joan wallach scott the politics of the veil

Supporters of the ban, wrote Scott, believed veils chipped away at the French ideal of “the oneness, the sameness of all individuals,” under the Tricoleur.įor many Muslims, it’s the official insistence on oneness and sameness that rankles. The veil debate pitted Muslim women’s desire for self-expression against the core French values of equality and universalism, noted Princeton political scientist Joan Wallach Scott in her book The Politics of the Veil. Their children and grandchildren frequently feel excluded from mainstream society because of their Arabic names or the color of their skin.įrance prefers its faiths kept private: its 1905 law on the separation of church and state was the legal basis for the much-contested 2004 ban on veils, crosses and yarmulkes in schools.

An older generation of French Muslims has been alienated by memories of the Algerian War in the 1950s, when local groups battled for independence from more than a century of French rule, with its heavy-handed disdain for local customs. With more than 5 million Muslims, France may have Western Europe’s largest Muslim community, but its relationship with Islam has been tenser than, say, Britain’s or Germany’s. What sets France on a particular collision course with Islamic practices is the country’s radical brand of secularism - and this ideology’s impact on French Muslim life. With news that the chief suspects in the massacre on Wednesday at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo are French citizens, a new mystery emerges: how could the land of liberty, equality and fraternity have produced men hell-bent on destroying all three? While the attack may evoke comparisons to earlier tragedies in New York, London, or Madrid, France’s relationship with its Muslim citizens is particular - and particularly fraught.

Joan wallach scott the politics of the veil