There
is no purity of thought in the West. Not anymore than elsewhere,
perhaps. And even less when it is a matter of institutional
gains and power politics. When this becomes a state of things,
the content of ideas shifts considerably from the cradle of
revolt, collective demand and social movements from which it
surged forth.
In
that regard, it comes as no surprise that two essential points
of the loi sur la laïcité have been brushed aside
without the bat of an eye. It is the measure of a law’s
fairness to be able to address the subtle pluralism on which any
society breeds. The fact that the French law aims at curbing the
rights of young women, under the purported guise of protecting
them from their own families and religious authorities, should
not lead one to ignore that such focus on the
student-individual’s general rights is otherwise a trait
typical to the French public schooling system at large.
The
French professeure d’école, or elementary school
teacher, is trained to believe the institution is always right.
The student is but a loose particle. The teacher distributes the
system’s values, which are no different than the current
construct of the Republic’s. Its scope is universal, or universalist,
under which the parent figure often matches up with the
decomposing matter of decaying atoms. Setting the student on a
refurbished orbit that simultaneously aims at correcting the
parents’ social commitment is how the professeure sees
her singular task.
The
French elementary school teacher is trained to believe the institution
is always right. The student is but a loose particle. |
|
This
orientation of the French system lies at loggerheads with
North-American English-speaking schools. There, parents
regularly overrule the teacher’s skill and wisdom through
individualist exuberance. In the teacher’s stead, parents seek
to ensure a fluid stream of values from what Mom and Dad teach
at home to what Jack and Jill learn at school. The problem is
that with the lengthening of the North-American work day, Mom
and Dad are not at home as often. The nature of what is learned
at home starts corresponding to what Jack and Jill reap from
television and pop culture.
Given
the constraints of their training, many French public school
teachers have dismissed the fact that young male Muslim
teens fall outside of the law’s ban on religious symbols.
Males can of course express religion not only through the
unlikely prospect of being able to sport beards by high-school
age (schooling is only compulsory in France until age 16), but
also through non-Western dress or adorning a Palestinian scarf.
While it’s true that Jewish boys will no longer be able to
wear kippas to class (and need we really linger on who
wears Christian symbols in France?), the Chirac-Raffarin
government dismissed the other tenet of secularism which should
insist on banning political symbols from school, such as
Che Gueverra t-shirts. But no: what’s good for the movies is
good for the classroom. Adepts of the Che should take note. As
opposed to the sixties, the Argentine hippie turned Latin
American freedom fighter is devoid of political agitprop. Or at
least, he has about as much of one these days as your typical
rock star.
Also
missing from the equation are the feelings of those who take
their fashion as seriously as their religion, with all due
respect. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) featured a
report on the anti-hijab law on February 9.1
Its focus was Amal, a devout French-born high-school-aged Muslim
girl. Born to Moroccan parents, she lives in the town of Nevers
(200 km south of Paris in the Loire river valley). Beautiful and
smart, Amal wears a hijab.
Here
is a woman who has chosen, a choice incidentally accepted by her
school superintendent. The silhouette her headscarf completes
drapes her school surroundings with singular elegance. Gliding
atop glamour high-heels, once school’s out she’s whipping
through the narrow suburban streets on her Vespa mobilette.
Through a typically French sense of seductive self-assurance,
Amal explains to the CBC reporter how her ambitions are to be
elected to the French National Assembly. But none of these
proactive dreams will tear her from Muslim faith and
North-African customs.
Insensitivity
to foreign cultures is a symptom of disinformation. |
|
From
Canada’s distant vantage point, one might shrug and say: And
why should they? Yet feminist support for the anti-hijab
legislation and the mainstream Western feminist viewpoint have
been ambivalent toward women’s self-representation in various
Muslim societies, to say the least. From the outside, societies
such as Taliban-led Afghanistan, or the more orthodox periods of
Islamic Revolution Iran, without mentioning the Saudi Arabian
applications of Shari`ah, have had Western feminists clutching
at self-certainties. In the meantime, throughout their
denunciation of “radical” Islamism, many feminists have
fallen short of naming what it is of conventional Arab societies
they accept, if anything.
Few
if any of them admit to a disheartening lack of information
available on the lives women lead in the Middle East. For
insensitivity to traditional foreign cultures is a symptom of
disinformation. This amounts to intellectual laziness, however,
when the embodied witnesses, foreign visitors or immigrants in
the West, attend the same universities or live in near-by
districts. It isn’t anything endemic to a feminist viewpoint
to be deeply rooted to one’s home and society. Yet feminists
have fallen short of admitting to the fact that it is difficult
for them to ponder living in another patriarchal system, even
when that society is built along “similar” cultural lines.
Ask
a conservative American feminist-they exist notwithstanding the
oxymoron-how alike they take their Republican cousin and
traditional ally, France, to be. Throughout the 1980s, with the
rise of mainstream feminism, it was not the Muslim world that
drew the ire of Anglo-American feminists. France had the dubious
honor of topping the list then, followed by China on the
occasion of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in
Beijing in 1995.
With
its accents on femininity, seduction and openly flaunted
physical beauty, in a type of latter-day Burkean hysteria
Americans viewed the Blue-White-and-Red of the French as the
mark of the beast. Then, as French media began feminizing its
men-to the point of reaching today’s trendy metrosexual
category-Anglo-Americans picked up on French glamour as a sign
of individual female choice. In the end, the French connection
also bore out a conservative dimension to the feminist critique,
now typical to all forms of Western liberal feminism.
 |
|
Feminist
attention during the
Afghanistan
war was directed at the burqa, with lack of consideration
for women conditions in war situations. |
In
the eyes of the latter, it seems as though there were some
greater progress to skimming dress than further adorning it.
These latter voices first spoke in unison as a common political
block in the US, England, Canada, France and Spain during the
American attack on Afghanistan. There, we could hear Madams Bush
and Cheney vouching for the liberating impact warranted by the
American attack on the lives of those unfortunate women hidden
behind burqas.
Not
once, however, was compassion given to the vulnerability of
women in war situations. Thirty years of brutal invasion and
civil war had torn apart the fabric of Afghan societies.
Civilians, generally a euphemism for women, children and the
elderly, are always the ones to suffer war crimes while
the soldiers fight-and die-with arms. Despite the tyrannical
rule of the Taliban, the burqa is deserving of some positive
consideration, namely as a means to protect women.
In
hindsight, the feminist voice appeared in 2001 to legitimize yet
another Western incursion into the lands of Islam. This mistake
must be confronted in light of the illegal invasion of Iraq and
its catastrophic consequences-something which anti-war activists
knew full well would occur given the spurious pretexts and
“sexed-up” spins leading up to the attack.
Among
the various petitions and manifestos drafted by French feminist
groups regarding the anti-hijab law, one, and only one, has
stood out. It was run by Féministes pour l’égalité
(Feminists for Equality) and stands as a stark reminder of the
patriarchal and centralizing forces within French politics.
In
the eyes of its authors and sponsors, l’affaire du foulard
(the hijab “scandal”) “has become a national debate in
which we’re finding out things: that for a number of male
politicians, sexual equality is a priority-well, well! While for
some feminists, it’s in the struggle against Islam-obviously
fundamentalist-that the fate of women in France is being played
out.” These mainly academic feminists interestingly point to
the “Charles Martel syndrome.” As the story goes, the French
united under that leader to fend off the invading Moores at
Poitiers-thereby saving the Western Christian continent. But as
Karen Armstrong, author of a recent work on Islam, has pointed
out, in addition to being no easier on granting women’s rights
than were the Christians or Jews, the Andalusians had never
mounted a full-scale plan for invasion of France-but merely
raids.2
France
’s Feminists for Equality oppose any law stigmatizing Islam or
fostering discrimination. |
|
The
current debate, as the petition’s authors clearly assert, is
inscribed against a long history of colonialism and economic
exploitation. “So long as the Republic refuses to grant the
descendants of the peoples it colonized with the equality
promised by its constitution, by domestic law as much as by
international obligations, France shall have problems… And
France cannot keep its promise of equality while refusing to
gaze head on at the reality of illegal inequality that is being
perpetrated on a daily basis. There is permanent discrimination
on all scales: at work, school, in administration, and housing,
etc.” As such, Féministes pour l’égalité stand
opposed to any law stigmatizing Islam and fostering
discrimination and inequality.
Notwithstanding
its honorable political stance, the manifesto is still the
expression of non-Muslim French. It is a troubling irony that as
much as conservative, indeed reactionary, French persons hear
the loud stomps of Muslims on their land, the actual voice of
that community is discreet, even silent. When leaders appear,
expressing self-assertive positions, they are immediately
slapped with deep suspicion of having links to different
militant groups-whose claims to be resisting foreign military
interventions are immediately dismissed as illegitimate. The
only European official to have voiced the term “resistance”
on a favorable note regarding Iraq, for that matter, is Spanish
Judge Garzón,3
speaking at the University of Granada Law School.
As
for hijab, the French Muslim community only tentatively came to
an agreement over demonstrating against the law on February 14.
In the meantime, men have had to defend the issues, as in a
valuable article on female student’s views and positions,
published in the February issue of Le Monde diplomatique.4
What has lacked most is a collective project, such as the one
organized by Diaspora Muslim Canadian female academics, assisted
by the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCWM). In 2003, they
published The Muslim Veil in North America-itself long in
the making.5
The
demonstration in Paris of the “hors intégrismes”
Muslims (“outside of fundamentalism”) on Saturday February
14 successfully gathered thousands of opponents to the law.
Consensus among NGOs was still difficult to achieve. In that
regard, the history of France’s colonial incursions into
Muslim territories works as a trigger from which the
“secular” citizen views Muslims with suspicion. Accompanying
the march, the demonstrators published a text of refusal for
“women [to] be forced to wear hijab, and that other women be
forced to remove hijab… We do not liberate through repression,
but by the conquering rights.”6
It
was still Christine Delphy from Féministes pour l’égalité,
and editor of Questions féministes, who has most
unequivocally opposed any exclusion of veiled female students
from schools. As for the “historical” figures of French
feminism, opposing the law in their view amounts to supporting
hijab. From the looks of things such support is something that
lies against their religion, as it were.
As
for younger feminists, according to Le Monde, “they see
no obvious contradiction between veiled students and
equality.” The association Les Sciences potiches se
rebellent, a group from the Institut d’études politiques
de Paris, has gone as far as to reject the use of feminist
rhetoric to exclude young Muslim girls from the public school
system.
Norman
Madarasz is a Canadian philosopher residing in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil . With a Ph.D. from the University of Paris , he
teaches and writes on international relations, political economy
and philosophy. He is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch
and has published think pieces and philosophical research
extensively. You can reach him at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
1-
“Veil of Discord”, CBC, The National, television
broadcast, February 9, 2004.
2-
Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, New York, The
Modern Library, 2002.
3-
“El Magistrado Pronuncia una Conferencia en Derecho: ‘Nao
todo lo que suced en Irak es terrorismo’ (Garzón)”,
in Granada Digital (Tribunales), January 23, 2004.
4-
Pierre Tevanian, “Une Loi antilaïque, antifeminists et
antisociale,” Le Monde diplomatique, February 2004, p.
8.
5-
The Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates,
edited by Sajida Sultana Alvi, Homa Hoodfar, and Sheila
McDonough, Toronto, The Woman’s Press, 2003.
6-
“Une trentaine d'associations, rassemblées non sans difficultés
dans le collectif ‘Une école pour tous-tes’, appellent à défiler
samedi 14 février pour la tolérance sur le port de signes
religieux.” in Le Monde, February 14, 2004.
