Revealing Paradoxes: Muslim Women in Secular Europe

Abstract

In July 2019, the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, a symbol of women’s rights for her struggle for girls’ education in Pakistan, was photographed with Quebec’s education minister, Mr Jean-François Roberge (Why this photo with Malala is being criticised, 2019). After the photo, a journalist asked Mr Roberge whether Ms Yousafzai could ever teach in the francophone province, given the latest law forbidding public servants to wear conspicuous religious symbols. The minister answered that he would be honoured to have Ms Yousafzai to teach in Quebec once she removed her veil. His statement sparked a passionate debate, as Malala is not an ordinary person: she started her struggle for girls’ education in Pakistan when she was only 10 years old, after the Taliban took the power in her village and closed many female schools, forbidding girls’ public education in the area. In 2012 Malala was shot by the Taliban (Why this photo with Malala is being criticised, 2019), but this did not stop her struggle and in 2014 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest person to receive such an important honour (The Nobel Peace Prize 2014, n.d.). Malala, a young, veiled Muslim girl, seems at odd with the representation of veiled women: while she symbolises the courage to struggle against women’s oppression, the discourse concerning the veil in the west has constructed veiled women as oppressed by their patriarchal culture or as a threat to secular values of gender equality; the headscarf has been understood as a provocation, a ‘mobile prison’ (Fadil, 2018), and a symbol of terrorism (Hamid, 2015). This representation has been widely used by politicians to create a specific narrative in which Muslim women’s body emerges as the symbolic nexus through which a specific reality is established. The assumptions this reality carries are mirrored in the European legal decisions to ban the veil and in the excessive focus on the regulation of Muslim women’s body which works to reinforce secular/liberal dichotomies at the expense of the plurality of subjectivities that inhabit contemporary Europe. In fact, as I have argued in the previous chapter, western secular oppositional categories embedded in western and Human Rights law are problematic when dealing with different subjectivities, excluding those who do not conform to western/secular images of the legal and the religious subject.