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In late 2003, Al-Jazeera anchorwoman Khadija Bin Qinna caused a stir among viewers when she appeared on-air wearing a brightly colored headscarf. The vast majority of Al-Jazeera anchorwomen and female reporters do not wear any head-covering, and previously Bin Qinna had been no different. In addressing public speculation on the matter, the Algerian newscaster later explained that, after a three-year struggle with "the devil," she had been convinced of the necessity of donning the hijab by a guest on the station's weekly Islamic program, Sharia and Life.
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It is precisely this kind of rhetoric that troubles many non-Muslims. While most Muslim women who do not wear the headscarf themselves but defend those who do emphasize that the matter is one of personal choice, Muslim women who decide to conceal their hair (and more) tend overwhelmingly to cite divine mandate as their motivation. This would appear to leave uncovered Muslim women as dupes who have succumbed to the devil's wily charms.
Whatever the case may be, it is one of many issues social anthropologist John Bowen does not sufficiently probe in his study of the March 2004 law banning students from wearing "conspicuous" religious signs—including Islamic headscarves, large crosses, Jewish kippas, and Sikh turbans—in French public schools. Although the author recounts instances "when, after I have talked about why and how the law came to be passed, people are still unsure what I think," it would be wishful thinking to believe that this applies to the book itself; it is clear throughout that Bowen opposes the law. Fortunately, his arguments remain informed even when not wholly convincing, and his analysis of the headscarf affair simultaneously illumines the larger social context. Indeed, in many respects Why The French Don't Like Headscarves offers a detailed and insightful study of the overall place of Islam in the French Republic, and of the increasing discord between religious Muslims and the avowedly secular state they call home.
Not so another recent book on the subject, The Politics of the Veil, by sociologist Joan Wallach Scott, who, despite her erudition, makes the tendentious claim that "the veil in French republican discourse is understood in racist terms." Scott writes: "French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality"; yet "[t]he requirement of sameness underwrites and perpetuates racism." Scott fails to recognize that, though the French Republican conception of national identity is indeed narrow, the sameness required is neither religious nor racial, but simply the privatization of religious belief and the non-politicization of ethnicity on the part of all French citizens.
Whereas Bowen tends to view those French politicians and intellectuals who supported the law as having been inspired by the naïve belief that it would curb Islamic radicalism, Scott is convinced that something far more sinister is at play. Though the law directly affects only the small minority of Muslim schoolgirls who wear the headscarf, Scott improbably claims that it is directed against all Muslims, qua Muslims: "By outlawing the headscarf, the state declared those who espoused Islam, in whatever form, to be literally foreigners to the French way of life."
Perhaps because Scott's book is "not about French Muslims, but about the dominant French view of them," she does not bother to investigate the interplay between French Muslims' self-perception and the aforementioned dominant French view of Islam, or the manner in which the former may have influenced the latter. For example, isn't it possible that Western perceptions of a one-size-fits-all Islam—inaccurate, but not racist—take their cue from an outward insistence on the part of many Muslims that Islam is one and indivisible, and that Muslims the world over belong to a single umma, or nation?
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