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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.