French Muslims. Sharif Gemie
to the veil vary. One point to stress here is that non-Muslims often overestimate the unity of Muslim thought: in reality, Islam is a religion founded on debate and individual interpretations. A good example of this process is given by Bencheikh, who argues that the original purpose of veiling was to support women and ensure their status in the wider world. That role is now performed by the educational system: therefore Muslims should value the school over the veil.134 Some Muslims refuse such arguments, some accept them. Certainly there are also some female French Muslims who have developed a deep resentment of the veil. Libération carried an interview with one such woman, who stated how she would like to tear the cloth from the heads of all veil-wearing girls: a comment that was used as a headline.135 Abdelwahab Meddeb wrote strongly against veil-wearing, first because he found it a symbol of an ideological Islam, different from the pluralistic Sufi structures that he grew up with, and secondly because today it is a ‘metaphor of sexual inequality’.136 But if we focus our research on the voices of the veil-wearers, we find that while they certainly produce a variety of reasons for their choice of clothing (religion, identity, social status … and fashion?), none of them refer to a belief in female inferiority as a justification. As the veil-wearing Fatima, from Saint-Denis, notes: ‘If my veil is a “symbol of oppression”, am I then supposed to conclude that I’m oppressing myself?’137
The material surveyed in the paragraphs above therefore presents a sharp dichotomy: French veil-wearers produce a set of reasons for their choices, but these are not simply ignored by French political leaders, but even actively denied. Jean-Louis Debré considered that girls advancing modernist or emancipatory arguments in favour of the veil were demonstrating ‘ignorance about the foundations of their own religion’.138 Green deputy Martine Billard considered that ‘whatever these individual interpretations that a minority of young Muslim girls give to the veil, it is in no way a symbol of emancipation’.139 Stasi, to his credit, did note that the veil seemed to have different meanings, but then concluded that the paradigmatic case on which the Republic had to act was the veil as an instrument of oppression.140 Veil-wearing schoolgirls who took seriously the law’s promise of ‘dialogue’ met a similar wall of incomprehension and official arrogance: in September 2004 headteachers stood at the school gates and made snap judgements on their pupils’ clothing, instructing them to push back their bandanas from their foreheads and ears. ‘The law cannot be discussed’ they told those who protested.141 When the veil-wearing Zahra was isolated from her class in Décines (Rhône), she attempted to find out what she could wear to cover her hair that was not considered to be ‘ostensible’. She received an official reply from her local educational authorities: ‘it is for the school administration, and not for the young girl, to decide on the nature of a religious symbol’.142 In Mantes-la-Ville, the school director was even more blunt: ‘Law or no law, it’s me who decides!’143
To return to our previous question, what are the origins of this infallible and exact knowledge of the meaning of the veil that French authorities possess: a knowledge that enables them to state with such ease and such certainty that the veil is and can only be a symbol of female inferiority? It has not been from studying Islam: to my knowledge, no official pronouncement by any Muslim group recommends wearing the veil in order to signal female inferiority. It has not been from reading the works of sociologists and other researchers. While French authorities do give a few references to the situation of women in Iran and Afghanistan, these hardly suggest any serious effort to engage with the complex social dynamics of these countries. Above all, the authorities’ knowledge has not been gained from talking to the veil-wearing girls themselves: one recalls Stasi’s original decision that the veil-wearers were inherently unsuitable for interview. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that this rhetorical certainty is a legacy of French colonialism, whose structures and administrations were consistently based on the idea that French authorities possessed an exact knowledge of the natives’ cultures and lives.144 For these authorities, the idea that they were liberating the natives from the oppression of their own culture was the most convincing justification for their presence.145
One last point needs to be made here: the argument I have presented is that while compulsory veiling is certainly an unacceptable infringement of women’s rights, it is inaccurate to see the veil itself as inherently oppressive. This does not imply that, therefore, I consider the veil to be liberatory, merely that it carries many meanings. If required to define my position, I would describe myself as neutral on this topic: as a general principle, people should be allowed to wear what they wish. If veiling is to be criticized, then it should be on the basis of knowledge, not prejudice. There is no doubt that it is a practice that creates problems for its wearers: if the primary injunction is to dress modestly, then wearing a veil in a Western society seems, on the contrary, a means by which to draw attention to oneself. If it is worn in order to achieve a certain public recognition, then wearers themselves complain about the nature of that recognition: ‘they reduce me to my veil. And what a veil! A veil like a yellow star, an accessory to rape!’146 The simple banning of veils from state schools, however, will not solve these problems.
Integration
To introduce an examination of this term, I wish to refer to an incident in Britain in October 2006. My reasons for briefly changing the area of study are twofold: first, the incident provides an extremely clear example of certain attitudes. But, secondly, it is also a reminder that the problems which beset the French state are not unique: if Britain has managed to avoid some of them, this is only a difference of degree, not an absolute difference in quality.
As many readers will no doubt remember, Jack Straw, then leader of the House of Commons, was visited in his MP’s surgery by a woman wearing a full veil – a niqab – which entirely covered her face. She spoke English well, and had been educated in Lancaster. Perhaps like Chirac considering a veiled schoolgirl, Straw later reported that he felt intimidated, and he asked her to remove her veil. More interesting, he then stated to the press that he considered her veil ‘a barrier to social integration’.147 This is a curious comment: this woman had learnt English, had succeeded in the British school system and had understood the British political system to the extent that she was able to make use of the appropriate administrative and political structures to raise a case with her MP: something which the great majority of the British population never do. In what sense was she ‘not integrated’? At this point British culture comes to resemble French culture: she is described as ‘not integrated’ because she fails to conform to certain assumed norms. And what exactly are these norms? Here British culture grows as vague and cloudy as the speakers in the National Assemblies: those norms are the values of fair play, tolerance, moderation … Perhaps Straw meant that as this woman was wearing a niqab, she would find it difficult to institute the values of fair play by umpiring a cricket match? In truth, these oft-cited values are a remarkably poor summary of the values that govern most British people’s lives, although they may have some relevance as ideals.
Migrants who attempt to accept these lessons concerning ‘our values’ are then trying to live their lives to a set of ideals which the ‘native’ population habitually ignores. Azouz Begag’s political memoirs give countless examples of the moments when, having been characterized as a Muslim and as the child of an immigrant family, he was then required to live to a code of public morality which was more strict than that required for the other ‘native’ French ministers. This double-bind, Catch-22 logic has a demoralizing effect on the person caught in its contradictions. Begag speaks of an almost ‘genetic’ fear.
I was terrified. From father to son, among us, we always have this fear of not being ‘correct’ [comme il faut] in the eyes of the French. We are afraid of hurting others. Afraid of shocking them, of betraying them, disappointing them, of being late. We are afraid of life, of death, of everything. My poor father left to me this genetic agony.148
The examples of Straw’s visitor and Begag’s experiences suggest that we need to rethink the concept of ‘integration’.
A veil-wearing schoolgirl from Rennes observes: ‘They tried to make people believe that we were deviants and that in order to “integrate” us we had to remove our veils. Yet we were extremely