A veil of controversy

A decade ago in France, debate over Muslim girls attending school in hidjebs erupted into ‘l'affaire du tchador’. As the controversy raged in the press, a community of nations was coming together in western Europe, while communist regimes throughout eastern Europe were falling apart. Perhaps most significantly, a divided Germany was in the process of reuniting. This article mounts an applique of clippings to suggest that there is a correlation between the polemics over the hidjeb in France and these larger events simultaneously transpiring across Europe. Discursive opposition to the wearing of the hidjeb commonly took the form of claims that this practice transgressed two tenets of French republican tradition: that of equality (in this case of women) and that of secularism. This study contends that the widespread invocation of these values as inalienable French principles can be powerfully challenged. To arrive at such an understanding, it seeks out the hidden shape of that which presented itself as one-d...