A closer look at France’s controversial dress code laws
Fawaz Turki :
Warning to junior and high school students in France: The clothing police are watching. And they watched and watched as the 12 million students in the 45,000 schools attended by these students opened on last Monday.
Nowadays, if you’re a student wearing an outfit that connotes a seemingly “ostentatious” religious meaning, or accessories such as a Catholic cross, a Jewish skullcap, a Muslim headscarf or a Sikh turban, you’re breaking a law intended to protect the state from assault against the cherished belief of laicite, a term outsiders innocently translate literally as secularism. But a literal translation of the term won’t cut it.
In France, you see, laicite is a word charged with political, cultural and historical meaning, harking back to the bitter feud in the country between the church, or in this case organised religion, and the state in the years that preceded and then followed the French Revolution.
Today, the state, which had emerged triumphant in that bitter feud, insists that not only religion itself but also religious symbols and religious attire should be absent from the public sphere.
Ban on le voile
Last month, the French government passed a law, that became effective on Monday, that banned Muslim students from attending class while attired in the abaya, the loose-fitting, body-covering garment worn by women and girls in some Muslim countries (sister garment to the thawb, worm by men and boys), a law that some critics were quick to see as an infringement on if not also an affront to civil liberties, while others were equally quick to see it as a scene, given its bizarreness, from an opera bouffe.
(In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Committee said France’s ban of the niqab violated the human rights of women.)
In April, 2010, France passed a bill in parliament that imposed a ban on the wearing of the niqab, the full-face veil, known in French as le voile, anywhere in a public space – at risk of a 150-euro fine.
And subsequent to that, another bill was passed preventing Muslim students from wearing the hijab in schools and Muslim government employees from wearing it in government buildings.
A woman puts wet head scarf to protect a man from the sun, during a heatwave across Italy as temperatures are expected to rise further in the coming days, in Bologna, on July 18, 2023.
A sense of “otherness”
Now imagine the grand setting where these bills, addressing the inconsequential issue of women’s clothes and headgear, were heatedly debated before they were passed: The French Senate, which usually meets in the Palais du Luxembourg, a chamber as elegant as an opera house and as old as the French Revolution! And though bills like these, which are often lamely advanced by the government as ones targeting “all religious symbols” wherever and by whom displayed, the arrows, truth be told, seem to always be aimed at the Muslim minority.
Ironically, the fact – a fact that doesn’t pass unnoticed by social critics – is that many of these kids who wear a hijab or a abaya are not necessarily observant Muslims.
They are second, third or even fourth generation descendants of immigrants who continue to have a sense of “otherness” thrust upon by society at large, otherness being the term coined by the late French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (d. 1980).
To these kids, thus, their Muslim attire becomes a challenge to those who had othered them and a demonstration of pride in their cultural heritage.
Sadly, the alienation that the descendants of non-European immigrants in France feel is felt in equal measure by their counterparts in other European countries.
Neither progressive nor cosmopolitan You see, the attempt by Europe to do away with barriers to the movement of people, goods and capital, which began with the six-nation Common Market in the wake of the Second War War and then later expanded to include multiple countries and national identities, morphing finally into the European Union, succeeded admirably, with that conglomerate presenting itself as an inherently progressive and cosmopolitan hub – except it was, at heart, neither progressive nor cosmopolitan.
In reality the project to integrate Europeans into a dynamic system made up of interdependent subsystems was driven by racialised thinking, racialised thinking made all the more evident by the 2015 refugee crisis and by how this reconstituted Europe remains open to new member states from the Continent but shut to those outside it.
That, at least, is the argument broached by Hans Kundnani, associate fellow in the European program at Chatham House, in his critically well-received and recently published book, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Oxford University Press).
In it we read: “Today’s ‘pro-Europeans’ would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the two baffling and outrageous”.
(In the interest of disclosure, Dr. Kundnani was born in the UK to an Indian father and a Dutch mother.)
It is not baffling or outrageous to the students who fronted up for their first day in class on Monday, reportedly with policemen and security guards around readily available to enforce the law of the land.
(The writer is a noted academic, journalist and author based in the US. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
Courtesy: Gulf News).
