Great read for those interested in a deeper understanding of many of the issues in Europe we have seen bubble over the past few weeks.. The French in the 19th century identified the veil as a symbol of Islam’s primitive backwardness; it was used to justify the brutal pacification of north African Muslims and to exclude them from full citizenship. Since colonialist stereotypes continue to proliferate, many second- and third-generation Muslim women have creatively used the veil in charting their own path to the modern world. In 1989, three French girls deliberately risked expulsion by wearing headscarves to school. The veil for them was not only a badge of identity but also an assertion – one that a feminist Enlightenment philosopher might have admired – of freedom from the state’s oppressive authority. The task confronting people condemned to modernity is “not so much to escape this fate”, Paz wrote, “as to discover a less inhuman form of conversion”, that “does not bring duplicity and split personalities in its wake, as is the case today”. To acknowledge that there are many passages to modernity, each with its own complex strains, is to move toward a less unilateral view of humanity, and, perhaps, to the more accommodating form of secularism and democracy that is increasingly the need of the hour in an irrevocably multiethnic Europe. Muslim women, however, were absent from the French debate on the foulard, whose tone was set by Jacques Attali comparing the veil to the Berlin Wall, and the philosopher André Glucksmann describing it as a “terrorist operation”. (Confusingly, Bernard-Henri Lévy called it “an invitation to rape”.) The hysterical denunciations yet again revealed how many of the Enlightenment’s heirs and sentinels have lapsed from individual reason into a zealotry of the state, in which, as Joan Scott wrote in The Politics of the Veil, the reality of an “imagined France”, one that is “secular, individualist, and culturally homogenous”, can only be “secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation”: by effectively proscribing a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck. The attempts to define French or European identity by violently detaching it from its presumed historic “other”, and by setting up oppositions – civilised and backward, secular and religious – cannot succeed in an age where this “other” also possesses the power to write and make history. Economic globalisation, by prompting interdependence, seemed at first to be undermining nationalist or civilisational solipsism. In fact, as is revealed by the recrudescence of the clash of civilisations discourse, we are far from transcending obsolete and increasingly rigid notions of belonging and identity. The necessary discussion of flexible notions of citizenship and sovereignty or fluid identities – both imperative in the globalised age – is quickly pre-empted by blaming the incorrigibly medieval nature of religious people and their failure to appreciate the virtues of secular modernity.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 11:58:28 +0000
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