Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

The headscarf has become a cultural flashpoint, a freighted symbol of many of the central social, cultural, political, and religious tensions of this first decade of the twenty-first century. When I first began to research the French controversy surrounding the Muslim headscarf in 2001, it was little known in the United States. Since then, the issue has attained global prominence. In late 2003, the Stasi Commission, which Prime Minister Jacques Chirac had appointed several months earlier, recommended a ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf in public primary and secondary schools.1 The legislature promptly passed such a ban, which became law on 15 March 2004.2 Since then, Germany, Turkey, and Britain, among other countries, have wrestled with their own headscarf controversies. The debate reached international proportions when the European Court of Human Rights upheld Turkey’s ban on the headscarf in universities, in the 2005 case of Sahin v. Turkey.

In December 2003, the Stasi Commission, appointed by the President of France, recommended prohibiting public school students from wearing conspicuous religious symbols or apparel. This recommendation was quickly enacted, becoming the Law of 15 March 2004. This law is meant to be an application of the "principle of laïcité," which is part of the French Constitution. The law speaks in terms of a general prohibition, but in fact essentially targets the wearing of the headscarf by young Muslims, a practice that had been permitted in French schools since late 1989. The present article attempts to explain the particular conditions within which the problem arose in France and to render an account of the work of the Stasi Commission, of which the author was a member. In conclusion, the article offers a critical evaluation of the effects of the law.

Throughout the 2004 headscarf affair, both partisans and opponents of the law have claimed to stand for laïcité, this founding value of the Third Republic. While there were of course many other issues at stake—including, but not limited to, feminism, postcolonialism, the banlieues problem—it is impossible to understand the scope and the positions of this debate without taking into account the importance of laïciteacute; in French history. This paper presents an analysis of one of the founding debates on French laïcité, the one leading to the Ferry law of 1882 on non-confessional education in public primary schools. By examining more closely the birth of the école laïque, we hope to offer a new perspective on the contemporary issues.

Using a comparative method, this article explores the reasons for the absence of a legal ban on Muslim headscarves in the United States. Study of France reveals a culture that values "public space" and "citizenship." The United States places more value on the generic concept of "religion" as the unifying bond among individuals, even of different religious groupings. Cross-religious sympathy is a distinctive feature of American culture and reflected in legal briefs to the Supreme Court. The article suggests that legal concepts are not merely reflections of social institutions but are important social facts in themselves.

This article examines the meaning of the French headscarf ban in the light of France's state-sponsored religious councils. These councils belie the view that France simply has a stricter separation of Church and State than the United States. Rather, France reconfigures the traditional conception of civil society as mediating between the individual and the state. The French state conceives of itself as the representative of the people and, as such, inter-mediates between religious institutions and individuals. This intervention achieves two distinct but complementary goals. First, the state endeavors to save individuals from private religious forces in order to promote individual autonomy. Second, the state's intervention into institutional religious matters bureaucratizes, centralizes, and domesticates religious institutions, making them more comprehensible and less threatening. Both the headscarf ban and the religious councils stem from the state's goal of serving as a buffer between its individual citizens and religious institutions.

Americans commonly believe that their country is unique in its commitment to the separation of church and state. Yet by the European measure, the American separation of church and state looks strikingly weak, since Americans permit religious rhetoric to permeate their politics and even cite the Bible in court. In light of these striking differences, this article argues that it is wrong to imagine that there is some single correct measure of the separation of church and state. Instead, northern continental Europe and the United States have evolved two different patterns, whose historical roots reach back into the Middle Ages. In northern continental Europe, unlike the United States, historic church functions have been absorbed by the state. The consequences of this historic divergence extend beyond familiar questions of the freedom of religious expression, touching on matters as diverse as welfare policy and criminal law.

This article examines another European iteration of the headscarf debate, this time in postcommunist Bulgaria, the European Union member with the largest Muslim minority. Bulgaria is a country that has always been at a crossroads between East and West, and women's bodies and their fashion choices have increasingly become the symbols of the "backward Orient" or the "corrupt and decadent West" for those on either side of an ongoing national identity crisis. For the Orthodox Christian/Secular majority, the headscarf represents all that is troubling about the country's Ottoman past and Islam's presumed oppression of women. For a growing number of Bulgarian Muslims, the miniskirt has come to represent the shameless commodification of women's bodies and the moral bankruptcy of global capitalism.