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What the Veil Reveals: a Critique of Religious and Sec- Ular Debate Over the Headscarf

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What the Veil Reveals: a Critique of Religious and Sec- Ular Debate Over the Headscarf ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output What the veil reveals: a critique of religious and sec- ular debate over the headscarf https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40270/ Version: Full Version Citation: Baldi, Giorgia (2017) What the veil reveals: a critique of reli- gious and secular debate over the headscarf. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email What the veil reveals: a critique of religious and secular debate over the headscarf Giorgia Baldi School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of London February 2017 Declaration I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own, except where explicit reference is made to the work of others. 2 Abstract The debate over the female headscarf has become an arena of fervent discussion in the West as well as in Muslim majority societies and it is often framed through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between western/‘secular’ and ‘religious’/traditional values. This thesis attempts to contribute critically to the recent debate and ‘obsession’ over the legal regulation of the hijab shared by westerns and Islamists. Trough anthropological, semiotic, political and legal theories, it proposes to give a different reading of the legal decisions over the practice of veiling in order to unwrap the way in which the tension between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ is understood as an absolute polarization. A closer analysis of recent western legal decisions over women’s veiling reveals a disturbing symmetry with a positivized modern view of Sharia law by Islamists as binding women’s bodies to a fixed, transparent and singular ‘universal’ identity that is, I claim, analogous to a universal-ist subjectivity of Human Rights law. Thus, the veil emerges as the metaphor of a clash between two imperialist universalist modern discourses: the secular discourse of a westernised world that is re-humanised through Human Rights and the reactive Islamist discourse. Both aim at creating a fixed and monolithic subject of law through the control of the visible (veiling/unveiling) in the public sphere. The claim of an incompatible dichotomy between liberal/secular and ‘Islamic’ religious values obscures this symmetry. Moreover, I argue that this polarization is the result of a specifically Occidental (Christian/secular) semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law, but also in Islamist discourse. This dichotomy becomes a useful tool to sustain the fiction of a monolithic subject and to operate a re- configuration of religious sentiments and practices in the public sphere to benefit state sovereignty. This re-conceptualization emerges as a necessary sovereign act to preserve the unity and homogeneity of a people. 3 Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to my supervisor, Dr Marinos Diamantides. Without his encouragement and kindness, I would never have completed this thesis. His work has been a continuous source of inspiration for me and his precious philosophical insights have deeply influenced not only my research but also my understanding of life, law and politics. Marinos has been an exemplary supervisor: despite his heavy workload he has always been available to discuss and guide my work, and he has given me the independence to develop my own lines of enquiry. I cannot thank him enough for what he has done for me in the last few years: he has been a mentor, a teacher and a friend. More than that, he has taught me what it means to be a rigorous academic, showing at all times a unique and extraordinary sensitivity. It has been a great privilege for me to work with a scholar of such intellectual rigour whose academic excellence is internationally-recognised. Birkbeck law school has been greatly supportive: I would like to thank Shabna Begum for her help with teaching allocations and Dr Elena Loizidou for her kindness and genuine engagement, and for telling me everything I know about teaching. I am immensely grateful to them. And I am also grateful to Dr Anton Schütz and Dr Piyel Haldar, whose advice during my upgrade was especially valuable for my research. My sincere thanks go to my friends Shirin Shahidi, Walid Salem, George Andrews, Severino Gergolet, Nicoletta Lambrtucci, Daniele D’Alvia and Marisa Fassi who gave me support and encouragement, and to Silvana Der Kureghian, who was with me in the darkest moments with her sparkling mind and kindness. Special thanks go to my friends Rashida al-Mughrabi and Raed Debiye for being more than a family and for helping me to understand the complex political and legal context of the Middle East. My parents, Baldi Giorgio and Cantoni Liviana, have offered their support throughout the whole project. I am grateful to my mother for her encouragement and to my father for his endless curiosity and helpful insights about Middle Eastern politics. My gratitude goes also to my sister, Cristina Baldi, whose warmth, happiness, and benevolence have made a real difference in my life. I am also grateful to all those feminists who have guided my political and intellectual life in the last twenty years and strongly supported this research project. The endless discussions I had in recent years with Cecilia Luzzi, Sandra Schiassi, and others pushed me to write about Muslim women. I am also greatly indebted to my grandmother, Gemma Regina, and to my aunt, Baldi Chiarina, for the example they gave me during their lives. This work would not have been possible without the material and emotional support and encouragement of all these people. 4 Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..…………………..….6 Chapter 1: Law, power and the Muslim female dressed body…………………..………………15 1.1 The veil and Islamic law………………………………………………………….………………………………20 1.2 The Veil and Muslim cultures…………………………………………………….…………………………..33 1.3 Imagining nations, imagining women: the regulation of female clothes in the era of nations………………………………………………………………………………………….……………………………..44 1.4 Regulating clothes, regulating subjectivities……………………………………….………………….59 Chapter 2: Setting the scene: Unveiling ‘political Islam’…………………….……………………..72 2.1 Shari’a Law and Islamic legal sources……………………………………………………………………..78 2.2 Islamic law and the assimilation of the monotheistic frame of mind………………………85 2.3 From Imperial Islam to Islamist movements: towards a ‘secularization of Islam’……98 2.4 The dis-similar mirror of the West……………………………………………………….……………….114 Chapter 3: The ‘humanity’ of the secular legal subject ……………………………………………125 3.1 The western/Christian/secular subject of law……………………………………………………….130 3.2 The ‘humane’ subject of law………………………………………………………………………………...139 3.3 Revealing paradoxes: Sahin, Dahlab, Shabina and the others…………………….…………151 3.4 Reconfiguring religion and religious practices in the secular space………………….……170 Chapter 4: The veil that reveals………………………………………………………………….…………..179 4.1 On Freedom and Agency: an East/West Perspective….…………………………………………185 4.2 The Symbology of ‘otherness’………………………………………………………………………………209 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..226 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………238 5 Introduction My research began to take shape while I was involved with women’s activism in the Middle East at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a period of political turmoil: the 9/11 attacks, the 7/7 bomb in London, the Palestinian uprising and western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have deeply changed East/West relations. Increasingly those changing relations have been played out around the image of women. In Iraq and Afghanistan, western wars have been justified as a struggle in the name of democratic principles and women’s freedom: for years, western mass media have repeatedly broadcast images, documentaries and news of oppressed women under the shroud of a burqa. But women’s body has also become prominent in discourses around the ways European societies deal with integration, multiculturalism and the place of religion in western, liberal, secular space. Veiled Muslim women in Europe started to be perceived as a threat to European values and a challenge to the western concept of women’s freedom, to the point that many European countries felt the need to legislate over the wearing of the headscarf: as a result, the veil has been banned -from educational institutions, work places and public offices- in the name of secular values and gender equality. In 2004, France enacted a law to ban the headscarf from public schools, and in 2010 the French government banned the burqa from the public sphere. Belgium and Switzerland passed similar laws forbidding the wearing of the veil in schools and public offices, and the concealment of the face in public spaces.1 At the same time, in Germany, eight Landers forbade the use of the veil in public institutions, while allowing the display of Christian symbols. Although in many other European countries there is no specific law banning the female headscarf, veiled Muslim women have felt their possibility of agency to be limited in the work place, in educational institutions, and even in courtrooms. The female veil is not only an obsession for westerners: some Muslim countries have banned or rendered the veil compulsory. In
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