The ‘illegal covering’ saga: what's next? Sociological perspectives

Abstract

Over the course of the last thirty years, the publicly visible ‘otherness’ embodied by the Muslim population in the member states of the European Union has sparked movements of transnational moral panic mainly driven by the fear of the collapse of ‘national cohesion’. Generally however, these fears, shared internationally, always become more pronounced when women are at the center of their focus. Islamic women's attire, whatever the terminology used to describe it – veil, scarf, and more recently, ‘burqa’, to designate a garment fully covering the body – is presented as an increasingly delicate problem, an issue at the center of legal battles and the subject of virulent political controversies in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This conclusion is more specifically concerned with the ‘public texture’ of the discussions surrounding the recent ban on the wearing of the full veil in European public spaces as analyzed by the contributors to this special issue. It aims to engage in the conversation about the epistemological and political implications of the evaluation of daily, individual experiences through a legal framework and classifying them as problematic in secular contexts, or even criminalizing them.