In many Western nations, Muslims are experiencing legal battles over whether women have a right to wear sectarian Muslim dress - specifically, a hijab which largely covers a women from head to toe. Sometimes the dress is defended on cultural grounds, sometimes on religious grounds. Should Muslims be able to wear it or are there reasons to prevent it?

In In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Milton Viorst writes:

The standard Muslim defense of the hejab holds that it is not religious symbol but a cultural artifact, linked to Muslim history. Larb Kechat told me — disingenuously, I thought — that it reflects the differences between the West’s physical sense of beauty, acquired from the Greeks, and the more abstract notions of the East, where the highest art form is calligraphy.

A mantra of the pro-hejab forces asks why, if one teenager can attend classes in a miniskirt or torn jeans, another can’t attend in hejab? There was no easy answer. Playing on a perceived weak spot in egalitarian ideology, the hejab’s defenders proclaim that to deny to Muslim women a freedom of dress that is guaranteed to everyone else in France is pure racism.

The standard French counterargument, its roots embedded in the revolution of 1789, is that the schools have a mission to neutralize religious differences and imbue students with a common dedication to French culture. One prominent scholar wrote that French education “is incompatible with the preservation of immigrant cultures. We preach the universality of mankind.” French intellectuals link the hejab to tribalism, seeing it as a barrier to the very integration that Muslims claim to desire.

There is some tension between defending the hijab on religious grounds and defending it on cultural grounds. If it’s defended on cultural grounds, Muslims admit that it isn’t a religious requirement, such that preventing women from wearing it entails forcing women to disobey their religious beliefs. This is the most honest defense because it’s obvious that Islam doesn’t really impose such requirements on women — the hijab is a cultural artifact from the Arabian deserts, not religious garb. At the same time, though, the religious argument may be strongest because it’s harder for the state to justify forcing people to go against their religious beliefs

Religious or cultural, though, what possible arguments are there for the state to be able to interfere? Why should something like the hijab be singled out for banning? If nothing else, the hijab is a symbol and symbols have meaning. If part of the meaning is the second-class status of women, then the state has a legitimate interest in not allowing such ideas to be promoted in public spaces where the state is in control — this would include spaces like schools, but not spaces like a public park.

In a liberal democracy, the state has a positive obligation to uphold and promote the civil equality of all citizens, even those citizens who don’t accept their own equality. The state isn’t obligated to treat all messages or ideas as completely equal in all contexts. The state may not be allowed to discriminate against certain messages in places like streets and sidewalks, but public schools and government offices are different. If messages of inequality and discrimination are given equal status there, then the state is effectively endorsing them and that isn’t acceptable.

 

Quick Poll: Do you agree with the decision of the French government to ban "conspicuous religious symbols," a measure aimed primarily at the headscarves of Muslim girls?

1. Yes - it's necessary to maintain French secularism.
2. No - it infringes on religious freedom and/or it will only make things worse.
3. I don't know / don't care.

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