Hijab and the Republic
Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate
Publication Year: 2008
Published by: Syracuse University Press
Cover
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p. 1-1
Title Page, List of Similar Titles, Copyright Page, Epigraph, About the Author
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pp. i-vi
Contents
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pp. vii-viii
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-x
None of us work in isolation or unaided so of course there are a number of people who deserve thanks for this book. First, I would like to thank the many women in France, too numerous to name, who, over more than two decades, spoke with me, campaigned with me, sent me documents, invited me to meetings, communicated insights, and encouraged me in my...
Abbreviations
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pp. xi-xii
Introduction: Why France?
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pp. 1-15
One autumn day in May 2006, as I crossed a parking lot at the elite university where I work in Sydney, a young hijab-clad woman crossed my path. The fact that she was wearing a modern Islamic headscarf was in itself unremarkable. What caught my eye was the combination of the hijab with the rest of her clothing, which was not only Western but also as body-hugging...
Part One. Contextualizing the Debate
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pp. 17-20
These first three chapters paint the historical and contemporary backdrop against which the French hijab debate has been waged. They will focus respectively on the “new veiling” in the Muslim world and diaspora in the last few decades of the last century and the beginning of this one, as well as the rise of Islamism, its relationship to modernity and its hostility to the...
1. Very Modern Tradition: Background to the “New Veiling"
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pp. 21-52
Many scholars have noted that women are the guardians of culture and honor, and women’s appearance and body language have been the primary visible marker of this.1 Clothing symbolizes women’s submission, rebellion, or emancipation, and through these, society’s progress, security, or moral degradation, as debates in the West over the last century concerning...
2. The “Cornerstone of the Republic”: Secularism and the Regulation of Religion
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pp. 53-88
It has often been said that the French idea of la�cit�, enshrined in article 1 of its constitution, is impossible to translate. Even though Western countries are, to varying degrees, secular, in practice if not always formally in law, and even though there is some debate as to how unique French secularism really is (Baub�rot 2004), nowhere else in the West has secularism been...
3. French Muslims: Between “Integration” and “Muslimism”
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pp. 89-124
The development during the 1970s and 1980s of a postcolonial French population that had, now that the postwar boom was over, become associated with socioeconomic problems, gave rise to a sort of national identity crisis and concerns over “immigration,” which were in part manufactured by the extreme-right party Front National and its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen....
Part Two. A Fifteen-Year Saga
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pp. 125-128
The political, media, and legal plemic about the hijab in France has been long and not entirely linear. It has had peaks and troughs, hardening and softening of stances. In particular, the ways in which it has been imbricated within wider national and international debates on race, nation, women, religion, “Muslimness,” and secularism have changed significantly...
4. 1989: Three Little Girls and a Great Big “Psychodrama”
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pp. 129-162
On September 18, 1989, Le�la and Fatima Achaboun, two sisters of Moroccan background (aged thirteen and fourteen), and Samira, their fourteen-year-old friend, of Tunisian background, were expelled from junior high school (coll�ge) Gabriel Havez in Creil, for refusing to remove their hijabs. The school was around sixty kilometers north of Paris in a ZEP, that...
5. 1990–1995: From Psychodrama to Saga
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pp. 163-196
Estimates of the total number of headscarf incidents between 1989 and 2003 vary according to the source, as do those of total numbers of headscarved girls: there are a range of opinions on the subject and hard data, outside cases that went to court, are hard to come by. Hanifa Ch�rifi, appointed in 1994 by the then right-wing government as a government...
6. 1995–2004 and Beyond: How Ostentatiousness Became Conspicuous
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pp. 197-232
During the years between 1995 and 9/11, the hijab issue neither went away nor showed any particular signs of escalating beyond what was already in place, and it tended to occupy less space in the public arena than it had during the 1994–95 peak. It continued, however, to be an irritant, more acutely so at some moments than others, with both the white French and...
Part Three. Feminists Caught in the Contradictions
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pp. 233-236
...I wrote these words in 2001, in the context of a debate on the diversity of feminist activism and feminist positionings with relation to religion. Nowhere are they more true than within the French debate over the hijab and related issues, particularly in its third resurgence in 2003–6. Suddenly everyone was claiming to be the voice of feminism. Caught in the crossfire...
7. The Politics of Hijabization
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pp. 237-265
Commentators , both headscarved and not, have advanced various reasons for wearing the hijab. Many of these reasons correspond with those I discussed in chapter 1, within the framework of the politics of reveiling in the Arabo-Muslim and Middle-Eastern Muslim world from the 1970s onward. The degree to which the argument holds that “it’s not the same” in...
8. Co-optations and Instrumentalizations
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pp. 266-305
In 1989, many commentators on both sides of the fence had referred to the girls as the center of the affair as “hostages” in a social debate that was ultimately not about them. Some fourteen to fifteen years later, little had changed on this level. If anything, it had worsened. Even if, by 2003, feminists were more vocally and visibly participating...
9. Feminist Confusions and Confrontations
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pp. 306-343
...so wrote Brigitte and Twefik Allal, co-originators of the Manifeste des libert�s (Abada et al. 2004), and co-founders of the association of the same name founded in December 2004. With these words, they identified a fundamental problem with the hijab debate among the broader left that, already partly present in 1989, had become extreme. Among generalized...
Conclusion: French Lessons for the West?
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pp. 344-348
It is a cause for deep concern that in the 2003–5 period, two or three thousand hijab-clad girls, the French Islamist “brotherhood,” and a few thousand men behaving very badly indeed for three weeks in 2005 managed to hijack the French race debate, not to mention the debate on women’s rights, with the main government responses being punishment on one level...
Appendix: Chronology
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pp. 351-354
Glossary
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pp. 355-356
References
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pp. 357-383
Index
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pp. 385-419
E-ISBN-13: 9780815651321
E-ISBN-10: 0815651325
Print-ISBN-13: 9780815631743
Print-ISBN-10: 081563174X
Page Count: 416
Publication Year: 2008
