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This chapter analyses a set of Paris police documents from 1727–1738 that record infractions of the protectionist ban on wearing indiennes. These were popular colourful fabrics imported from the East, which were also imitated by European manufacturers. Enforcement of the multiple legislations passed in France during the long period of prohibition (1686–1759) was draconian and inequitable. Women, predominantly from lower and middle classes, were spied upon, named, shamed and fined. As with present day controversies over the hijab, women's dress was a flashpoint for wider societal debates. The series of ordonnances issued by René Hérault, Lieutenant Général de Police, exhibit a dual performance of upholding and breaking the law, enacted through textual, visual and spatial strategies. As the scopic legal gaze is lured by the exotic and feminine, the subversive properties of indiennes present an opportunity for wider social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the open-door refugee policy initiated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in August 2015, approximately 550,000 refugee women, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan arrived in Germany. Studies that address the realities of immigrant Muslim women, primarily through the perspective of intersectionality, do not pay enough attention to the millions of immigrants whose legal status is as yet undefined. This article explores the experiences of hijab-wearing refugee women in Berlin and how they are viewed as the 'other' in a multicultural country like Germany. Focusing on refugees who arrived in Germany in the last five years, we conducted interviews with 25 refugee Muslim women. Thematic analysis of the data revealed three central themes: (1) racism, violence and exclusion; (2) empowerment and liberation; and (3) preserving identity and belonging to a community. The women's narratives demonstrate how this added dimension of subordination – refugeeness – transforms their lived experiences, highlighting the lingering centrality of citizenship in an age many identify as post- or transnational. Intersectional analysis of the interviews suggests that gender, racism and Islamophobia, and legal status cannot be entirely disentangled and that Muslim refugee women who wear the hijab, often experience very different forms of discrimination than their non-hijab wearing counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the individual and societal explanations for the persistence of the hijab as a conservative cultural norm in persistently religious and culturally conservative communities. Analyzing data from 300 hijab-wearing women in Egypt and 198 hijab-wearing women in Kuwait, our findings confirm the importance of considering societal as well as individual-level factors in the persistence of conservative cultural norms. We find that low salience of the hijab is associated with beliefs that others misuse the hijab. High salience of the hijab is correlated with beliefs that the hijab brings its wearer greater social mobility. Exposure to non-hijab-wearers was associated with both high and low salience of the hijab, and demonstrates the influence that exposure to norm breakers has on reinforcing the salience of conservative social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses social positions of Swedish female converts to Islam who have previously passed as white majority Swedes, but whose experiences have changed, sometimes radically, since donning the hijab. It addresses their accounts of being treated and evaluated differently by teachers, co-workers, family, and friends, and having their choices questioned by strangers. It also examines the double standards that white converts to Islam must negotiate when dealing with daily life in Sweden, and how becoming a Muslim leads to frequent exclusion from constructed whiteness and Swedishness and the privileges attached to those positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about Islamic veiling practices often focus on legal aspects of wearing the hijab and niqab and the recent banning, actual and proposed, of the veil in several countries has received substantial media coverage. This ethnographic research paper adds to the discussion by providing insight into the views of women from the Sultanate of Oman, using questionnaire and interview data to examine their understanding of and beliefs about laws relating to veiling practices in Oman and in other countries. The research also explores Omani women’s views on the niqab, which has dominated much of the global media debate. The results indicate that Omani women typically believe that veiling practices should not be mandated by a legal framework but reflect personal choice rooted in Islamic notions of piety and respect and that non-Muslim countries should respect women’s freedom to dress according to their religious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Earlier work on hijab has targeted either Muslim minority women or those who have been bound by the law with respect to their attire (Clark, 2007; Droogsma, 2007; Murshid, 2005). The present study addresses women in Pakistan, which is predominantly a Muslim society and the state neither bans nor recommends any particular dress. This research was geared to identify a theoretical framework under grounded theory approach. The analysis involved open, axial, and selective coding. Five focus groups were conducted with women practicing five types of dress (niqab-wearing, headscarfing, headcovering, dupatta-carrying, and the modern-dressed). One discussion was conducted with a group of male university students. The analysis involved open, axial, and selective coding, accompanied by constant comparisons between coding and data. The analysis has revealed three core categories, namely, religious commitment, environmental adjustment and psychological satisfaction. These three factors appeared as the causal conditions which lead to wearing hijab. However, the same factors also work as context, and functions under different situations for different wearers. Propositions and hypotheses relating to phenomenon of hijab have been extended for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how contemporary believers are negotiating a new identity of Islamic piety in Bulgarian Muslim communities. Driven by communal memory of repression and contemporary Islamophobia, Bulgarian Muslims have created communities of practice (Wenger 1998), participatory groups that share a common interest in learning more about their faith. Communities function on multiple levels: there are small pockets of Islamic activity at the local level, and at a broader level, an imagined community of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims connected to an imagined global Islamic community, the ummah. The practices examined here include face-to-face activities, such as learning to read the Qur’an and prayers in Arabic, learning Islamic principles and practice, and talking about faith in mosques and homes in Bulgaria. This paper also examines virtual practices, such as discussing faith on social media. The article focuses on women’s and girls’ Qur’an reading groups and discussions about wearing hijab, and it examines an online mixed-gender discussion of daily prayers. Such grassroots practice of Islam fosters a newly articulate and participatory version of religion, embracing and encouraging believers’ literacy and knowledge, activism, and agency. The mutual goals, repertoires, and activities of this community of practice create a sense of commonality and cohesiveness, while leaving room for some diversity of focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the point of revisiting Muslim women's head wear when such a topic has already been extensively discussed in recent years? What can we do with the specters of class and labor that often appear, however fleetingly, in discussions that take secularism and the public sphere as their organizing concepts? Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in northwest China, this article examines the intricate connection between rural Hui Muslim women's "hats" (maozi) and the history of female labor in its multiple shifts from the socialist to the neoliberal period. In making this connection, it attempts to return the headscarf debate to its transnational politico-economic origins and to explore the hidden links between the transnational articulation of difference and the global organization of ethical practices, on the one hand, and the transnational distribution of materialities and politico-economic values, on the other. This link alters the specific terms and discourses that frame the narration of maozi among rural Muslim women: rather than expressing an attitude or opinion on veiling, their narratives focus heavily on the concrete stylistic shifts of maozi , which closely trace women's transformed relationship to labor. By considering the global differential distribution of ethical practices in tandem with the global (unequal) distribution of materialities, this article hopes to reorient our contemporary discussion about the Muslim veil in light of an analysis of transnational political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countries, and one from Belgium where Muslims are a minority. We find that averagely religious women conform to the classical theories' predictions. But among highly religious women the modernizing forces--education, occupation and higher income, urban living, and contacts with non-Muslims--increase veiling. We conjecture that for highly religious women modernizing factors raise the risk and temptation in women's environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women's piety to their communities. Our findings have implications for cultural policy and Muslim integration in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Muslim women in Helsinki, Finland use dress as a tool to cultivate and express forms of cultural capital, that fashion, anti-fashion and non-fashion are strategies in such practices, and that fashionability, stylishness, piety, modesty, disinterest in fashion, and spirituality are forms of symbolic capital that are used in order to gain status within various reference groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and other international sport governing bodies have recently been involved in contestations concerning the allowance of the hijab in sport. This article interrogates how these institutions participate in the regulation of Muslim women, and the relationship that these actions have with colonial and imperial constitutions of race. Drawing on critical race feminist theorizing, this article argues that the regulation of women who wear the hijab is a technology of power that frames these sport governance bodies as benevolent actors operating within the ‘best interests’ of female footballers. This hijab that has become a cause of concern in sport is hegemonically understood through Western colonialisms and racial grammars that have historically constituted the figure of ‘The Muslim Woman’ as in need of protection. The recent contestations represent a new moment in a global field, however, as notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal rights’ are being invoked to now allow the hijab, albeit under conditions that insidiously reinscribe white patriarchal authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Brick Lane, Monica Ali problematizes the practice of hijab both implicitly and explicitly. To this end, the British Bangladeshi writer does not simply open the discussion within the fictional world of the novel. She also creates a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a broad spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes that range from the rejection to the ardent celebration of such a practice. Relying on socio-cultural studies on the subject, the present contribution intends to examine the politics of hijab as represented in Brick Lane, demonstrating how the novel fictionalizes many of the competing discourses which have surrounded the question of hijab in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term Hijab has been customarily used to talk about the veil of the Muslim women as a duty imposed by their religious beliefs. The result of these inconsistencies is that we will focus on the original meaning of the rules of the classic Islamic Law namely, the idea that wearing the full veil and headscarf in the public sphere is a religious duty for Muslim women who live in democratic societies. The study of this issue is necessary in order to analyze the proportionality of the recommendations that have been established by the Council of Europe and legal restrictions on the right to wear such religious dresses that have been introduced the European Court of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration and social integration are gendered issues. In this article, we concentrate on women's immigration from the Maghreb to France, and explore what we term "Maghrebi Feminism". We discuss the specific historical context of three waves of Maghrebi migration to France after WWII, analyze the women's positioning within French/European Islamization trends, and elaborate the different experiences of male and female migrants in France. The Maghrebi female migrants' dilemmas are then presented as the outcome of these circumstances. In the second part, we review the political and welfare issues that Maghrebi female migrants face. Through their struggles regarding education, occupation, health services and political representation, we conclude that Maghrebi female migrants are social agents who gain more and fare better than their male counterparts when migrating to France, but pay a crucial price to traditional family and community life. Methodologically, we employ quantitative tools of analysis as developed within micro political research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the sartorial practices of Dutch-Turkish women who wear Muslim headscarves may be summarized as a shift from sober, religiously inspired forms of dress towards colorful, more fashionable styles. A focus on the materiality of headscarves indicates, however, that the relation between Islam, dress, and fashion is more complex. The main motivation for the women to adopt headscarves, including the fashionable ones, is religious. They do so because they consider it a practice prescribed in the foundational Islamic texts and because presenting a pleasant, up-to-date look can be considered as a form of visual da'wa. At the same time, however, wearing particular styles of fashionable headscarves also performs other, non-religious, identities and forms of belonging, such as those pertaining to status, ethnicity, and professionalism. This is evident in how fabrics (such as silk) and shapes of headscarves (square or rectangular) matter. An investigation of headscarves as particular items of dress is, in turn, helpful to understand the limits of a focus on aesthetic styles and fashion. The headscarf format makes these items of dress easy to acquire and hard to discard, because they are often received as gifts. A woman's attachment to particular headscarves--materializing social relations and functioning as souvenirs--goes beyond aesthetic styles and mitigates the force of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the resurgence of headscarves throughout the Muslim world, some women adopted ‘more fundamentalist’ clothing styles, such as full-face veils, or began pietistic social movements. What explains this escalation and increasing diversity of Islamic dress and behavior? This paper analyzes how the spread of headscarves and Islamic dress since the 1970s undermined it as a signal of piety, which is a valuable yet hidden characteristic in many social interactions. As less pious women adopted the headscarf for myriad reasons, pious women adopted increasingly conservative dress and behavior to credibly signal their piety to uninformed observers and improve their marriage prospects. The spread of ‘fundamentalist’ behaviors does not necessarily imply a societal shift in piety, ideology, or support for political Islamists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, an Irish Muslim girl who asked to be allowed to wear the hijab to school. It traces the media and government response to her demand, and frames that demand as a citizenship claim. It focuses in particular on a peculiarity of the Irish response; that the government was disinclined to legislate for the headscarf in the classroom. It argues that – perhaps counter-intuitively – the refusal to make law around the hijab operated to silence the citizenship claims at the heart of the Egan case. To this extent, it was a very particular instance of a broader and ongoing pattern of exclusion of the children of migrants from the Irish public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New media technologies and migration networks create a new situation for the Muslim population in Europe. During the past decade Muslims, usually descendants of migrants, have increasingly taken part in media debates in Danish national and interactive media. They blog on the Internet, write in newspapers and partake in televised panel debates. A significant share of these media activists are women and their reflections on clothing and appearance constitute the major part of my argument in this paper. I discuss the clothing style of eight women who identify as Muslim and who have attracted attention in different forms of media; written and visual mass media or individualised interactive media. Beginning with the concept of sartorial strategies, I argue that by entering the Danish media these women challenge what it means to be equal and available for social contact in a Danish public realm. Some do so by considering how to avoid being ascribed negative stereotypes in everyday interaction and by media audiences, and others by choosing a distinct Islamic style of clothing, consequently their visibility as Muslim women is contested. In other words for some, subtle ways of communicating the new presence of active Muslim women in the media is the response, whereas others communicate this presence more distinctly. These strategies constitute a form of conscious impression management, revealing that Muslim women enter the Danish media with caution. Thus, wearing Islamic fashion is a form of micro-politics, a level of politics usually ignored in discussions of Islam in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses legal justifications for French laws and legal decisions concerning Muslim women's dress in the early 21st century. According to the author, the reasoning behind these justifications has shifted from harm-based to values-based arguments and is based on politically expedient premises concerning concepts of French national identity and laïcité, or secularity. It is suggested that these arguments criticize Muslims for a perceived rejection of modern French values. Topics discussed include French law concerning headscarves and other coverings for the face and hair, marriage practices, citizenship, and popular perceptions of Muslim women as submissive and subordinate.

In this article the author discusses the banning in France of the burqa, a covering garment worn by Muslim women. It is noted that about two thousand women in France wear the burqa which the author states makes for a small constituency. The author argues in favor of the ban. A number of topics are addressed including the significant suspicion of religion in France, the opinions of Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim intellectual, and the passage of the French prohibition on wearing the Muslim headscarf in school.

The article presents a study that examines how perceptions of threat posed by Muslims and the attitude towards them explain public support for headscarves ban in Europe. It notes that cross-national comparisons are made to know how the relations are affected by different contexts. Furthermore, it was found that perceived threat leads to stronger support that influences the said ban among discriminatory and non-discriminatory people.

This essay looks at the world of cyber Islamic commerce and the marketing of new forms of hijab through tracing the connections between the British Muslim entrepreneur Wahid Rahman who runs a website called HijabShop.com and the Dutch designer Cindy van den Bremen, designer of a new form of sports head covering known as Capsters. It considers the lifestyles of these two individuals, their diverse philosophies and their personal involvement in the promotion of Islamic fashion for women and how cyberspace has provided them with an opportunity for a business partnership. The essay explores some of the representational challenges inherent in the reframing of hijab as fashion, showing how those involved in this niche market navigate complex tensions between different Muslim interpretations of the relationship between beauty and modesty, fashion and faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent decades, France has had to deal with the growing presence of immigrants from its ex-colonies - a phenomenon that has been affecting many former colonial powers and accentuated by globalisation. Starting in the late 1980s, this presence translated itself, among other things, through an increased visibility of Islam. For instance, numbers of second- and third-generation Muslim women, primarily of North African origin, have been expressing their religiosity by wearing a headscarf in the public sphere. Many members of the French state and society have perceived this as a threat to the secular settlement, as they understand the headscarf to be a sign indicating that the believer's first allegiance does not lie with the secular nation state, but with God and with a religious community (the ummah) that transcends national borders. This article argues that the headscarf controversy in France has been a way for the French secular state and elites to reinforce a certain exclusive understanding of laicite (secularism), as being more than a legal principle, which symbolises an ethic of collective life. This ethic succeeds in becoming stronger and more tangible because it is able to convey a sense of who can be included, and who has to be excluded from collective life. In this case women wearing headscarves have been identified as incapable of protecting and fostering Republican values while, in addition, also representing an external threat. They have therefore been slowly excluded from partaking in the activities of the polis, and deprived from enjoying their full citizenship rights' and duties. To conduct this investigation, the article takes the March 2004 law banning visible religious symbols in public schools as a starting point, and analyses how from then onwards petitions, law proposals and governmental reports have recommended, in the name of laicite, excluding headscarf wearers from a variety of public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the most influential weltanschauungen at play in the politics of immigration in Europe. I categorize relevant value judgments into what I, following Theodore Lowi, call "public philosophies." I highlight three competing public philosophies in the politics of immigration in Europe: 1) liberalism; 2) nationalism; and 3) postmodernism. Liberalism prescribes universal rights protecting the autonomy of the individual, as well as rational and democratic procedures (rules of the game) to govern the pluralism that inevitably results in free societies. Against liberalism, nationalism stresses community and cultural homogeneity in addition to a political structure designed to protect both. Rejecting both liberalism and nationalism, postmodernism posits insurmountable relativism and irreducible cultural heterogeneity accompanied by ultimately irrepressible political antagonism. I examine the three outlooks through a case study of the headscarf debate. The article concludes with consideration of how normative ideas combine with other factors to influence policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hijāb, an Islamic ethico-religious and socio-cultural symbol, is increasingly becoming visible in the Western public arena giving rise to a debate over its compatibility with dominant Western culture and values. Placing it in an argumentative genre, the paper highlights the sociological, religious and cultural rationales for the increasing visibility of the Islamic dress code among young Muslim women. It provides a discursive framework based on a cultural sociology through which hijāb and niqāb could be accepted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Article 8 of the ECHR, as applied to the protection of a person’s right to wear a headscarf, is an inappropriate locus for thrashing out arguments about the right to protection of religious freedom, and that Article 9 allows for a broader legal and political analysis of the multiple meanings and impacts of religion in our lives. However, the law should not prohibit women from wearing the headscarf. Legal regulation of the headscarf should be replaced with robust political debate about the many diverse and intersecting ways in which it is possible to experience womanhood, sexuality, culture, religion, race, nationality and economic security in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the experiences of six young women who chose to remove their headscarves or veils to attend to universities in Istanbul as it relates to issues of public space and the presence of covered women in the public sphere in Turkey. These six women have removed their headscarves to comply with the so-called headscarf ban which prohibits women from wearing head coverings in public spaces and public spheres such as universities and colleges. The author also places the issue of headscarves in the context of dress and the "spacialized understanding" that emanates from wearing these head coverings.

Previous research highlights the continuing relevance of family culture in explaining educational inequalities in Turkey, especially patriarchal beliefs and practices that discourage investment in the education of girls. We extend that research by introducing two much-debated, but empirically untested, aspects of family culture - parental religiosity and headscarf preferences. An analysis of a nationally representative sample of 15-19 year olds in 1988 shows that while religiosity had no significant effect on educational attainment, children who lived in families whose fathers expected them to wear a headscarf in public had lower educational attainment, especially girls. The large negative headscarf effect suggests that the government ban on headscarves in schools may be an obstacle to eliminating gender inequality in education. The results are discussed in light of recent trends in Turkish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wearing of the female Islamic dress (generally referred to as the hijab), or any feature of this dress such as the headscarf (khimar), face veil (niqab) and the head-to-toe all enveloping garment (jilbab) is a complex and multi-faceted issue that is often raised in public debate in most European States in recent years particularly in the education and employment areas. This article analyses the selected State practice and judicial decisions on the banning and similar restrictions to the wearing of the Islamic dress in State schools. Two issues are analysed: (i) whether the prohibition of female Muslim pupils or students from wearing the Islamic dress, or any feature of the Islamic dress, while at State schools amounts to an unjustifiable violation of the right to education and/or an unjustifiable violation of freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs and (ii) if a State (or a non State actor) prohibits a female Muslim teacher from wearing the Islamic dress while at a State school, docs this amount to a violation of the teacher's right to work and/or the teacher's right to manifest freedom of religion or belief? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights some of the discursive implications of framing the question of Islamic dress as one of religious rights. It is argued that the very construction of hijab issues as those of ‘religious identity’, sustained by the use of Article 9 of the ECHR as the primary legal basis for their resolution, has shaped a number of counterproductive trends. These are: avoiding difficult questions through a judicial technique of deference to local knowledge; using a language of choice to produce an obscure and unsatisfactory account of Muslim women's agency; false dichotomising of culture and gender; and producing an ever more docile and exposed subject through the subtle mechanisms of public scrutiny and moralising. Each trend is considered in turn. The article's arguments draw on the critical thought of Wendy Brown and post-colonial feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article highlights some of the discursive implications of framing the question of Islamic dress as one of religious rights. It is argued that the very construction of hijab issues as those of ‘religious identity’, sustained by the use of Article 9 of the ECHR as the primary legal basis for their resolution, has shaped a number of counterproductive trends. These are: avoiding difficult questions through a judicial technique of deference to local knowledge; using a language of choice to produce an obscure and unsatisfactory account of Muslim women's agency; false dichotomising of culture and gender; and producing an ever more docile and exposed subject through the subtle mechanisms of public scrutiny and moralising. Each trend is considered in turn. The article's arguments draw on the critical thought of Wendy Brown and post-colonial feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among Muslims living in the United States, Islamic religious practices are negotiated and adapted to a new culture. A visible and controversial symbol of Muslims' differences from dominant American Christianity is the hijab worn by many Muslim women. The decision to wear hijab occurs within a two-fold cultural context: (1) the assumption by many non-Muslims that hijab encapsulates Islam's inherent violation of women's "equal rights"; and (2) a widespread Muslim critique of American culture for its individualism, materialism, and lax sexual mores. Using data from interviews and observations with college-age, second-generation Muslim Americans, we explore the context, meanings, and consequences of wearing hijab. Second-generation Muslim women are negotiating social and religious identities in contrast both to non-Muslim Americans and to their immigrant families. Hijab has multiple meanings as a religious and social symbol; it provides a clear identity marker at a life-course transitional time, and it provides culturally legitimate space for young women who are formulating Muslim-American identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Muslim headscarf in light of recent debates about the accommodation of religion in U.S. public institutions. Recent quarrels over such matters as the phrase 'one nation under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and the posting of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and other government buildings, foreground American attitudes about whether wearing the Muslim headscarf is a practice deserving First Amendment protection. What legal claims have been raised by or on behalf of Muslim women wearing the headscarf in the United States? How do these comport with judicial doctrine on the separation of church and state? And what roles have religious advocacy groups played in promoting positions that have a bearing on how the headscarf is viewed? Viewing the law of regulation as productive rather than protective of the subject, this article analyzes how discourses and practices of secularism have been formed with respect to the question of wearing the Muslim headscarf in a variety of contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contends that the laws banning public school teachers from wearing Islamic headscarves are unconstitutional. It examines the religious significance of the Islamic headscarf and the surrounding political controversy in Germany. It demonstrates that most of the headscarf laws fail the Federal Constitutional Court's (FCC) guidelines for equal treatment of religions. It concludes that all religious clothing and symbols should be expressly and unconditionally permitted in public schools.

The article addresses the debate over the wearing of Muslim headscarves in French schools. The veil or its absence has increasingly been considered as a marker of religion, and/or of political and social views. The issue of the Muslim headscarf is more controversial in France than in other European countries. The controversy about the wearing of headscarves or veils in schools is an episode in the country's change from being a nation of nearly all old-stock Catholics to one including a large component of people from other backgrounds and other religious traditions.

Since 1989, France has endured repeated, contentious debates about the ‘Islamic’ headscarf. In February 2004, French legislators approved a new law prohibiting students from wearing conspicuous ‘religious signs’ in public schools. Contrary to some observers’ assumptions, this measure was not caused mainly by new efforts to combat terrorism or by pro-Christian prejudice. Explaining France's decision to pass this surprising new legislation requires attention to both historical continuities of French political thinking and the changing French and international context. French republican understandings of citizenship and secularism have long made the headscarves issue peculiarly sensitive in France. However, the new law marks a clear departure from previous French policy. Explaining that rupture requires attention to more immediate social and political factors, most importantly: dissatisfaction with the previous policy; effective mobilization of public sympathy by new feminist groups; concern about rising anti-Semitism; and, somewhat paradoxically, developments in international human rights law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how a headscarf ban in French schools resulted to a conflict between France and Iraq. As a result, an Islamic organization kidnapped two French journalists and demanded that the French government must withdraw the law. However, the French refused to consider. Political analysts on the other hand consider the law as against human rights since it condemn freedoms of religion and expression. The ban not only caused international conflict but also chaos in schools.

In many countries of the European Union, the issue of the Islamic headscarf has resulted in specific legal measures taken by governmental institutions or courts, or in pragmatic compromises reached between parents and school authorities. This holds especially true for the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. As a matter of principle, the relations between public authorities and religious groups, as well as the determination of the place of religion in the public sphere, fall under the sovereignty and exclusive competence of each of the EU member-states. Consequently, the nature and results of discussions in these countries, as well as the compromises reached to resolve conflicts, differ according to the countries’ various educational and constitutional traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explores the metaphysics of the Muslim veil. Negation of her body by the woman; Reinforcement of the status of the human body as appurtenance to be constructed by an omnipotent male gaze; Affirmation of classical definitions of woman.

The article presents a comment on the article "Deploying the Muslimwoman," by Miriam Cooke. The author relates her experiences of teaching at a university where Muslim and non-Muslim students attached on the veil or hijab, confirming its importance. She claims that the veil remains a lodestone of political Islam, to represent the status quo of the Muslim woman and its identity in both the Muslim-minority and Muslim-majority worlds. She hopes that all Muslim women could simply agree that the hijab is not an issue in a Muslim-majority or a Muslim-minority setting, but rather an internal and deep connection to an individual's devotion to and understanding of her Allah.

The article presents a response to an essay on the censorship of clothing by Muslim girls and women. All terms used in the essay like hijabs, khimars, and burqas are already historically, culturally, and politically marked. A discursive approach would require careful consideration of the histories of performative force that discursive acts carry. The author suggests that education ought to foster the critical questioning of assumptions base on external appearances, and of imperialist and ethnocentric readings of discourse and pay attention to the ways in which language carries past meanings and uses that trouble its apparent clarity and that produce meaning beyond the intention.