The Politics of the Veil (review)

In an incisive and searing book, Joan Wallach Scott explores the anxieties and prejudices fueling the French law banning the headscarf in schools and lays bare the issues hidden by the controversy. French republican laïcité or secularism rests on the concept of the universal equality of abstract individuals. Scott shows how the French formulation founders in its inattention to difference and to the presence of groups and how the headscarf prohibition draws on racism and other legacies of France's colonial past. Muslims are called to assimilate even while they are believed to be fundamentally unassimilable, viewed as all alike, permanent "immigrants," even when they are born in France.

The ban is claimed to protect the individual choice of teenage girls, but its advocates have ignored the evidence of the actual young women who decided to wear the scarf as a stage-of-life experiment with independence. It is also supposed to facilitate the sexual equality of young Muslim women by having them follow the French system of regulating the relations between men and women. But, says Scott, both systems are patriarchal, the one insisting that women be fully visible to men and the other insisting that women wear modest dress before men who are not their kin.

While making her own position crystal clear, Scott gives full report of the range of views in France on the headscarf ban, of supporters and opponents, especially among the non-Muslims. ("This is not a book about French Muslims; it is about the dominant French view of them.") Her hope, originating in her earlier work on gender and universal rights, is to replace homogeneity or "common being" as the ideal underpinning universal equality in the state, with the exclusion that this entails, by political practices and ideals that recognize difference as essential to democracy and that seek a common ground and inclusiveness in the continual negotiation of difference.