By Dr Ibtihal Ramadan, Research Fellow EEI, School of Education
A key point to note from the 33rd Olympic games in Paris, France that concluded just ten days ago, is the hijab ban for French women athletes.
(Un)Surprisingly, the ban occurs amidst an important landmark of Paris Olympics: it has been celebrated to be the first ever gender equal Olympics regarding the number of athletes invited. Moreover, the ban clearly violates the Olympic Charter that guarantees the rights and freedoms without any discrimination of any kind, religion included. While the decision has been criticised widely by UN human rights spokesperson, human rights organisations, and women athletes. Such criticism has not affected the French decision to ban the hijab in a step that has been deemed as exclusive of its own Muslim women hijabed athletes. I will explore this issue in this article, analysing its relevance to how recent shifts in French secularism have discriminated against Muslim women, concurrently invoking the historic aversion of French colonisers to Hijab in Algeria as well as the broader context of Islamophobia.
According to the French officials, the ban is nothing more than an adherence to French secularism, laïcité, perceived as the core of modernity and closely associated with democracy. laïcité refers to an official state policy of supposed neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices, an ‘exit from religion’ that acknowledges religion but places it outside the common political domain. Hence, French athletes, as civil servants, must adhere to neutrality, i.e, abstain from portraying a conspicuous religious identity, such as wearing the hijab while acting in an official capacity, including as members of the French national team.
However, secularist ‘neutrality’ seems to be disproportionately targeting Muslim women. Put differently, this ban could be seen as another manifestation of a chain of ‘gendered-Islamophobic’ secularist polices that have long sought to control Muslim women choices through regulating or banning the wearing of hijab or religious sartorial symbols.
For over three decades, Islam has been discussed in political discourses and public debates as ‘The Challenge’ to French secularism. The hijab has been systematically emphasised as a symbol of backwardness, patriarchy, oppression, subordination, and as an integral component of a ‘dangerous’ religion. Secularism has been advanced and promoted as the foremost method to ensure equal rights for Muslim women. To emancipate Muslim women who continue to choose to take on a visible faith identity through wearing the hijab, policies have been put in place to enforce that all Muslim women are ‘emancipated’. In 2004, the French Parliament banned the hijab at state schools, to protect against ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. White feminists have supported and promoted this exclusive political discourse that labels the hijab as a symbol to advance ‘political Islam’. Rather than mobilising to support the right of choice for all women, they deny it to Muslim women, which question the underpinning logic of White feminism, as it does not bear solidarity to women irrespective of their race, religion, or background.
What we see here is that when Muslim women make a ‘free’ choice that doesn’t align with the narrow, colonial definition of ‘freedom’ and ‘women’s rights,’ it becomes a challenging battleground for them.
The following examples demonstrates the double standards of French secularism that disadvantage Muslim women. While celebrating amendments to constitutions regarding women right to abortion a few months ago, The French Prime Minister, Gabrial Attal, assured women in his speech before the lawmakers that “Your body belongs to you and no one has the right to control it in your stead”. Last year, Attal, the then Minister of Education, mobilised ‘secularism’ to justify banning the Abaya in schools [a long garment that covers the whole body], stating that “When you enter a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the religion of pupils”. The logic associates these sartorial practices with Islam. Yet, the similarity between the Abaya and the evening gowns worn by Queen Camilla and French First Lady Brigitte Macron at a state banquet in France during an official visit of King Charles III and Queen Camilla to France a few weeks later was highlighted by social media users, who questioned the double standards of France.
Another similar incident is the attire of Kim Kardashian a few years back who appeared fully covered from head-to toe in black was largely describe as ‘creative’ and innovative’ AND not ‘barbaric, radical or extremist’. These incidents clearly beg the question: has the ban targeted the garment itself or attempted to restrict the choice of ONLY Muslim women of their dress? Obviously, a garment like the Abaya is considered neutral or trendy when worn by non-Muslim women. For a lot of Muslim women, doubtlessly, it is the latter, which underscores a textbook case of gendered Islamophobia.
The current French control over Muslim women is rooted in the Frech colonialism of North Africa. Fanon reminds us that French colonial power in Algeria sought to dominate the cultural signs, including hijab, which signified a form of active resistance against French colonialism. Recognising that hijab was a unifying symbol of Algerian women who was fundamental to fabrics of society, the French colonisers aimed to conquer women as part of their broader strategy to annihilate the resistance, dominate and assimilate the colonized population. To do so, they mobilised multitudes of accusations to demonise hijab, its logic, its effect on women opportunities in life that could otherwise be obtained through a rhetoric of ‘liberation’ from men’s patriarchy. However, this imposition only strengthened the hijab’s symbolic role as a form of resistance. These politically motivated accusations have been reinvigorated in the age of modernity, yet cloaked in a soft and more appealing rhetoric of ‘human rights’, ‘democratic values’ and women ‘liberation’. The politicising and ‘othering’ of hijab has been and continue to be a landmark of western democracies exclusion of its Muslim women.
To conclude, hijab has indeed been made a complex phenomenon, has been shaped and re-shaped by two opposite interpretations of liberation: one rooted in Western colonialism and the other in Muslim women’s struggle for free choice. In what seems to be a survival strategy, Sounkamba Sylla compromised the hijab and wore a cap to avoid being barred from Olympics opening ceremony. A decision that some Muslim women accede to, but others have found their own ways to challenge this exclusive narrative.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Birmingham.