The Politics of Veiling

Earlier this month, the lower house of the French parliament approved a ban on the public wearing of any veil that cover the face, known as a niqab or a burqa. The bill is expected to become law in September. “The burqa is not welcome in France because it is contrary to our values and contrary to the ideals we have of a woman’s dignity,” said President Nicolas Sarkozy. Similar laws have been proposed elsewhere Europe, including in Belgium, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.

For insight into the practice of veiling, I turned to Marnia Lazreg, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. Lazreg is the author of Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women, published by Princeton University Press in 2009. She answered my questions by e-mail.

Q: What do you make of legislation to ban the wearing of various kinds of veils?
A: The ban on veils that cover the face represents France’s fear and anxiety before what it perceives as a Muslim threat. The French state failed to treat its Muslim citizens (second and third generation immigrants from the former colonies of North and West Africa) equally and worries about their turn to cultural practices that also happen to be emphasized by various Muslim sects and Islamist movements. It is disingenuous for the French legislator to argue that the ban on the face veil was motivated by concern for “the dignity of the person,” and “equality of the sexes.” Wouldn’t  dignity or gender equality be better served by ensuring that French Muslims have access to employment without having to change their names to pass for Europeans (as some felt compelled to do), or ending police profiling and harassment in the Parisian banlieues, or ghettos? By targeting a very small group of women who wear the niqab or the burqa, the state penalizes women (who have to pay a fine of about $190.00) and singles them out for public scrutiny. 

The French state today feels threatened in its own identity wrapped as it is around an aggressive form of secularism that demands conformity to its cultural norms at any cost. By banning the face veil, the state escalates the politicization of the veil. The French state in this respect is no different from states that mandate veiling, such as Saudi Arabia or Iran. In either case, women are required to do what they may not wish to do. We need to de-politicize the veil so that women can weigh the pros and cons of wearing it without feeling the pressure to conform or to resist.    
 

Q: You grew up in a Muslim family in Algeria. Your mother wore a veil when you were a child, but she eventually discarded it, along with many of her peers who came to regard it as an archaic custom. Yet the veil is undergoing a revival. Why?

A: The revival of the veil is linked to the rise of transnational networks of young men, trained as Imams in various Islamic universities, who lecture women, especially in Western countries, about their religious duties of which the veil is made to be an essential component. Since 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment in Western countries translated into various degrees of self-assertion and the desire to show pride in one’s culture among Muslims. It is unfortunate that women have selected the veil to signal their commitment to Islam. Why should women be the ones to engage in a public demonstration of cultural pride? Is the essence of Islamic culture reducible to a veil?  

The veil is presented as a tool of liberation, or a new form of “modernity.” Clearly, it is neither. It is the revival of a custom that has historically placed women on an unequal footing with men in legal, political and social terms, and emphasized the irredeemable nature of their differences. Indeed, only women wear veils; women wear veils because they are women, because of their biology; men do not wear veils. But men now expect women to wear veils. Expectations create pressure on women to conform to the re-veiling trend.
 

Q: The veil, you write, is “detrimental to women’s advancement.” How so?
A: The veil is detrimental because it empowers men over women. It is usually men who remind women of their “veil” obligation, who insist that the veil distinguishes a Muslim women who takes her religion seriously from the one who is assumed not to. The veil reinforces a man’s masculine identity.

To repeat, only women wear veils and they do so because of their biology. The veil reinforces in a male the notion that he is favored on account of his biology. But a woman must apologize for her body; she must accept it as a social blemish; she has to agree that it must be covered over in order for her to have access to social space.  
 

Q: Is it important that veiling remain a choice among Muslim women, rather than something that they are either forbidden or forced to do?
A: Yes, veiling in the present era should be depoliticized so that women can decide in full knowledge of  the history of the veil, religious as well as legal texts, whether it is worth wearing it. When states decide for women that they should wear it or prohibit them from wearing it, they deprive women of the freedom to determine whether the veil is truly a religious requirement or a social convention that has been sanctified.
 

Q: You are critical of some non-Muslim social scientists who study veiling. Unless these researchers are willing to “don the veil themselves,” you write, “they should realize the implications of imparting to it meanings that reinforce its rehabilitation as a custom that reduces women to their biological body and denies them autonomy in their body.” Explain what worries you about recent social science research on veiling.

A: In the past three decades, a number of non-Muslim, primarily North American, scholars have studied veiling in Muslim countries from an unbridled cultural relativist perspective. Some argue that the veil represents women’s resistance to, and protest against the failed policies of modernizing states; others insist that re-veiling allows poor and working class women the freedom to get out of their homes without arousing a husband’s jealousy or the suspicion of the community. Some opine that the veil is just a style of dressing and a woman should be allowed to choose what she wears. Admittedly, these scholars seek to be free of cultural prejudice, which they see at work in the attitudes of European countries towards the veil, and to distinguish themselves from the feminists who in the 1960s and 1970s had defined the veil as a symbol of oppression.

However, the global context has changed since then, and so has the political landscape in Muslim countries. The veil has become a bone of contention between faith-based movements and many women who resist a conservative redefinition of their roles in society. The dismissal of native women, critical of the re-veiling trend, as being “westernized” represents a failure of scholarship in raising questions about a complex issue. This trend in scholarship unwittingly reinforces the views of conservative theologians and sectarian groups.  

Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have just started two book projects: one deals with women in classical Islamic law, the other with “Michel Foucault and the conundrum of culture.” —Evan R. Goldstein