Islamic Headcoverings, Freedom of Religion & the Law (US and Abroad)
This past Spring I had the honor and pleasure to take a course co-taught by Chicago’s Bernard Harcourt and the incredibly insightful, thoughtful and frankly kind Belgian lawyer and scholar Fabienne Brion, of the l’Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve. The course was on Foucault, but while Fabienne was here in Chicago for the Spring, the Belgian government passed a bill banning the burqa. (Here’s an early Religion Clause article from when the lower house passed the bill; any google search will turn of plenty of information on this). Fabienne has written on this issue, and during her stay presented a paper to the Political Theory Workshop at Chicago, to which my friend Hamza served as respondent. It’d be too much here to rehearse her very interesting arguments, and any of the writing she’s done on it that’s available online is in French, unfortunately. But, I mention it because this issue has been an abiding interest of mine for some time now, and it always strikes me, to be frank, how wide the range of responses and thoughts on it can be: ranging anywhere from a perspective of downright intolerance and Islamophobia, to subtle and I daresay nuanced arguments for varying positions (both for and against). I bring it up now because it’s just come to my attention that the formerly much-maligned (at least at the start there, and perhaps for good reason, although I have no real opinion about it) NY Times Philosophy blog, “The Stone,” has posted an exchange on this issue, beginning with a piece by Chicago’s own Martha Nussbaum (who I greatly admire in general), responding initially not to the more long-publicized question of headcoverings in France or Belgium, but rather in Spain (there are links from her article, so I won’t reproduce them here). The piece is called “Veiled Threats?” and is followed up by a response to readers comments, and a response by Feisel Mohammed. All of the pieces are worth the read, and I particularly like that this is a conversation that is taking place in a philosophy forum, as this is the kind of philosophical work I’m personally interested in (both in terms of reading and doing myself). All of this is to say that it’s worth checking these short pieces out, and keeping up on some of the more abstract theoretical parts of the debate, which I really think crystallizes some of the questions around freedom of religion in particular, and civil rights in general, very nicely.
Finally, since there is so, so much confusion on what “Islamic headscarf” actually means in any of these debates (in the US and in Europe), if you’re interested in this stuff it’s helpful to get a little more familiar with the actual names of the different forms. From what I understand, none of these bans relates at all to the hijab, which is the basic scarf that covers hair (more or less loosely depending), and instead these debates are over the burqa and niqab — which are very clearly much less palpable to Western eyes. This initial difficulty, the intuitive gut-reaction, is part of what makes the issue so fascinating on a more abstract philosophical level, and important on a the concrete level.
