Part One: Framing the West's Cultural War with Islam
By: Daniel Philpott
January 22, 2015
The horrific shootings on January 7 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris have already ignited the latest round of a culture war that has been roiling in Europe and in democracies elsewhere over the character of Islam. Especially in Europe, the culture war has much to do with the place of domestic Muslim minorities.
One side of the culture war insists on the intrinsic connection between Islamic beliefs and violence and intolerance. It recites a litany of episodes beginning with Iran’s edict against Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s and continuing through the attacks of September 11, 2001, subsequent bombings in London and Madrid, the murder of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in 2004, a violent reaction among Muslims to Danish cartoons, and now this. (For an example of this view’s reaction to the Paris murders, see here.)
The other side insists on the diversity of Islam, allowing that it has an extremist minority but pointing out that other religions do, too. This view criticizes Westerners for being intolerant when they “essentialize” Islam as violent and illiberal. (For an example of this view on the murders, see this.)
This debate does not fall neatly into right versus left. Yes, there are rightists who view Muslims as a threat and leftists who call for tolerance. But there are also leftists—many feminists, for instance—who insist that Islam threatens their values. And there are religious people who line up with conservatives on some key issues yet discern a repressive secularism behind portrayals of Islam as an enemy.
Is there a principle that might garner consensus in this discussion? One of the innovative, boundary-crossing, and most widely discussed contributions to this debate is that of an American professor, Joan Wallach Scott, whose book The Politics of the Veil (2007) explores French public controversies over the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls in France. A historian of France and a pioneer of gender studies, Scott explores intensive public debates that took place in 1989, in 1994, and then in 2003-2004, when the French parliament passed a law against headscarves in public schools.
Just before the law was passed, only 14 percent of Muslim girls were discovered to wear the religious garb, Scott points out. Why, then, the outcry? Scott makes a compelling case that the issue says more about the French than it does about Muslims. It is hard to deny that the public reaction to Muslim dress arose in part from the litany of violent incidents that one side of the culture war cites, particularly the attacks of September 11, which preceded the passage of France’s law. With the view that Islam is regressive, Belgium, Holland, Australia, and Bulgaria have proposed similar legislation, while Turkey has long prohibited headscarves in a wide variety of institutions. Scott, however, raises questions about this explanation, pointing out—as the other side of the culture war does—that Islamists and violent extremists are a tiny minority of Muslims.
A far better explanation for the controversy, Scott believes, is the devotion of the French to their culture, most of all their republican ideology, which they believe to be universally valid. The hallmarks of this ideology are individualism and secularism, values that the French Revolution played a historically pivotal role in advancing. Many French view Islam as a threat to both values. Islam, they believe, is repressively communal, socializing schoolgirls into subordination. Furthermore, Islam is religious, contrary to the Enlightenment values of openness, self-definition, science, and rationality.
Scott’s crucial move is to call France’s universalism into question; these values, she claims, are France’s, not everyone’s. When French ideology is touted as universal, it ends up excluding non-European residents of European countries, much in the spirit of colonialism. Secularism is central to the problem. As promoted in the wake of the French Revolution, France’s version of secularism—which came to be known as laïcité—was not one of religious openness but rather one of religious skepticism, whose proponents sought to render as France’s national philosophy. In the nineteenth century, France’s culture war was fought between the Catholic Church and allied monarchists on one side and the Republicans legatees of the Revolution on the other. The Republicans largely won, especially in the realm of education, which both sides viewed as the battleground for shaping souls. Through a series of legislative enactments beginning in 1879 with the “Ferry laws” and culminating in the 1905 Law on the Separation of Churches and the State, France vastly reduced the place of the Catholic Church in education, asserted sharp state control over the Church and its institutions (with complexities such as allowing the Church to choose its bishops), and even expelled priests from the country.
To this day, the 1905 law—and its national project of incubating new French men and women as secular Republicans—defines France’s governance of religion. It is these institutions and these ideas that the French came to view as threatened by Muslim girls who wore headscarves inside public schools, the chief sites of secular incubation.
Scott responds to these controversies by arguing for the toleration of headscarves in the name of a notion of democracy that protects differences rather than assimilates people. As the pages turned, I came to identify Scott as a member of a recently emergent school of scholars, including Talal Asad, William Connolly, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood, and Peter Danchin, who sharply criticize the exclusiveness of Enlightenment secularism from the standpoint of post-modern thought, which rejects universals and promotes respect for differences. Criticism of universalism is a leitmotif that runs through Scott’s book.
Scott’s respect for religious differences is not as capacious as it might seem at first. She pointedly criticizes American evangelicals, for instance, for their patriarchy, their desire to impose creationism in the schools, and their threat to open democracy, rights of contraception and abortion, and the place of women in general. Consistent with Scott’s overall argument, she roots the problem with evangelicals not only in the character of their convictions but also in their belief in the universality and immutability of their convictions.
Does Scott offer a way forward Europe’s (and the West’s) culture war over Islam? Her critique of France’s restriction of headscarves is incisive. France’s attempt to establish skeptical secularism as its national philosophy through managing and marginalizing religion contradicts its own commitments to openness and free thought. A nation cannot very well promote basic liberties of thought and expression and then curtail religious versions. In France, such an approach has elicited resentment and marginalization, not integration and equality.
Scott’s critique crosses the boundaries of the culture wars insofar as it is both sympathetic to religion and skeptical of certain western pretentions to universality. Does she point the way forward to a basis for inclusion of Muslims in Western societies and an alternative to the culture war over Islam that besets France and the West? Here, her analysis proves far less promising.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is Part One of a two-part blog series which was originally written for the Religious Freedom Project's Cornerstone blog as a response to a series on Muslim minorities in Europe.
The other side insists on the diversity of Islam, allowing that it has an extremist minority but pointing out that other religions do, too. This view criticizes Westerners for being intolerant when they “essentialize” Islam as violent and illiberal. (For an example of this view on the murders, see this.)
This debate does not fall neatly into right versus left. Yes, there are rightists who view Muslims as a threat and leftists who call for tolerance. But there are also leftists—many feminists, for instance—who insist that Islam threatens their values. And there are religious people who line up with conservatives on some key issues yet discern a repressive secularism behind portrayals of Islam as an enemy.
Is there a principle that might garner consensus in this discussion? One of the innovative, boundary-crossing, and most widely discussed contributions to this debate is that of an American professor, Joan Wallach Scott, whose book The Politics of the Veil (2007) explores French public controversies over the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls in France. A historian of France and a pioneer of gender studies, Scott explores intensive public debates that took place in 1989, in 1994, and then in 2003-2004, when the French parliament passed a law against headscarves in public schools.
Just before the law was passed, only 14 percent of Muslim girls were discovered to wear the religious garb, Scott points out. Why, then, the outcry? Scott makes a compelling case that the issue says more about the French than it does about Muslims. It is hard to deny that the public reaction to Muslim dress arose in part from the litany of violent incidents that one side of the culture war cites, particularly the attacks of September 11, which preceded the passage of France’s law. With the view that Islam is regressive, Belgium, Holland, Australia, and Bulgaria have proposed similar legislation, while Turkey has long prohibited headscarves in a wide variety of institutions. Scott, however, raises questions about this explanation, pointing out—as the other side of the culture war does—that Islamists and violent extremists are a tiny minority of Muslims.
A far better explanation for the controversy, Scott believes, is the devotion of the French to their culture, most of all their republican ideology, which they believe to be universally valid. The hallmarks of this ideology are individualism and secularism, values that the French Revolution played a historically pivotal role in advancing. Many French view Islam as a threat to both values. Islam, they believe, is repressively communal, socializing schoolgirls into subordination. Furthermore, Islam is religious, contrary to the Enlightenment values of openness, self-definition, science, and rationality.
Scott’s crucial move is to call France’s universalism into question; these values, she claims, are France’s, not everyone’s. When French ideology is touted as universal, it ends up excluding non-European residents of European countries, much in the spirit of colonialism. Secularism is central to the problem. As promoted in the wake of the French Revolution, France’s version of secularism—which came to be known as laïcité—was not one of religious openness but rather one of religious skepticism, whose proponents sought to render as France’s national philosophy. In the nineteenth century, France’s culture war was fought between the Catholic Church and allied monarchists on one side and the Republicans legatees of the Revolution on the other. The Republicans largely won, especially in the realm of education, which both sides viewed as the battleground for shaping souls. Through a series of legislative enactments beginning in 1879 with the “Ferry laws” and culminating in the 1905 Law on the Separation of Churches and the State, France vastly reduced the place of the Catholic Church in education, asserted sharp state control over the Church and its institutions (with complexities such as allowing the Church to choose its bishops), and even expelled priests from the country.
To this day, the 1905 law—and its national project of incubating new French men and women as secular Republicans—defines France’s governance of religion. It is these institutions and these ideas that the French came to view as threatened by Muslim girls who wore headscarves inside public schools, the chief sites of secular incubation.
Scott responds to these controversies by arguing for the toleration of headscarves in the name of a notion of democracy that protects differences rather than assimilates people. As the pages turned, I came to identify Scott as a member of a recently emergent school of scholars, including Talal Asad, William Connolly, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood, and Peter Danchin, who sharply criticize the exclusiveness of Enlightenment secularism from the standpoint of post-modern thought, which rejects universals and promotes respect for differences. Criticism of universalism is a leitmotif that runs through Scott’s book.
Scott’s respect for religious differences is not as capacious as it might seem at first. She pointedly criticizes American evangelicals, for instance, for their patriarchy, their desire to impose creationism in the schools, and their threat to open democracy, rights of contraception and abortion, and the place of women in general. Consistent with Scott’s overall argument, she roots the problem with evangelicals not only in the character of their convictions but also in their belief in the universality and immutability of their convictions.
Does Scott offer a way forward Europe’s (and the West’s) culture war over Islam? Her critique of France’s restriction of headscarves is incisive. France’s attempt to establish skeptical secularism as its national philosophy through managing and marginalizing religion contradicts its own commitments to openness and free thought. A nation cannot very well promote basic liberties of thought and expression and then curtail religious versions. In France, such an approach has elicited resentment and marginalization, not integration and equality.
Scott’s critique crosses the boundaries of the culture wars insofar as it is both sympathetic to religion and skeptical of certain western pretentions to universality. Does she point the way forward to a basis for inclusion of Muslims in Western societies and an alternative to the culture war over Islam that besets France and the West? Here, her analysis proves far less promising.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is Part One of a two-part blog series which was originally written for the Religious Freedom Project's Cornerstone blog as a response to a series on Muslim minorities in Europe.
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