Valérie Amiraux

Discours Voilés Sur Les Musulmanes En Europe: Comment Les Musulmans Sont-ils Devenus Des Musulmanes?

Islam has for a long time been perceived as a purely male religion. This is no longer the case nowadays in Europe. Various elements have helped the “feminization” of Islam in Europe, in particular at the level of its public reception. The veil affairs are among these. Political and scientific discourses have played a role in explaining that wearing the veil could be interpreted differently as the symbol of anti-modernity and backwardness. At the centre of this public dimension of veil affairs, a young woman pops up. She was born in the European country of which she is also a citizen. She belongs to various circles of socialization, not exclusively Islamic ones. Her faith is chosen, assumed and claimed. In a way, she reminds us of some Islamic militancies in the “societies of origin”. Can we consider the two sides of this commitment to a religious activism in public in a comparative perspective? What could then be learned as far as the public perception of Muslim women in Europe is concerned?

Discrimination in Comparative Perspective: Policies and Practices

This introduction to a pluridisciplinary comparative analysis of European antidiscrimination policies and practices provides a critical assessment of current European empirical developments and the analytical issues that they raise. The authors’ argument builds upon the tension between the improvement of the protection of rights to equal treatment and the intensification of xenophobia in the European Union. Can proequality policies developed in a hostile context make a difference? The first part of the introduction provides an analytical framework to account for the emergence and implementation of an antidiscrimination policy framework in the European Union. The second part assesses the limits of this new paradigm in particular as far as the categorization and measurement of discrimination are concerned. It focuses on the broader impact of the development of antidiscrimination policies and jurisprudence and on the way “vulnerable populations” have made use of it.

Visibility, transparency and gossip: How did the religion of some (Muslims) become the public concern of others?

Over the last 30 years, the publicly visible “otherness” embodied by the Muslim population in the member states of the European Union has sparked movements of transnational public discussions mainly driven by the fear of the collapse of “national cohesion.” This paper engages theoretically with the idea that these debates have become an ordinary trap for European publics, France being the main illustration in the text. It is more specifically concerned with the discussions surrounding the recent ban on the wearing of the full veil in French public space, asking: what does the omnipresence of public discussions about religious otherness reveal of the national culture of citizenship? What are the epistemological and political implications of the evaluation of daily individual experiences as criminal in secular contexts? The text develops some speculative readings of the public experience arising from the visibility of Islamic religious signs and the capital attached to their visibility.

The ‘illegal covering’ saga: what's next? Sociological perspectives

Over the course of the last thirty years, the publicly visible ‘otherness’ embodied by the Muslim population in the member states of the European Union has sparked movements of transnational moral panic mainly driven by the fear of the collapse of ‘national cohesion’. Generally however, these fears, shared internationally, always become more pronounced when women are at the center of their focus. Islamic womens attire, whatever the terminology used to describe it – veil, scarf, and more recently, ‘burqa’, to designate a garment fully covering the body – is presented as an increasingly delicate problem, an issue at the center of legal battles and the subject of virulent political controversies in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This conclusion is more specifically concerned with the ‘public texture’ of the discussions surrounding the recent ban on the wearing of the full veil in European public spaces as analyzed by the contributors to this special issue. It aims to engage in the conversation about the epistemological and political implications of the evaluation of daily, individual experiences through a legal framework and classifying them as problematic in secular contexts, or even criminalizing them.

Religious Discrimination: Muslims Claiming Equality in the EU

Let’s imagine a young woman queuing for her first visit to a job center. She has dark skin and wears a colorful headscarf. She is carrying a file on which her long oriental name is written. It is longer than the line she had to write it down on. Without following her through the complexities of job center administration, what do you think you would notice first as a ‘white’ non-Muslim spectator of the scene? Her gender, her different skin color, her ethnic origin, or her religious affiliation as indicated by the headscarf? Which is the most visible of these signs? Where is difference more striking? Let’s now suppose that the dialogue with the job center officer is aggressive and ends up with the young girl crying and the officer yelling at her that she will never be accepted as a job seeker in Britain. What could be the motive? Her bad English? Not having correctly filled in the required forms? An arbitrary decision by the employee not to assist her for racist reasons? Let’s now imagine that the young woman with the headscarf goes to court and claims discrimination, what would be the most efficient criterion to promote in her case: gender, race, ethnicity, religion? What would be the grounds for helping her to get reparation and for asking that justice be done? Is there any clear and distinguished reason at all for explaining the bad treatment of which she has been the victim?

Turkish Islamic Associations in Germany and the Issue of European Citizenship

Most research on questions of immigration and Europe regard immigrants as victims of ‘obscure forces they cannot understand’ (Leveau, 1989). These studies usually focus upon common European policies concerning the flow of immigrants, the uniformity of naturalisation requirements, or the definition of the right to asylum. In the following study, I choose an alternative point of view, not only dealing with the political management of the presence of foreign populations in Europe, but also studying the reactions of immigrant people themselves to the construction of the idea of ‘Europe’ and especially to the setting up of one of the most controversial aspects of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the definition of European citizenship. Such an approach is premised on the idea that every study concerning migration necessarily involves structural issues such as citizenship, nationality, the capacity of nation-states as host-countries to assimilate a certain number of persons into the national area, and the recognition or acceptance of collective mediation.

Citoyens, piété et démocratie. Réflexions sur l’occultation des corps croyants, l’intimité et le droit au secret

This article is based on ongoing fieldwork conducted in France and Quebec with Muslim women who stopped wearing a headscarf. It offers a puzzle for reflection: what is achieved when a sign of religious affiliation disappears (in this instance, wearing a headscarf)? The first part of the article describes the general framework in which public conversations about the visible piety expressed by Muslim women has been discussed in public spaces. The second part looks at the double bind in which Muslim women have been placed by being asked, on the one hand, to be as discrete as possible when expressing their religiosity and, on the other, to behave in full transparency. How and under which conditions can these women ‘find a place’ in the public space (Joseph, 1995) of secular societies? To conclude, the article invites reflection on the role of secrecy, the impossibility as well as the necessity of the secret in society in order to be able to consider the proper room available for pious female citizens in democratic secular societies.

La religion, objet juridique non identifié ? Approches comparées des opérations de droit et de ses effets sur le religieux

Over the last two decades, public discussions on religion, whether national, supranational or international, have emerged increasingly in the juridical arena (courts, tribunals and parliaments). This movement can be observed in North American and European contexts, as well as in North African and Middle-Eastern countries. This special section aims to investigate the following issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective: (1) The legitimacy of law, when used as an objective tool, to participate in the interpretation of religion; (2) The distributive effects of this process of interpretation, through its generation of definitions and assessment of the legitimacy of religion, in public and social life. The reflection on the centrality of law in the management of religion is a call for innovative theoretical and empirical research which focuses on the ways various actors engage in situations involving religion (participation, reaction, contestation, etc.).