EDUCATION FOR ALL!
By: Women'S March Paris
Tags: France, Muslim, Feminism

Taken from Wikimedia Commons

The French Senate has just voted to ban parents who wear the hijab from participating in school trips. This barely cloaked expression of state-sanctioned Islamophobia and misogyny is an extension of an earlier racist law. On March 15, 2004, the French government banned the wearing of headscarves in public schools. While the law purported to promote secularism, by technically prohibiting the display of “conspicuous religious symbols,” it was clear that Muslims were the target. This is our translation of a French text written by Nta Rajel?, a collective of North African decolonial feminists, in which those affected by the law share their perspectives.

15 years after the French law banning headscarves in public schools: Muslim women who wear the hijab express themselves on the consequences

March 15, 2004 to March 15, 2019.

Women who were no more than girls when the law was passed can now express themselves regarding the law’s consequences!

Women’s rights are under constant threat. In the face of France’s 2004 law prohibiting the display of religious symbols, and most notably the headscarf, in public schools, we can and must clearly state that progress towards rights for all women has taken a step backward.

The crucial first step in this process is recognition. We must recognize women who wear the hijab as fully fledged human beings, acknowledge their humanity, view them as people who are free to reason, act, and think. We must recognize the discriminatory nature of this law, the way that it codifies — let us come out and say it — Islamophobia and sexism.

Whatever the law’s intended goal, 15 years after its passage, we can clearly see its results: the exclusion of all young women who “do not conform to the civility of [French] society”, to quote the words of Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. The consequences are ethnic profiling, abuses of power, the violation of rights, harassment in school, and innumerable inhuman humiliations. The consequences are young women that are pushed to renounce their right to an education, the marginalization of a whole segment of society, people deprived of the right to a self-identity, who are placed under the “guardianship” of the government and its institutions, who claim that they will help their “wards” think for themselves. The consequences are a social climate that encourages Islamophobic and gender-based violence, constant employment discrimination, and almost insurmountable socioeconomic vulnerability.

Because they are visibly Muslim, girls are being deprived of their right to an education, which is the mother of emancipation.

The law of 2004 created fertile ground for an abundance of legislation that specifically targets Muslim women. So much harm has been inflicted by pointless debates about hijabi mothers on school trips, skirts that are “too long”, burkinis, and, more recently, Décathlon’s running hijab, all in a country where there is a clichéd defense of women’s rights on both the right and left.

But who is watching out for the rights of young women who wear the hijab, whose background often involves post-colonial immigration, who are members of a religion that is considered to be external to or a taint on the values of the French Republic? Who are the primary victims of Islamophobia? Who are these women whom France is seeking to liberate from the islamopatriarchy all while simultaneously preventing them from getting an education?

These women, they are us.

They are Muslim women who wear the hijab, and some of them face double discrimination. On the one hand, black visibly Muslim women are exposed to the same Islamophobic violence as non-black visibly Muslim women. On the other hand, their identity as Muslims is denied, and they are excluded and erased. Indeed, in contrast to mainstream representations, Muslim women who wear the hijab are very diverse.

Here, we are talking about all the hijab-wearing girls who have been educated since 2004. They have inherited the painful burden of French and world history, in which there were campaigns to forcibly remove women’s headscarves. They are the descendants of the indigenous people who were the victims of these campaigns during the colonial period. Our grandmothers had to uncover themselves to be “good” native people, and we must uncover ourselves to be “good” French citizens. We refuse to accept this colonial and patriarchal legacy. We refuse to be relegated to the rank of second-class citizens. We refuse to let anyone “help” us gain freedom because we are very much capable of liberating ourselves. We have no need for universal feminism and its paternalism, nor for the intervention of the French government, whose sole concern is that we stay invisible. The French government imprisons us, and universal feminism is complicit, since it prefers to fight Islam rather than the patriarchy.

Supposedly in the name of women’s rights and a secularism that protects the religious beliefs of all, we are being prevented from studying, working, and simply existing in public spaces. It is time to take a long, hard long at the social and political consequences of our behavior, our tolerance, which is oh so great in the face of a law that is unworthy of a country that preaches equality for all.

In 2019, no woman should have to call into question her own identity or conform to the so-called civility of French society to exercise her right to an education. No young woman should be stigmatized because of her gender or her religion. No woman should have to choose between her personal convictions and her right to an education.

There must be an end to this French shamelessness!

Erased, marginalized, and brutalized, we are determined to resist.