Hijab Research Articles

A Review of Dominic McGoldrick's Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe

This is a book review of Dominic McGoldrick's Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe, Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2006, pp. 309, Plus Index.

Religions, genre, et politiques laïques en France, XIXE-XXE siècles

In the French polemics over the Islamic headscarf, the relationship betweensecularism and sexual equality has sometimes been made out to be an artificialone. The articulation between politics, religion, secularism, and women'srights is examined here over the longue durée. Since the beginning of the secularizationprocess during the French Revolution, a minority has championedan egalitarian conception of secularization. Rivalries between or convergencesof political and religious authorities have driven an ambivalent and not veryequal secularization, creating secular pacts that rely on gender pacts to thedetriment of equality. This dynamic reversed itself beginning in the 1960swith the battle for legal contraception and abortion, which shook one of thevery bases of French Catholicism to its foundation. The headscarf affairsrevealed the egalitarian effects of secularism and favored the elaboration ofthought about secularism in conjunction with sexual equality, which, whateverthe various interpretations of that thought may be, could prove to be anon-negligible benefit.

L’Ecole laïque entre respects de la liberté de conscience et construction du monde commun

Secularity is initially defined as the institutional guarantee of the freedom of conscience. But, it also tries to determine the conditions of creating a common world to all the members of the same community. This articulation between individual freedom and public duties constitutes the main topic of this article in connection with the application of the principle of secularity within a school framework. The first part is built on a review of the main historical periods from the third Republic up to nowadays. It analyses the evolution of school secularity as a passage from a dynamic and conquering position to a situation of crisis and relative marginalisation followed by the return of secularity on the front of the public scene since 1989 with the debates about the Islamic headscarf. Having examined some issues resulting from the debates concerning the place of school as a social institution and the articulation between individual rights and public duties, the second part reviews various recent theoretical interpretations of secularity.

The Islamic Headscarf Problem before Secular Legal Systems: Factual and Legal Developments in Turkish, French and European Human Rights Laws

AbstractThe Islamic headscarf problem is bound to form a risk of clash of civilizations between Western and Muslim cultures. In Turkey, the Islamic headscarf constitutes a significant symbol or cause of battle between a powerful ultra-secularist Kemalist bureaucracy and moderate but also opportunist Islamist politics. In France, despite previous judicial solution, the legal headscarves ban in (merely public) schools seems to be a political message to the conservative and nationalist electorate in the name of Republicanism. The European Court of Human Rights' legalization of headscarves bans tends to be a legal coup de main for the contenders against Islamist radicalism. Dealing with this problem responsibly following rational legal standard – as described and proposed in this article – could surprisingly demonstrate that a consensus is possible concerning such a big problem between two cultures.

FORCED MIGRATION, HUMAN RIGHTS AND SECURITY

1. Forced Migration: Refugees, Rights and Security Guy S Goodwin-Gill 2. Resolution 1373-A Call to Pre-empt Asylum Seekers? (or 'Osama, the Asylum Seeker') Penelope Mathew 3. National Security and Non-Refoulement in New Zealand: Commentary on Zaoui v Attorney-General (No 2) Rodger Haines QC 4. Offshore Barriers to Asylum Seeker Movement: The Exercise of Power without Responsibility? Savitri Taylor 5. The Legal and Ethical Implications of Extraterritorial Processing of Asylum Seekers: The 'Safe Third Country' Concept Susan Kneebone 6. Re-thinking the Paradigms of Protection: Children as Convention Refugees in Australia Mary Crock 7. Wearing Thin: Restrictions on Islamic Headscarves and Other Religious Symbols Ben Saul 8. Subjectivity and Refugee Fact-Finding Arthur Glass 9. Towards Convergence in the Interpretation of the Refugee Convention: A Proposal for the Establishment of an International Judicial Commission for Refugees Anthony M North and Joyce Chia 10. The Refugee Convention as a Rights Blueprint for Persons in Need of International Protection Jane McAdam 11. The Responsibility to Protect: Closing the Gaps in the International Protection Regime Erika Feller

Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Gentrification in Istanbul

With manifold projects of historic preservation, gentrification, and urban renewal, Istanbul has transformed over the last two decades into a preeminent metropolis and tourist destination against the backdrop of an increasingly neoliberalized and moderately Islamic, yet secular, E.U.-aspirant Turkey. In this article, I examine through an embodied lens the complex interplay among shifting practices of belly dance, new Islamic veiling, and urban space in contemporary Istanbul. In an analysis grounded in a series of ethnographic sites that include an elite concert hall, a tourist restaurant, a dance class, a local nightclub, and a retail store, I argue for a performance-centered and gender-sensitive examination of urban gentrification that is often missed in recent political economic analyses.

The Islamic Headscarf: An Example of Surmountable Conflict between Sharî'a and the Fundamental Principles of Europe1

Abstract: The demand by certain Muslims living in Europe to wear the Islamic headscarf has led to important cases, before the courts of the Member States of the Union as much as before the European Court of Human Rights, above all with regard to public education. The Court of Human Rights and the Member States have taken different positions concerning the licitness of wearing the headscarf. The solutions adopted are, in fact, strongly influenced by the classical concept of relations between Church and State. In schools in Germany, where a relationship of cooperation exists between Church and State, the wearing of the veil is allowed, but only for the pupils, not for their teachers. In France, which has a model of strict separation between Church and State, neither teachers nor pupils are allowed to wear the veil. The tensions linked to wearing of the headscarf are but one example of conflict between sharî'a and the fundamental principles of Europe. These conflicts are not insurmountable. However, they do require efforts from both sides. The EU and the Member States must break with discriminatory practices against Muslims. The Muslims of Europe must construct a ‘European Islam’, re‐reading sacred texts in light of the characteristics and the values of the European societies in which they live.

Religion, culture and women's human rights: Some general political and theoretical considerations

Synopsis Religious and cultural rights, generally expressed as collective or ‘group’ rights, are perceived by some as being frequently asserted at women's expense. For others, the assertion of the supremacy of individual rights is a Western concept incompatible with the dynamics of non-Western societies. Caught within the real or perceived tensions between group rights and individual rights, women may feel pressured to choose between gender and ethnicity (involving culture/religion) as the site of their primary loyalty. Even when women refuse to be forced into such choices, the polarisation can be such that the discursive or strategic spaces available to them to express an alternative stance are limited. This article, in looking at these issues with relation to Muslim-background women, not only identifies current tensions between ‘culture/religion’ on the one hand and ‘women's individual human rights’ on the other, but asks, in doing so, to what extent these tensions are real or manufactured, and whose interests are being served by maintaining them. The article will refer, among other examples, to the French debate over the Islamic headscarf and to discourses and realities of women's rights in Afghanistan.

Keeping Identity at a distance: Explaining France's new legal restrictions on the Islamic headscarf

Since 1989, France has endured repeated, contentious debates about the ‘Islamic’ headscarf. In February 2004, French legislators approved a new law prohibiting students from wearing conspicuous ‘religious signs’ in public schools. Contrary to some observers’ assumptions, this measure was not caused mainly by new efforts to combat terrorism or by pro-Christian prejudice. Explaining France's decision to pass this surprising new legislation requires attention to both historical continuities of French political thinking and the changing French and international context. French republican understandings of citizenship and secularism have long made the headscarves issue peculiarly sensitive in France. However, the new law marks a clear departure from previous French policy. Explaining that rupture requires attention to more immediate social and political factors, most importantly: dissatisfaction with the previous policy; effective mobilization of public sympathy by new feminist groups; concern about rising anti-Semitism; and, somewhat paradoxically, developments in international human rights law.

Contentious Freedom: Sex Work and Social Construction

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as “women” and “sex”).

Modernity, Islam, and secularism in Turkey: bodies, places, and time

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction1. Performative Politics and the Public Gaze2. Bodies: Clothing the National Body: Islamic Veiling and Secular Unveiling3. Places: Cities, Squares and Statues: The Use of Public Space in the Making of the Nation4. Times: Performing the Nation: Public Contestations of National HistoryConclusion NotesBibliographyIndex

What's in a Scarf? The Debate on Laïcité in France

The issue of the Islamic headscarf has troubled French society since the end of the 1980s and led to legislation, enacted on 15 March 2004, proscribing the wearing of headscarves or any other "conspicuous" religious symbol in schools. But what strained relationship between the state and religions, and more generally minorities, is hidden by this long controversy that preceded the centennial of the 1905 law separating church and state? This article aims to summarize for American readers the stakes involved in this long debate while putting it into historical perspective by trying to clear up misunderstandings that may crop up in discussions (on both sides of the Atlantic) of a subject where the famous "French exception" seems to be crystallized, that is, the practice of laïcité. Underlying these discussions, one must locate the treatment of religious minorities as put into place during the Napoleonic era in the case of the Jews, which has remained, mutatis mutandis, a model for the organization of Islam in the Hexagon at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such a model is one of an assignment community, organized with the goal, inherited from the Revolution, of emancipating its members and responding to questions of public order.

Politicizing Imagery and Representation of Muslim Womanhood: Reflections on the Islamic Headscarf Controversy in Turkey

This article seeks to expand our understanding of gender as a contested subject in the context of the secularist-Islamist rift by examining the Islamic headscarf controversy, which has become a major symbolic point of contention in the cultural politics of Turkish society. The strategic construction and propagation of the images of the “modern woman’ as an integral part of the project of modernity by the secular republic and the reactive Islamist movement to restore the gendered practices that agree with Islamic normative principles are documented and analyzed, followed by in-depth interviews with women who adhere to the Islamic dress code.

“The Simulacra of Morality”: Islamic Veiling, Religious Politics and the Limits of Liberalism

On December 17, 2003, French President Jaques Chirac went on television to explain the immediate necessity of passing a law recently proposed by the Stasi commission. This commission had been empowered to explore the failures of the last thirty years of French immigration policy in terms of integration. It had also been specifically instructed to investigate threats to the concept of laicite, the rigorous French version of secularism and the separation of the Church and the State. Chirac explained that, following the commission’s advice as well as that of numerous experts, he had centered on a policy to deal with these issues:

On Headscarves and Heterogeneity: Reflections on the French Foulard Affair

In February 2004, the French National Assembly passed legislation banning conspicuous religious symbols in school. In March 2004, the law was overwhelmingly passed in the French Senate: all ostentatious forms of religious dress are now forbidden in French schools. Although the law bans all conspicuous religious dress, it is clear that the new law targets students wearing Islamic headscarves. When the law was first proposed, many French Sikhs believed that their children would not be affected because, as one father explained, Sikhs had “never posed a problem”. Even so, headscarves, yarmulkes, turbans, and large crosses are prohibited in public schools.

Alexandre Balasescu. « Tehran chic: Islamic headscarves, fashion designers, and the new geographies of modernity ». Fashion Theory (Berg, U.K.), vol. 7, issue 1, (March 2003), pp. 1-18.

Alexandre Balasescu. « Tehran chic: Islamic headscarves, fashion designers, and the new geographies of modernity ». Fashion Theory (Berg, U.K.), vol. 7, issue 1, (March 2003), pp. 1-18.

Culture, Religion Frame Care for Muslim Patients

Culture, Religion Frame Care for Muslim Patients

Symptomatic Politics: The Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools

The events that became known as the affaires de foulard began on 3 October 1989, when three Muslim girls who refused to remove their head scarves were expelled from their middle school in the town of Creil, about thirty miles outside of Paris. The headmaster, Eugène Chenière, claimed he was acting to enforce laïcité––the French version of secularism. According to Chenière, laïcité–– a concept whose meaning would be furiously debated in the months and years that followed––was an inviolable and transparent principle, one of the pillars of republican universalism. The school was the cradle of laïcité, the place where the values of the French republic were nurtured and inculcated. It was, therefore, in the public schools that France had to hold the line against what he later termed “the insidious jihad.”

Cloth on her Head, Constitution in Hand: Germany’s Headscarf Debates and the Cultural Politics of Difference

As the current debates about the headscarf in Germany and Francedemonstrate, “Islamic” veils and headscarves garner attention forminority women in Europe to an unparalleled degree.2 For centuries,Islamic veils and headscarves have served as powerful symbols inOrientalist discourse, functioning as markers of the Oriental woman’ssupposed eroticism as well as convenient tropes for philosophers.3Recent kidnappers’ demands in Iraq that France lift its headscarf bandemonstrate the complex appropriations of Muslim women for fundamentalistdiscourses as well.

Under God but Not the Scarf: The Founding Myths of Religious Freedom in the United States and Laicite in France

In March 2004, the French parliament adopted a law that prohibits public school students from wearing clothing and insignia that con spicuously manifest a religious affiliation. The law was approved by an overwhelming vote of 494-36 in the National Assembly, 276-20 in the Senate, and was strongly supported by popular opinion throughout France. The momentum for adopting such a law began in March 2003, when Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin of the governing conserva tive party UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) said in a radio interview that Muslim headscarves should absolutely be prohibited in public schools. A string of endorsements for such a law followed dur ing the next few months, culminating in a December 2003 speech by President Jacques Chirac, also of the UMP, in which he similarly pro posed that a law be adopted. Although the highest French administra tive court (the Conseil d'Etat) had ruled as early as 1989 that French children have the constitutional right to wear religious insignia to school, and although many scholars of religion and law believed the law would be a bad idea, the Socialist Party joined arms with the conserva tives in the cause that had the support of a majority of the French population. For many Americans, the French effort to prohibit children from wearing religious clothing and insignia at schools may well exemplify their suspicions about prevailing anti-religious attitudes in France. The most recent attack on religious clothing, particularly the Islamic head scarf, might appear to be yet another manifestation of the excessive