The French headscarf affair: Universality, secularism, and autonomy

On March 15 2004, the French government passed a law banning the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in public schools. In The Politics of the Veil, Joan Scott shows that the French headscarf policy demanded that Muslim girls abstract themselves from their particular cultural identity in order to become autonomous, and thus equal to the French. In Secularism Confronts Islam, Olivier Roy helps us see that a philosophical definition of laicite led to the headscarf ban, whereas a legal definition of it would not. However, as I argue in this dissertation, these authors do not completely account for how we can see Muslim girls as fully autonomous agents, and they miss the function of social inequalities in the politics of headscarf wearing. To address these gaps, in Chapter 2 I look at the concept of universal citizenship in France. In Chapter 3 I examine the history of laicite and the hard line interpretation of laicite that led to the headscarf ban. The concept of universal citizenship, combined with the hard line interpretation of laicite, induced the French state to expect Muslim girls to be abstractly autonomous. In Chapter 4 I review the literature on personal autonomy and analyze the autonomy of the headscarf wearing girls in France. Muslim girls cannot be autonomous by the French definition of abstract autonomy. Abstract autonomy is an unrealistic ideal, difficult to achieve for most individuals, because it does not take into account the external conditions for autonomous agency. Furthermore, the French state does not provide the external conditions to enable Muslim girls to achieve autonomous agency; it ignores the social structural inequalities affecting the autonomy of Muslim girls. Abstract autonomy forces Muslim girls to take on a symbolic role in which they are seen as representatives of Islam, whether they want to be or not. Thus, abstract autonomy undermines the political agency of Muslim girls in two ways overlooked by previous analyses. First, they cannot be seen as agents highlighting social inequalities. Second, they cannot bring concerns about such inequalities into the public sphere because their cultural group belonging delegitimizes those concerns.