law student, wearing a veil was a means to bring her closer to God.119 For another girl, it was a means to surpass the Islam of her father and to find a pride in her Arab identity.120 A third speaks of the veil as a form of vengeance for the suffering that her parents had experienced ‘when they were forced to pray in garages’.121 Commentators close to French Muslims produce a range of interpretations of the veil. Sophie Bessis, born in Tunis and working in France, makes the obvious – but necessary – points that the veil has no single meaning, and that the ‘new veil … is not a return to tradition’.122 Hajji and Marteau, on their journey through Muslim France, present the interesting idea that the new veil carries a new significance: it is a way of asserting a double loyalty, to Islam and to France.123 Gaspard and Khosrokhavar suggest a similar complexity: the new veil-wearers are French and Muslim, modern and veiled, autonomous and dressing in an Islamic manner.124 Halima Zouhar, a Muslim activist, makes a similar comment about the dichotomy-bridging veil: ‘these girls have adopted the emancipated lifestyle so praised by the West, while living according to the precepts of Islam.’125 Caitlin Killian interviewed 100 Muslim women in France. She describes what could be termed ‘the passport veil’: the ability of the veil to act ‘as a way to negotiate between the community of the parents and the French society in which they are immersed’.126 Writing rather more eloquently, Lucette Valensi makes the same point, paraphrasing the typical young veil-wearer as saying ‘father, mother, I am not betraying you. I share your values, and I am taking them to the public world’.127
Researchers working outside France who have interviewed or studied Muslim women have come to similar conclusions: they find a variety of explanations for veiling, but none report that Muslim women choose to veil in order to present themselves as inferior to men. Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland, in a general review of women’s lives and Islam, stress the heterogeneity of the religion, but also make the simple point that ‘for the individual woman the veil materializes as a public statement of personal commitment’.128 Jenny B. White, studying Islamist women in contemporary Turkey, identifies a ‘new veil’ which can be at once ‘political symbol, marker of modesty and … fashion’.129 While she is aware of the contradictory nature of this symbolism, and of the manner in which the veil can contribute to frustrate women’s aspirations to full political participation, she certainly does not consider that the veil is a symbol of inequality. Meena Dhanda, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, found that the veil worked as ‘a means of seclusion from the rampant materialism of a hyper-commercial culture’;130 while Reina Lewis arrived at almost the opposite conclusion, noting how veil-wearing is developing its own fashion industry.131 Karen Armstrong, a perceptive analyst of religions who was once a veil-wearing nun herself, considers that the new Muslim veil symbolizes ‘resistance to oppression’.132 Jen’nan Ghazal Read and John P. Bartkowski, interviewing Muslim women in Texas, found a sort of internationalism among them. The veil led to ‘a feeling of connectedness with a broader religious community of other veiled Muslim women’.133 The contrast between these analyses and the clichés that circulated among French politicians and in the media is obvious.
Muslim attitudes 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
