hijab in France, culminating in the 2004 law which banned pupils from wearing any overtly religious symbols or items of clothing. The French law is compared with the practices of other European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and others; and also case studies from non-European states such as the United States, the Ukraine, Trinidad and Afghanistan. These various case studies provide some interesting insights into the ways in which religion, minority rights and muticulturalism have been debated and translated into policy and legislation in different national contexts. However, although this wide body of empirical data could have provided a solid foundation for an interesting theoretical analysis of the debates over the rights of Muslim women to wear a hijab in Europe, and more broadly of the current discussions about the 'failure' of multiculturalism or the political instrumentalization of islamophobia in Europe, unfortunately the author makes some basic factual errors and completely fails to engage with a whole body of feminist academic literature on the relevance of universalist or multi-culturalist understandings of rights, and on feminist critiques of international human rights law. The chapter on France, for example, is marred by the continued misspelling of the name of Creil, the town where the 'original' affaire des foulards started. McGoldrick quotes extensively from a variety of sources but fails to develop his own analysis to any real extent. More seriously, many of the underlying gender issues at stake in the debate are simply not considered, or else are analysed in a highly essentializing way. In a very short section on 'gender discrimination and feminist perspectives', McGoldrick cites extensively from newspaper articles but fails to engage with any of the feminist critiques of human rights discourse, any of the wide-ranging critical literature on ethnocentrism and essentialism in Western feminism, or any of the feminist debates over multiculturalism. In trying to cover such a wide range of empirical material McGoldrick leaves too little space for any real analysis of the issues involved. The book is worth buying for those in search of empirical legal and political data on the right to wear a hijab, but adds little or nothing to the theoretical debates on this subject. [End Page 121]

Jane Freedman
Université De Paris 1
...

pdf

Share