Social Anthropology

This paper examines how a number of pious and non‐practising Belgian Maghrebi women  with the opposite sex and  manage the sensitivity and transgressive potential of these practices. Whereas all interlocutors were prone to adjust their conducts to avoid controversies, these adaptations were nevertheless assessed differently. Adopting a flexible stand in the case of not‐handshaking was viewed as normal by the pious women, while the impossibility of eating in front of other Muslims was problematised by the non‐practising women. I suggest that these different assessments display the  ethical importance attributed to conducts in a liberal‐secular regime.

This article traces the emergence of secular Muslim women into the French public sphere. I focus on Fadela Amara, co‐founder of Neither Whores Nor Doormats (Ni Putes Ni Soumises), an association protesting the denigration of women in the immigrant suburbs. I argue that Amara is politically efficacious for the French government, shifting focus from the structural causes of socio‐economic problems in the suburbs to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In addition, I argue that figures like Amara are effects of the dual universalising and particularising imperatives of republican citizenship and, moreover, that such figures help to defer the contradiction between those imperatives.

This article discusses how religious Muslim women negotiate Islamic prayer and Islamic dress within French and German public spheres where Islamic connoted bodily practices are not easily accommodated. While these women perceive their practice first and foremost in terms of devotional practices with the objective to fashion and strengthen a pious self, within the context of these secular public spheres they also get entangled in (re‐)signification processes. In order to grasp these specific shifts in the religious practices in question, the article discusses approaches that emphasise the role of corporeality in the shaping of religious subjects with those conducted in the field of performance theory.

Wearing headscarves in universities has been forbidden in Turkey for several years. The implementation of this ban is based on the Higher Education Council's regulations on ‘preventing ideological and political polarisations among university students’. Muslim students with headscarves have found a way around this exclusionary enforcement: wearing wigs. This bodily performance itself creates a contradictory practice, a novel form of veiling turns out to be another form of exhibition/representation. In this paper, we investigate Muslim students’ interpretations of wig‐wearing practice through in‐depth interviews conducted both in Turkey and in Northern Cyprus.

This article investigates how, within less than a decade, face‐veiling has turned from a non‐issue into a threat to the Dutch nation‐state. With good citizenship increasingly defined in cultural terms, politicians have used a strong affective discourse of dislike that produces a sense of national belonging amongst a wide range of people, but excludes face‐veiling women. Not (only) the act of face‐covering, but the fact that Muslim women are engaged in these acts causes discomfort, anxiety and resentment, as the very same women who are defined as oppressed, turn out to challenge Dutch normativities about gender and sociality through their corporeal presence.

This contribution will focus on the debates and questions arising in Italy around public Islam, young Muslim women and secularism. These debates shed a new light on the nature of Italian secularism, ultimately helping to reposition the accusation towards Islam as a threat to the secular public sphere. The paper aims at suggesting that there is hardly anything that makes Islam in Italy exceptionally and uniquely alien to secularism. Rather than Muslim constituencies, in Italy it is the Catholic Church that is striving to re‐occupy a position in the public sphere that has been shrinking since the 1970s. On the other hand, rather than challenging the nature of secularism and liberalism in Italy, young Muslim women are contributing to their expansion and redefinition.

Response to Heiko Henkel