A veil of controversy

Abstract

A decade ago in France, debate over Muslim girls attending school in hidjebs erupted into ‘l'affaire du tchador’. As the controversy raged in the press, a community of nations was coming together in western Europe, while communist regimes throughout eastern Europe were falling apart. Perhaps most significantly, a divided Germany was in the process of reuniting. This article mounts an appliqué of clippings to suggest that there is a correlation between the polemics over the hidjeb in France and these larger events simultaneously transpiring across Europe. Discursive opposition to the wearing of the hidjeb commonly took the form of claims that this practice transgressed two tenets of French republican tradition: that of equality (in this case of women) and that of secularism. This study contends that the widespread invocation of these values as inalienable French principles can be powerfully challenged. To arrive at such an understanding, it seeks out the hidden shape of that which presented itself as one-dimensional principle. It then progresses to a close reading of the discourse that appeared in the press, highlighting the subtext below its phrases and images. In so doing, it uncovers a strand of anxiety running through French society at the moment of great historical change that the Autumn of 1989 represented. Such a semiotic reading interrogating the imagined that lurks behind utterance uncovers this sense of vulnerability and helps to account for the creation in 1989 of a full-blown ‘affair’ around the presence of a few — or even a few hundred — headscarves in the French public school system.