Secular Affect and Urban Exclusion: Feelings About Burkas in Public Spaces." Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations
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Burchardt, Marian, and Mar Griera. "Secular Affect and Urban Exclusion: Feelings about Burkas in Public Spaces." Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations. Ed. Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil and Johansen Schepelern Birgitte. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 185–198. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350065253.ch-013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 00:19 UTC. Copyright © Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Contributors 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 13 Secular Affect and Urban Exclusion: Feelings about Burkas in Public Spaces Marian Burchardt and Mar Griera This chapter examines the imaginaries, ideas and sentiments that shape public discourses on Islamic face-veils in an urban context in Southern Europe. Through a qualitative case study on the regulatory politics of face coverings in public space, we explore the repertoires of justification employed and mobilized by local actors to legitimate (or contest) the ban. Our aim is to go beyond an analysis anchored in the religious-secular divide and offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of the causes and implications of the controversy by discussing its relationship with secular affect, urban dynamics and historical trajectories. In particular, we discuss the notion that Islamic face-veils disturb the sense of tranquility of other urban residents and explore how the (perceived) Islamization of urban space is related to other kinds of urban disturbances such as nudity and prostitution. Controversies on face-veils have gained momentum in Europe during the last decade. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy created an ‘expert commission’ to deliberate over face-veils in 2009. The commission’s final report called on the French parliament to adopt a resolution declaring the incompatibility between the wearing of the face-veil and the ‘values of the Republic’1 and paved the way for the passing of a national ban on face coverings in France (French: LOI n° 2010–1192: Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l’espace public). However, even before France, some Italian cities prohibited the wearing of face-veils through local by-laws. This was, for instance, the case of Azzano Decimo, which passed an edict that banned the use of face-veils in the public space in July 2004.2 The ban was replicated in many other towns in Northern Italy (Piatti-Crocker and Tasck 2015) but was later deemed illegal by the Italian Council of State.3 In the case of Spain, the controversy started in the city of Lleida in 2010 when the mayor mobilized the city council to ban the face-veil (Burchardt et al. 2015). The initiative quickly spread to other nearby towns. No less than twelve Catalan municipalities passed regulations on the wearing of face-veils, while only in a few of them public debates actually prompted these regulations. There were also several initiatives aimed at implementing a national or regional ban of face-veils in public space against which human rights activists appealed in courts and which were finally 186 Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations rejected. In the city of Reus, which is in the focus of this chapter,4 the face-veil was prohibited in 2014 after several previous attempts and amid a bitter public controversy. The banning of facial veiling occurred through a municipal by-law on civismo (civil participation) aimed at regulating a series of public practices that were considered ‘undesired’: covering one’s face, nudity and visible forms of prostitution. The by-law was strongly resisted by radical leftist parties and finally modified in 2016 after a change of the composition of the local assembly. All of the bans mentioned above have been abandoned in the meantime due to a decision by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2013. Face-veil debates are part of a post–9/11 situation where Islam has been securitized and Muslim women’s bodies are under permanent public scrutiny. Variously addressed as a religious symbol, an expression of piety and a particular form of spirituality (Parvez 2011), face covering is often embedded in debates about the role of religion in the public sphere (Ferrari and Pastorelli 2013). In these debates, the religious-secular distinction forms the fundamental analytical grid over and against which institutional responses to new religious manifestations in the public sphere are explored and claims to religious rights adjudicated. As we will show, however, secularity and secularism are not only ‘cognitive frames’ (Taylor 2007) and ‘principles of statecraft’ (Casanova 2009) but have an affective dimension that shapes routine practices of being in public space in everyday life (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012). Thus far, only few anthropologists and sociologists (Brems 2014) have addressed controversies over Islamic face coverings from an empirical angle. By and large, the debate has been dominated by legal scholarship and political theorists concerned with the normative dimensions of these new regulations (Giffen 2011; Grillo and Shah 2016). While welcoming this scholarship, in this chapter, by contrast, we aim to address the particular cultural, emotional and political meanings attached to face-veil wearing that are mobilized in public discourse. We will describe the local dynamics and show that contestations around face-veils emerged from the ways in which arguments over it drew on the mobilization of sentiments and affective states. These sentiments articulated urban memories of earlier contentious politics around Islam, secular notions of urban space and social practices that codify the ethics of urban conviviality. Theorizing secular emotions European debates about the Islamic face-veil, especially the discourses of those favouring regulations or even bans, seem to provide evidence for the idea that controversies around Muslim practices are expressions of militantly secularist visions of society, borne by historical secularization processes and driven by secular emotions. As, or to the extent that, European societies are construed as secularized, the political and legal measures that aim at curbing religious minority practices must be secularist in inspiration (Bader 2010; Calhoun 2008; Casanova 2009). In this vein, they are often perceived in continuity with other controversies such as those surrounding the publication of the cartoons ridiculing the prophet Muhammad in Denmark. According to dominant views, such controversies pit particular religious expressions and beliefs Secular Affect and Urban Exclusion 187 against secular liberalism and that, in defending liberal principles and values such as free speech, individual freedom and gender equality against ‘religion fanaticism’, secular activism acquires itself a strong emotional quality (Duyvendak 2011: 80). Indeed, scholars such as Göle (2010), Özyürek (2006) and Navarro-Yashin (2002) have pointed to the fact that secularism is not only an abstract principle of statecraft but that it carries affective force that plays out in aesthetic practices and social relationships in everyday life. Conversely, Saba Mahmood (2009), while not directly addressing the question of secular affect, usefully pointed to the affective and embodied ways in which religious subjects attach themselves to and ‘cohabit’ with religious signs such as icons or images, which Protestant and liberal semiotic ideologies may render unintelligible as they construe relationships between objects and signs through models of representation. In this chapter, we suggest that the view from Spain complicates assumptions about secular emotions as the drivers of the so-called ‘burka debates’ and as a dominant outcome of secularization processes. While experiencing accelerating secularization processes during the last decades, especially following the transition to democracy in 1975 (Perez-Agote 2010), Spain is still one of the most religious countries in contemporary Europe. At the same time, because of the deep historical legacies of Roman Catholicism as the dominant religion, Spain is not easily assimilated to theoretical concepts that cede much explanatory power of secular emotions on the impact of Protestantism such as those of Mahmood (2009). This becomes especially clear with a view towards the history of anticlerical violence that marked much of the history of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. As many historical studies show, one peculiar aspect of Spanish anticlericalism was that it was directed not only against priests, monks, nuns and other religious people but specifically against things: churches and convents were burnt down, statues destroyed and Catholic symbols desecrated. If Roman Catholicism in Spain does not adhere to a ‘representational model’ of piety (Mahmood 2009: 847), neither does anticlericalism for that purpose. In fact, anticlerical violence was animated by and shared with Roman Catholic devotion, the assumption that religious objects were authoritative presences, and embodiments, not ‘symbols’ of the sacred (see also Belting 1994). As a result, we argue in the following that the sensibilities that feed into current ‘anti-burka’ initiatives in countries as diverse as France, Spain and Lithuania have other historical sources than the semiotic misrecognition of Muslim women’s