(no subject)

[skygiants]

John R. Bowen's Why the French Don't Like Headscarves was another recommendation from schiarire. In 2004, a law passed in France that made it illegal to wear "conspicuous religious symbols" in public schools, which to me at the time (and to many not-me people, I would think . . .) seemed sort of crazy for a number of reasons, considering that it means kids can be expelled for wearing, among other things: yarmulkes, large crosses, Sikh turbans, and, of course, the Islamic headscarf or 'la voile'. The book basically undertakes to explain the origins of the law and the attitude towards headscarves and how the law came to be passed.

The law seems no less crazy to me now, really, but I think I at least theoretically understand the underpinnings of it better? The part that seems most obviously crazy is the fact that the main justification for the law was to make sure young women were not being forced by The Islamic Patriarchy to wear headscarves - obviously crazy because many of the girls involved in Dramatic Headscarf Cases were not in fact from super-religious families (two of them, the Levy girls, had a Jewish atheist for a father), and had clearly decided to start wearing the scarves as symbols of their own identity and independence. I mean, the subtext there, which Bowen lays out, is obviously that the idea of young French people finding strength in Islamic identity is frightening to many more mainstream French people, with racism and Islamophobia very much tied into that. Not to mention the fact that many North African feminists from Islamic countries were coming to France and actively speaking out against the voile - and their experiences are obviously very important to listen to, and not to discount - but at the same time, no one was actually listening to the girls in question or taking their viewpoint into account, and that can't ever be a good thing in a debate like this even without the basic problem that, hey, it just got a lot easier to kick immigrant girls from Islamic neighborhoods out of school, awesome.

But at least I can see and understand the reasoning and cause and effect there, even though I don't like a lot of it. The other point, that was much harder for me to grasp on an emotional/intuitive level, is this concept that seeing someone else's religious symbol can be considered an intrusion into 'public space' and a threat to freedom of religion. Bowen points out that people described seeing women walking around in headscarves as an offense to them, an offense to the idea of France as a secular country, and on an intuitive level that sort of boggles me, becaus what someone chooses to wear or feels necessary to wear for religious beliefs is about their choices, not about the observer! To me that seems self-evident. But the history of France regarding religion, and the attitude towards religion there, is very different than it is here, and Bowen does a very good job of explaining that and making that difference clear.

I'm sorry, guys, I feel like this is a very rambly and not super-coherent review. Anyway, the book made me think a lot about my own assumptions about what freedom of religion means, and . . . I still don't think my assumptions are wrong, but thinking about them isn't a bad thing regardless.

Comments

[aberration]

Heh, yeah, I remember when the Danish cartoon controversy was still particularly flaring, you'd get all these comments like, "you don't understand, people aren't religious in Denmark," etc., and while it's true church attendance in most of Europe doesn't rival the United States, I'd just want to answer, "Come on, they have a government-run church subsidized with taxes." Try finding a burial plot in Denmark if you're not a member of the Church or the small Jewish community! And Scandinavian countries, despite having low church attendance rates, do tend to have high rates in baptism, confirmations, church weddings, and church funerals. Religion is present, but the majority religion is seen as tied to national identity in a way minority religions are not.

And yeah, like Becca said, there are similar stories about OMG WHAT IF THEY SEE KIDS NOT EATING PORK OR EATING AFTER SUNSET BECAUSE OF RAMADAN? The attitude is, to some extent, that displaying these kinds of differences and discussing them openly erodes national identity and unity. That... whole idea is very foreign to me, really - the two main attitudes in the United States that I've encountered have been more outright rejection of anything considered antithetical to "traditional America" (and those who disagree will openly call it bigoted and racist), and the multicultural approach that emphasizes exploring and discussing differences, and uniting through the fact that we're all pretty different from each other.

But the U.S. also doesn't have the kind of emphasis on preserving national unity that France does - my main problem is almost less that attitude (though it's still not something I'd advocate having over here), and more with the fact that while it suggests that everyone more or less gives up some part of their identity to unite under a public French identity, some people are asked to give up far more than others.

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

you'd get all these comments like, "you don't understand, people aren't religious in Denmark," etc.

For the most part, I'm grateful that we don't get the same level of religious craziness as the US does (singular freaks like Åke Green notwithstanding), but I sometimes fear that the sheer low key-ness of it all makes it all the more insidious. That people honestly believe that there's nothing religious about having mandatory church events for school children where a priest talks and everyone sings "born is our Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour and God." Which is kind of insulting to Christians, too, when you think about it.

But the U.S. also doesn't have the kind of emphasis on preserving national unity that France does

Sweden has more of a positive attitude to non-Swedishness, I think, but it also means that Swedishness is defined very narrowly; the thought that someone might be Muslim (or Buddhist, or even religiously Jewish) and Swedish hardly ever arises.

I'm painting the devil on the wall here - obviously not everyone is like that - but, yeah.