Can multiculturalism prevail as long as women wear the veil? Is the assimilation travail to no avail? Did I mention the veil?

By Bridget Purcell

“There must be something about the Jews; they upset me physically.” This is how Sartre summarized the anti-Semite’s position in his 1946 indictment of anti-Semitism, Reflexion sur la Question Juive. This argument, which he encountered “thousands of times” in mid-20th century Europe, cites feelings of discomfort with Jewish culture as evidence that there is something objectively alien and suspicious about it. Sixty years later, a similar logic runs through the debate over the place of Muslims in European culture. Last week, Tony Blair supported Jack Straw’s opposition to the full-face veil, because it “makes people from outside the community feel uncomfortable.” Such statements appeal to passions and fears, but never make any sense; as Sartre pointed out, no one would seriously suggest that “there must be something about tomatoes, for I have a horror of eating them.”

Like Straw before him, Blair partly disclaimed his position by saying that he was merely expressing his feelings—which he is certainly welcome to do in a liberal democracy. Neither Straw nor Blair aims to change public policy: “no one wants to say that they don’t have the right to [wear veils]; that is to take it too far.” This is a slippery rhetorical strategy, which enables Blair to chime in on certain politically-charged issues while remaining ostensibly apolitical. But such a neat bifurcation between the Prime Minister’s personal (yet very publicly stated) views and his stance on public policy is crudely disingenuous.

In past months—and particularly since these remarks were issued—there has been a storm of editorials proclaiming nothing less than the death of European multiculturalism. The presumed failure of Muslims to assimilate both bespeaks the naivete of liberalism and proves that there is something fundamentally wrong with Muslim culture. On October 12th, the Remarque Institute at NYU hosted an event to discuss multiculturalism and the assimilation of Muslims in Dutch society. Frits Bolkestein, a prominent Dutch politician, advanced the view that “Islamic civilization” was inferior to “Western civilization” and that Muslims had failed to integrate due to a stagnated and backward faith. He cited unemployment and crime statistics in order to prove the inherent “social depravation” of Muslim immigrants. There was no mention of how this reflects on the Netherlands’ ability to assimilate immigrants or its institutional inequalities. Instead, historically contingent social problems were consistently reified and turned into essential features of Islamic “civilization.” Such decontextualized criticisms can be (and have been) made of any minority group, such as African Americans in the U.S. or, as the mayor of London recently pointed out, Jews in Europe.

At the center of this controversy is a strip of fabric that covers the faces of a tiny minority of women in a tiny minority group in Europe. It remains largely unexamined why there is such a disproportionate emphasis on the veil (granted, it was a useful metaphor before the thousands of books and articles on the Middle East titled “lifting the veil” or “behind the veil” or “unveiling” this or that.) Focusing on the niqab as a central semiotic in the struggle between “Islam” and “the West” is part of a broader strategy to indict Islam from the standpoint of women’s rights. It is often taken for granted that conservative religion in general—and Islam in particular—is somehow “bad” for women. At the Remarque event, for instance, women’s rights kept getting thrown into the discussion in a kind of unexamined, laundry-list way: Muslims hate free speech, are stuck in the past, and, by the way, repress women. In this rhetoric, the veil becomes the symbol of this repression, and removing it the first step toward empowerment. Jack Straw said that most women he asked to remove their veil “seemed relieved” to do so. He rhetorically positions himself in the role of liberator. He thus joins a dubious list of proponents for Muslim women’s rights, from Salman Rushdie to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Rick Santorum (who, judging by his record of domestic legislation, is to women’s rights roughly what a wolf is to the sheep’s pen.) Without obscuring the fact that many women are in fact oppressed by repressive religious (and secular) traditions, we must recognize and resist the marshalling of feminist rhetoric to enforce an essentially xenophobic agenda. This means rethinking assumptions about women, faith and agency. Thankfully, feminists like Saba Mahmood are already on it.