Neutralizing the Hijab: The Case of France

Abstract

In the last decades, few socio-political issues in today’s world involve the complex areas of politics, religion, sociology, and law combined as has l’affaire du foulard (the affair of the headscarf) in France. The official French position has justified the headscarf ban on the principles of equality, fraternity, and liberty. In this paper, I argue that these republican principles, in their ideal forms, do not theoretically legitimize nor require the hijab ban. First, through an evaluation of the doctrines of neutrality and secularism, I will attempt to identify the limitations of this the ideological decision. Later, by challenging the nationalist official republican norm of forced assimilation, I will pay attention to a formulation of the policy of integration that is geared towards the new and increasingly multicultural France. Finally, I will examine universalist feminism and its modernist, hegemonic, and paternalistic knowledge of Muslim women. As such, I will provide how alternative conceptualizations of these three axioms would better serve for justice, freedom, and advancement of the socio-economic conditions of third-generation Muslim women in France.