Abstract
The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible.
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Notes
The burkini is swimwear used by some Muslim women which covers the whole body except for the face, hands and feet.
It is worth noting that while in the last two centuries the meaning of the veil as a ‘sign of’ Muslim women’s oppression remained unchanged in western culture, in Muslim-majority societies veiling is an immanent and performative ever-changing phenomenon which takes different meanings, colours and forms in different cultural and historical contexts (Ahmed 1992; Sedgwick 2006; Mernissi 1991; El Guindi 1999; Bodman and Tohidi 1998).
Critiques of Mahmood’s work point out that, through her empiricism in defining how different cultures experience life, she falls into the same essentialism that she tries to avoid (Waggoner 2005; Ismail 2007). For Bangstad (2011), for instance, the problem of Mahmood’s analysis is that she places pious women in Cairo as the embodiment of a ‘radical alterity’ creating a binary (essentialized) opposition between ‘pious women’ and the ‘western/liberal’ self. He argues that Mahmood falls into a kind of ‘religio-centrism’ and cultural relativism as her anthropological analysis is limited to women in the mosque and does not take into consideration the emergence of Egyptian Salafism; failing, in this way, to historicise the practice of pious women in Egypt. In this light, Jacobsen (2011) points out that in the Norwegian context ‘piety’ is not in opposition to the secular/liberal model; rather, the subjectivity of ‘pious’ Muslim women in Norway is shaped by the intersection of a different concept of the self. Similarly, Butler (2013) argues that Mahmood moves within a monolithic (secular) normative framework which creates a tension between ‘on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the subject as dispossessed in transcendence’ (p. 119): this, in turn, assumes a generalized secular ontology of the subject. Although I agree with Butler that secularism is not monolithic in its ontology, what I found particularly interesting in Mahmood’s (2013) work is that she detects certain (secular) ‘modular arrangements and practices that have come to be identified with modern secularity (such as the ideological separation of church and state or privatization of religion) that give secularism a certain coherence and structure’ (pp. 146–47). As a matter of fact, all European legal decisions over the practice of veiling rely on the same assumptions. In my analysis, Mahmood’s work is particularly relevant since, as I shall argue, the regulation of the headscarf in Europe emerges through a specific normative definition of religion and the ‘proper’ form of religiosity in the public sphere. Drawing on Jacobsen (2011) and Jouili (2011), who problematize liberal/secular assumptions without reducing ‘pious women’ as ‘the other’ from liberalism, I argue that Islam is a discursive tradition (Asad 1993; Mahmood 2013) intertwined with many (contextual) factors and its discursive power changes based on specific contexts and power relations. Through Mahmood’s analysis, I do not want to dismiss semiotic processes or essentialize (or binarize) the category of secular and religious (or ‘pious’ and ‘western/liberal’ values), but to explore practices that do not fall in the western/secular semiotic ideology of the understanding of ‘signs’; that is, not in terms of opposition but in terms of ‘difference’. In my analysis I use Mahmood’s work to show veiling as a ‘speech-act’ that performs different work on the creation of the ‘modern’ religious subject: in showing this, I suggest that secular/liberal normative assumptions are inadequate when applied to different discursive traditions. In essence, while trying to avoid essentialization, I use Mahmood’s work to show how verbal and non-verbal practices cannot always be understood through a western theory of representation and semiotic. I also draw on Rappaport (1999) who argues that cultural order is not static; rather, it continuously changes through the performative repetition of fixed rituals by individuals who, by giving a different significance to it, render the cultural order ‘fluent’. For him the ‘ultimate postulate’ is nothing other than signifier without signified. These signifiers are transmitted through ‘fixed ritual practices’ to which the individual gives different significance based on his/her personal concerns.
I have chosen to use this term because I see a continuation between Christianity and the secular (see Kantorowicz 1957; Diamantides 2012). I also draw on Asad (2006a) for whom ‘the ideological roots of modern secularism lie in Christian universalism’ (p. 516) and Merz (2015) who argues that notions of the religious and secular should be applied in order to discuss their dynamic relationship.
As Vakulenko (2012) argues, the western feminist ‘has been successful in making (a certain understanding of) gender equality an unconditional normative value against which all gender practices, including Islamic veiling, are to be assessed’ (p. 13).
As I shall argue, Jivraj (2013) sees in this contraposition between a ‘tolerant’ Christian and an ‘intolerant’ Islam a racialization of religion which favours Christian belief over others.
It is worth pointing out that the ‘iteration’ of practices involves also a resignification of the meaning of those practices (Benhabib 2006). Although Mahmood shows the heterogeneity of Islamic discourses and subject formation, critiques of her work alert us that revivalist Islam is not the most powerful dimension of Muslim thought and identity (Masquelier 2010; Osanloo 2009; Marsden 2007; Soares and Otayek 2007). In my analysis, Mahmood’s work is relevant in comprehending different ways to understand religious performative practices. I do not contend that all Muslims experience religion in the same way; rather, that there are many ways to live, understand and interpret religion and religious practices.
In discussing ‘piety’ (pietas) I draw on Turner (2008) who argues that ‘acts of piety do not simply reproduce habits, but rather challenge existing arrangements both secular and religious…In this respect…acts of piety in empowering people characteristically involve some challenge to the existing order or “city”’ (p. 125).
As McClure (1990) argues, the idea that religion is primarily a ‘private belief’ emerged in the eighteenth century and was strictly connected to the notion of ‘worldly harm’ and the proper management and governance of the emergent nation-state in Europe.
Weir (2013) suggests Mahmood’s analysis might lead to a feminist re-conceptualization of freedom.
As Vakulenko (2012) argues, the concept of autonomy has been the main domain through which we can read gender equality and freedom of religion: the ‘obsessive scrutiny of Muslim women’s autonomy is unhelpful as it assumes as belief in absolute free choice, which hinders one’s ability to live out one’s agency meaningfully and relate to the world around’ (p. 13).
In an interesting analysis of the recent judgments relating to Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, Motha and Jones (2015) argue that ‘sovereign power operates by attributing signs to bodies whose localization offshore is central to the production of their juridical status and that of the sovereign authority they come in contact with’ (p. 255).
The Stasi Commission has been set up by the French Government in order to investigate the application of the principle of laicité in France.
Article 9.2 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or belief shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’.
As Vakulenko (2012) argues, the ‘currently dominant model of secularism…represents a rather particular historical formation and political rationality [in this view]…secularism…encourage certain “compartmentalisation” and transformation of religion, rather than its total eradication’ (p. 14).
Baroness Hale quoting Frances Raday, ‘Culture, Religion, and Gender’ (2003) 1 International Journal of Constitutional Law 663, 709.
Lewis (2004, 1996) and others (Abu-Lughod 2001; Yegenoglu 1998) have pointed out that the racialization of religion derives from orientalist discourses in which gender plays an important role. Similarly, for Mahmood (2012a, b), the discourse of religious freedom was, from its inception, intertwined with western forms of political power. She traces the legal discourse of ‘religious liberty’ within the framework of the colonial project and explains that the notion of ‘religious minority’ does not refers to a group protected by the law, but to a category produced by the legal codification of the principle of ‘religious minority’.
Herman and Jivraj (2011) have argued that ‘judges deploy three distinct yet, occasionally, overlapping approaches to understanding non-christianness: (1) as belief and ritual practice; (2) as racial genetic marker; and (3) as culture and personal identity’ (p. 286).
It is worth pointing out that for Jivraj (2013) the concept of non-Christian religions was, from its inception, not only a modern and onto-theological concept, but also a racialized one, brought into being predominantly from a European Christian thought. Along with it, Masuzawa (2005) and others have argued that a key effect of this scholarship has been the emergence of an ‘epistemic regime or way of thinking about and understanding non-European Christians’ (p. xii). In this way, the racialized notions of ‘non-Christianness’ becomes part of a wider political project of a ‘modern European identity’ construction (Masuzawa 2005; Miles and Brown 2003).
Motha (2007) sees in the limitation of Muslim women’s personal freedom a tension between ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’. Through an analysis of the formation of the ‘sacred’ in secular thought, he argues that ‘the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy stems… from the inability to sustain a political formation either by monistic authority (of God, monarch, or its modern variation as ‘people’), or by the various hetero-nomic formations of political community determined by history (class and labour), religion, culture, or ethno-nationality’ (p. 145). In this light, European legal decisions over the practice of veiling reveal the paradoxes of secular theology which ‘manifests the constitutive limits of liberal democracy’ (p. 160) as ‘it cannot guarantee its own law by its own means unless the autonomy of the political is always already heteronomous’ (p. 162).
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Baldi, G. ‘Burqa Avenger’: Law and Religious Practices in Secular Space. Law Critique 29, 31–56 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9208-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9208-5