File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0401, message 45


Subject: RE: [BOU:] Re: veiling and islam
From: Josh Robinson <jmr59-AT-hermes.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 18:23:28 +0000


<unlurks>

part of teh problem is about who's doing the oppressing: many Muslim
women -choose- to wear the veil, and see it as a symbol of their
religious identity (or, more accurately, as a sign of purity rather than
of their religion). of course the culture that forces - or even
encourages - them to do this is repressive, but i don't think that's
what's at stake here.

in Iran, many progressive women refuse to wear the veil as a symbol of
resistance to patriarchy. conversely, many progressive Muslim women in
western Europe -choose- to wear it in order to 'assert' their religious
identity, (some have said as a symbol of resistance to Anglo-American
imperialism). it's partly about the resistance to authority - if women
are forced to wear the veil, the 'rebellious' thing is not to wear it;
if it is banned, many will see the state as their enemy and choose to.

i don't think the issue is as simple as you make out, John: of course we
must do all we can to make sure that women aren't -forced- to wear a
veil, but couldn't banning it (especially if the ban is implemented by a
predominantly white legislature) be counterproductive?

josh

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 17:51, john.kaman wrote:
> Dear Emrah,
> 
> I don't know where you are coming from, my friend.  In arguing that Muslims
> are being oppressed by not being allowed to oppress their women in French
> territory you twist things about as much as they can be twisted.  The veil
> has been and will always be a symbol of oppression and as such it has no
> place in a republican state.  Scholarship seems to have fallen to a level
> where whoever  can develop the most distorted version of reality wins.  Atre
> we so bereft of ideas that we have to make up crap like this in order to get
> tenure?  At base, that's really what this is all about--coming up with some
> new phoney interpretation of reality so that everyone, not wishing to
> embaress themselves will say "Hrrumph, unintelligible--he must deserve
> tenure."  If you and others like you really believed what you are putting
> out you'd become additional American Talibans but that's just the problem> You don't believe it--you're just trying to get or to keep a job.
> 
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-bourdieu-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> [mailto:owner-bourdieu-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU]On Behalf Of Emrah
> Goker
> Sent: dimanche 4 janvier 2004 22:55
> To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject: [BOU:] Re: veiling and islam
> 
> 
> Good thing my blurb provoked discussion. Bad thing the power of the
> western-civilizationist doxa made its presence felt even on this list so
> rapidly. It won't be admitted easily ("What me biased? My best friends are
> Muslim! The majority of Muslims are good!"), but read between the lines of a
> couple of messages sent, it is lurking there.
> 
> I ally myself with Ozgur and Batoul and others who are sensitive about the
> injustices done towards North America's and Europe's Muslim immigrant
> communities, as well as about the racisms perpetuated at the very moment by
> the occupations of Iraq and Palestine.
> 
> First, a couple of replies I felt urged to make:
> 
> Erik --
> 
> I couldn't put a finger on the reason for your reactionarism, maybe it's
> your rhetorical style. First, dubbing the full-body veil as "ninja outfit"
> is common in the right-wing Turkish journalistic field (that includes
> fascist, Kemalist, neoliberal and other western-civilizationist positions),
> and well, for irreligious socialists like me, not to mention for most
> religious citizens, men or women, it is regarded as a racist obscenity. I
> can only hope that you tried to distance yourself from those positions with
> the quotation marks.
> 
> Second, it would be useful to present some evidence for your other claims
> about the relation between class distinction and veiling, homesickness and
> veiling, non-integration and Islam, etc. Not that I am skeptical, I want to
> learn. As it stands, your imagination of Islam in Europe is misleading: as
> if all generations of Muslim immigrants believe that Europe is a battlefield
> and that they have to prepare themselves for a war. Now, this is
> Berlusconi's or Blair's or Bush's vision of Islam, true, but how
> sociological is it?
> 
> Third, yes, oppression and inequality are properties of certain relations
> among Muslims. But the journalistic/scholastic argument used by right-wing
> French (or Turkish) Republicans to support discrimination against young
> Muslim women ("We are trying to liberate them from their male fundamentalist
> oppressors by removing their foluard/turban") is only an excuse for the
> state elites' nationalist/irredentist angst. Moreover, it is not difficult
> to detect the homology between this civilizing desire of "liberation" and
> the imperialist one (the latter's consequences are still unfolding in
> Afghanistan and Iraq). Sociologically, one needs to show, if they exist, the
> properly "Islamic" mechanisms of oppression whose removal will necessarily
> end racism, xenophobia, injustice and inequality in, say, France. In that
> vein, one needs to be clear about what an appropriate path for "integration"
> of a Muslim immigrant in a European country.
> 
> [Interviews in Bourdieu et. al.'s "The Weight of the World" frequently
> expose the problems with the "integration of Arabs". Mahmood Mamdani further
> exposes the other fallacy of the western-civilizationist distinction between
> "good" and "bad" Muslims; see his "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim – An African
> Perspective", http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/mamdani.htm]
> 
> John --
> 
> You write: "Furthermore to say that secularism or laicism is a right wing
> movement is not ignorant; it is stupid." And in another message, you note
> that anti-laicist Muslims who are "trying to make inroads into the
> progressive institutions of the French state", are "in the minority of
> Islam, as the leader of the sunnite sect Friday approved France's position
> for muslims in France, arguing that the veil was mandatory in a muslim
> country but elsewhere one does as in Rome."
> 
> I agree that "laicism" is not a movement, but in the case of especially
> France and Turkey, it is a dirigiste social technology, a source of
> political and bureaucratic capital, that can be used differently by
> different governments. In Turkey, as Ozgur also mentioned, the Army and
> left- or right-wing governments have mobilized this technology to
> undermine/control/oppress the representations of Islam which were beyond the
> state's reach. Like the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, which is a
> state institution designed to discipline Islam and profess the official
> version, after 1960s the French Consultative Council of Muslim Communities
> was designed to establish a similar disciplining of the "unruly" Algerian
> Muslims. Like the cooperation between German governments and Turkish ones to
> empower "official Islam" against "fundamentalist Islam", the French
> governments also cooperated with Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan governments
> for the management of religious services. It is not surprising that the
> domesticized leaders of Sunni communities will anxiously declare that they
> are "good" Muslims, that they want no trouble, and that they are willing to
> tolerate discrimination in order not to appear as a threat to France's
> "national security and unity".
> 
> ...
> 
> For me, defending young Muslim women's rights is a matter of justice.
> Forbidding veiling in schools, universities, public institutions, etc.
> constitutes an unjust treatment of a religious community. The ban enforces,
> in France, unjust majority communitarianism, which denies the equivalent
> treatment of young Muslim women in education. As far as I know, there is no
> analogous ban against Christian insignia. The principle of equal
> participation is denied here. Now, defenders of the foulard must also
> establish that permitting it will not exacerbate female subordination among
> the citizenship at large. As far as I know, there is no conclusive evidence
> that all diverse female Muslim representations of the veil are univocally
> subordinated to something called "Islamic patriarchy". The meanings are
> contested, and other than numerous testimonies like that of Batoul, there is
> a rich social scientific literature that supports this. [One among many
> examples, concerning the diverse representations in Turkey, is Nilufer
> Gole's book, "The Forbidden Modern".]
> 
> Emrah
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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