Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance, Equality

In recent years, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Barcelona and the Hesse state of Germany have rendered wearing a burqa in public illegal. Quebec, Australia, Denmark, French Canada and the rest of Spain and Germany are actively debating burqa bans. Israel is also engaging the possibility, though for peculiar reasons, namely the small but growing number of Orthodox Jewish women (Haredim) who have lately taken to wearing burqa-like garments.¹ France has banned other forms of Islamic modest dress—notably the headscarf—on girls and women obtaining or delivering public services, including education.

The debates about Islamic women’s modest dress in public space and public institutions have been framed by larger order concerns about multiculturalism, assimilation, freedom, accommodation and tolerance in Western nations. This essay poses a different question about these proposed or enacted prohibitions on the headscarf, the niqab, or the burqa. What assumptions in and about Western secularism make possible this astonishing historical moment, one in which women’s clothes are the subject of legislation in twenty-first century Western liberal democracies? One in which, in the name of freedom, equality, security or secularism, liberal democratic states mandate what women can and cannot wear, indeed, one in which women are legally required to take off certain clothes in public or stay home, strip or leave the public sphere?

In the course of pursuing these questions, I will not be discussing the most obvious features of this phenomenon. I will not discuss the extent to which these bans are part of a giant seizure about Islam in the West, one that extends from whether a Muslim community center may be built on private property near the former World Trade Center to whether a public radio news analyst may freely remark on his fear of Muslims without jeopardizing his job, whether religious Muslims belong in the west at all, whether “multicultural liberal societies” can accommodate them, whether, as the German chancellor Angela Merkel declared last year and David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy echoed more recently, “multiculturalism has utterly failed.”² Nor will I be discussing the extent to which these bans convey an aggression toward Islam exceeding any racialized or religious hostility legally consecrated by European societies in decades, one whose fire is unimaginable for Orthodox Jews, Catholic laity, German Baptists, Hindus, or any ethnic or racial group. I will not examine how banning Islamic modest female dress fuels Islamic anti-Westernism at the same time it violates the most basic precepts of individual and religious freedom in liberal democracies. Nor will I dwell on the fact that the range of reasons given for burqa bans—from the importance of immigrant assimilation to national security to gender equality to the value of revealing female beauty to preserving a religiously neutral public realm to the need to see faces—cancels the credibility of each.³ I will consider only in passing the ways that debates about the burqa underscore the extent to which women everywhere are still made to bear the burden of culture, how, in the name of protecting or emancipating women, living by religious codes or by secular ones, securing majority or minority national values, masculine norms of feminine sexual comportment remain the tiresome battlegrounds of these conflicts. Nor will I dwell on the ways that this preoccupation with ordinary women living ordinary lives displaces Western attention from violence against women and women’s persistent subordinate social and economic status within as well as outside liberal democracies.

All of these issues I mention to set aside as well as to open my hand. As should be clear, I do not believe the burqa bans can be defended in ways that meet minimum thresholds of liberal religious pluralism, individual freedom, or racial and gender non-discrimination. But what assumptions of and about secularism make them conceivable and legitimate? This is the question I want to probe. To be clear, I am not suggesting that such assumptions fuel the bans—the anxieties and aggressions already mentioned are responsible for that. Rather, my aim is to consider the conceits of Western secularism, including its historically French variant, laicite, that make these bans plausibly...