Muslim Girls Gone Wild
November 27, 2007
By John Bloom
So I’m reading this old Christianity Today article about
discrimination against Christian women in India, and suddenly I notice the
picture: they’re all wearing headscarves. All the Christian women in India (at
least in the picture selected by Christianity Today) are wearing
headscarves. Come to think of it, I’ve seen a *lot* of Christian women wearing
headscarves, especially in the Orthodox churches, and in fact, in most of those
churches, it’s a requirement to even go inside. So the only difference
between the Christian headscarf and the Muslim headscarf would apparently be
that the Muslim woman wears hers all the time, and the Orthodox woman
occasionally takes hers off, with the possible exception of grandmothers, the
famous babushki of Russia, who seem to always be pictured, nostalgically, in headscarves of a plain rustic sort. And isn’t this tradition equally honored in Judaism? Don’t all the daughters in “Fiddler on the Roof” wear headscarves?
All of which is to say: What is the big deal about headscarves in Europe? Why do people get so upset about it? Why do you read that it’s a “provocation”? How can this many people be this angry about several thousand teenage girls who want to wear a headscarf to class? The defenders of the French republic seem especially agitated on this issue, as though the honor of France might be besmirched by covered teenage heads. And yet if you travel back and forth very often between France and the U.S., you eventually notice that the most popular item on those duty-free carts on the airplanes is . . . the French headscarf! Christian Dior has sold more of those scarves to businessmen who have no idea what to bring back to their wives from France than any other item available at an airport kiosk. And doesn’t the headscarf, come to think of it, define the classic French cinematic woman of the fifties and sixties, whether Bardot or Moreau or Anouk
Aimee running on the beach in Un homme et une femme? Maybe it’s my faulty memory and Anouk Aimee didn’t wear a headscarf at all when she cavorted through the autumnal landscapes of Claude Lelouch, but I seem to remember her face peering out from the tightly cinched silk, and at any rate the whole headscarf thing was a French fashion, much less common in Italy or England.
So if we get down to what the French headscarf controversy is really
about, it seems to be: We want to know the motive behind your headscarf.
Of course, being French, they want to know the motive behind everything.
Gone are the days of Maurice Chevalier, whose classic version of “Live and Let
Live” implied that the French preferred not to know anyone’s secret reasons for anything. If we really delved into the complexities of the female psyche–never a good idea, but I’ll try–I would suspect that the motives behind Anouk Aimee’s headscarf and that of a 16-year-old Muslim student are similar. They are both saying, “Here I am, look at me.” In the United States, land of “Youth For Christ” t-shirts and crucifix jewelry sold at amusement parks, we have no trouble recognizing this impulse in a certain sort of teenager flush with the zeal of a paranoid minority. The expression in the schoolyard would be, “Yes, I believe in God! What of it?” It’s a pre-emptive action, a way of making your piety so obvious that you don’t have to feel uncomfortable in the company of atheists and infidels who don’t realize what you are and therefore try to include you in their confidences. And it is, in its simplest form, similar to any teenager’s
myspace page: “Here’s what makes me different.”
You would expect the French to understand this better than any other
country, France being made up of people who pride themselves on their
individuality. But the problem, I think, is that, whereas America has separation
of church and state, France has always had superiority of state over church. One
of the goals of the French Revolution, after all, was to wipe the Catholic
Church off the map, or at least prevent it from having any public voice. Then,
in 1905, the French passed a law actually restricting religion in public spaces–thereby going much further than the American First Amendment–and the Catholic church eventually accepted that law, but not until 1924. Ever since then, anyone who wants to use any form of religious symbol in a public square needs to get permission from the government. And on this basis, the headscarf is considered fair game. (Ironically, they seem less agitated about the nun’s habit, which is a much more bizarre form of dress and directly related to the Catholic church the 1905 law was directed against.)
The spokesman for the headscarf in Europe is Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim academic famous on this side of the pond for being appointed to a professorship at Notre Dame, only to have his visa denied by the State Department for “supporting terrorist organizations.” (When it comes to deporting imams and banning fellow travellers, the United States can hang right in there with the best police actions France, England or Holland can muster.) As Olivier Roy points out in his new book, *Secularism Confronts Islam* (Columbia, 144 pp., $24.50), attacks on Ramadan inevitably point out that he’s “handsome”–which he is, but which would seem to be beside the point. Why point it out if not to say “the devil wears Prada”?
The idea seems to be that someone who is educated in a western university,
speaks perfect French, and looks good in a suit, shouldn’t be speaking out so
strongly for sharia law.
In fact, what Ramadan has said is that he believes sharia should be
“suspended” in the nations of western Europe–that, for now at least, Muslims
should be satisfied with the laws of their home country. This is apparently not
good enough for Ramadan’s critics, though. The idea that those same Muslims
might try to change the law seems to infuriate them, and they’re
constantly trying to get Ramadan to “be reasonable” and say that sharia law is something that should never be brought to the west.
There are several things wrong with this attitude. First of all, Islam is
not in the east or the west. Islam is everywhere. There’s a tendency to assume
that Islam is a Middle Eastern religion, and of course it is, but only in the
sense that Judaism and Christianity are also Middle Eastern religions. Nobody
would say to a Jew “Take those hostile ideas back to Jerusalem where they
belong,” or to a Christian “Take those hostile ideas of St. Paul back to Greece
and Turkey where they came from.” (One of those St. Paul edicts, by the way, is
for women to always keep their heads covered–it’s part of his letter to the
church at Corinth.) But there’s an assumption, when it comes to Islam, that we
should contain it in its place of historical origin, namely Saudi Arabia
and its neighbors. In Europe this takes the form of movements to identify the
national culture as Christian–especially odd in France, where the children of
1789 spent two centuries trying to eliminate the church. There’s a similar movement in America, but it’s not as strong, perhaps because the Muslims of America are not concentrated in slum cities, the way they are in France. People react one way when a Pakistani doctor sets up his practice in the neighborhood strip mall, and quite another way when there are 2,000 unemployed Moroccans crammed into a housing project. It’s the shame of Christianity, more often than not, that we accept the wealthy professional and ignore the ghetto hordes.
But the second thing wrong with the attacks on Ramadan is that all these
frightened Christians, atheists and Jews say they want to enter into dialogue
with the Muslim world, but when a real live Muslim who can speak their language
shows up, they prevaricate and back away, saying, “Well, we want to talk to
*moderate* Muslims, to reasonable Muslims, to Muslims who are not sympathetic to terrorism.” (Ramadan is not sympathetic to terrorism, by the way, but no Muslim intellectual in today’s world can avoid entanglements with Palestinians and others who have been placed on various government target lists.) Seen properly, Ramadan is a godsend. He’s an intellectual who speaks perfect English and French and can articulate in the strongest possible terms the worldview of a reactionary mullah who never leaves South Yemen. Ramadan is a resource, not a threat. We need Ramadan a lot more than he needs us.
What the French really want Ramadan to say is that the French constitution takes precedence over any religious law. That would make everyone breathe easier. But how could he possibly be expected to say that? Would the Pope say that? Would James Dobson? The only theologians I know of who ever said that God’s law is a lesser law than the nation’s constitution were the German liberals of the 19th century, the same ones who supported the aggressions of the Kaiser and the atrocities of Hitler, first by their sermons and then by their silence. If Tariq Ramadan believes there’s a law from heaven that’s greater than the law of the Fifth Republic, or the law of the American Constitution, then he’s no different from half the pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Which brings us back to the headscarf. How many types of common religious headgear can we name? The yarmulke, of course, which young boys often wear to schools in America. (I don’t know about France.) The habit, which teenage novices wear in convents. And, of course, the Orthodox headscarf, which girls from Eastern Europe wear in church and sometimes in school as well. How is the Muslim headscarf different? That it’s cinched tighter? That it covers more of the face? That it’s worn for a different reason? Let’s look at that different reason. Frequently the girls who don the headscarf are violating the wishes even of their own parents. They want the world to know who they are. They’re wearing the headscarf as an act of rebellion. And in that sense, the reason is to reveal our own hypocrisy. They’ve done a good job.
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