The reasons for outrage over the sartorial choices of such a small subset of the population can be traced to French colonial history, Scott contends. Finally, these girls were wearing a form of hijab that only covers the hair and neck they were not wearing niqab, the burqa, or other forms of the veil that obscure the face and render the wearer difficult to identify.
Their use of religious garb as a form of pious expression was both fully autonomous and entirely personal. These young women had not been pressured into hijab by their fathers, brothers, imams, or local community, but instead had selected to wear the headscarf as an individual choice. In addition, several of the girls who were involved in setting off the debates had voluntarily adopted the headscarf. There was not a sudden influx of veiled immigrant girls filling French schools.
Scott notes that very few girls – a tiny minority – were wearing headscarves to school. If differences are not documented, they do not exist from a legal point of view, and so they do not have to be tolerated, let alone celebrated.” Because of this, “o official statistics are kept on the ethnicities or religions of the population. Secularity is designed to protect French citizens from any claims of institutionalized religion (in contrast to the American and British systems, which protect religion from the interference of government). Instead of being given legal protections based on differences, all are considered first and foremost French citizens, with the underlying ideal that French nationality comes before any other marker of identity. In the French legal system, unlike the American or British, differences of religion (as well as race, sex, etc.) are formally unacknowledged. Scott explains that the headscarf ban was justified by appeals to the French republican ideal of secularism. In reality, Scott contends, the headscarf ban typifies the roiling undercurrents of anti-Muslim racism endemic to contemporary French society. She challenges the government’s assertion that headscarves represent chauvinism, sexism, repressive patriarchy, and “anti-modernism” and that they are therefore antithetical to the egalitarian ideals of the French republic. Joan Wallach Scott introduces The Politics of the Veil, about the 2004 headscarf debates in France, with a telling sentence: “This is not a book about French Muslims it is about the dominant French view of them.” Writing in highly accessible prose, Scott examines the political firestorm surrounding the official French ban on headscarves for girls under the age of eighteen in public schools.
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