HIJAB IN SCHOOL

A few English-language articles appeared over the weekend about the expulsion of two girls from their high school in Aubervilliers, France, for wearing veils, and the subsequent mainstream political support for the decision. Newsday, for example, carried this wire story about the case, and the BBC has this story, while al-Jazeera has this story in english and the Singapore Straits Times recaps the same information here. The AP story carried by the American papers neglects to note that the girls were not raised in a religious household: her father is a self-proclaimed atheist, and, as he put it in an interview with BBC, "Jewish by Vichy rules but not by the Talmud", and her mother is Algerian but not a practicing muslim. The two are separated. It was apparently the mother's family who encouraged the girls to devote themselves to religion.

For French coverage of Alma and Lila Levy's fight with the school authorities, read this article in Liberation (detailing the favorable official reactions to the decision to exclude), this article in Le Figaro (about the girls' disavowal of connections with Islamic interest groups), and this article in L'Humanite.

The reaction of French authorities seems to bear out what Dan Gordon noted to me in an e-mail regarding the German Constitutional Court decision on teachers' wearing of hijab, namely, that in France the secular feminist position -- that the veil is subordination and exploitation as such, even when freely chosen -- is widely accepted. In Germany, there is more receptivity for the argument that religious choices deserve some respect even if it is possible to develop a critique of such choices from the standpoint of equality. It should be said, of course, that there is only comparatively more receptivity for such a position in Germany, since Germans are well on their way to doing what the Constitutional Court asked them to do: clarify by statute the rights of teachers in schools, probably by outlawing the veil at least at the front of the classroom. In the abstract, there is some play in the law on the question of wearing veils in school, since the Constitutional Court also upheld an employees right to wear the veil at work in a department store. But in German law there is a strong principle of protecting employee rights in the private economy, a principle that finds little parallel in the area of individuals seeking access to civil service positions, at least as I understand things. Civil servants can be burdened in ways that private employees cannot.

It seems to me that the argument that the veil is exploitation, as such, is odd. If the underlying context is one of compulsion, then there is compulsion from the underlying context (a tautology) and one can be concerned about that. Nonetheless, you can certainly hear arguments from women that wearing the veil is an affirmation of aspects of their identity that they do not want to give up. I see no reason to argue that these women are acting strategically, and no reason to accuse them of not understanding themselves fully.