Your Headscarf, Our Choice: Muslim Women and the Right to Veil in Europe

By Sahar Ahmed

In October 2021, the Council of Europe released posters as part of a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination. Slogans across the posters ranged from ‘Beauty is in diversity as freedom is in hijab’ to ‘My headscarf, My choice’, along with pictures of women - some wearing a headscarf, some not. But promptly following the publicity of these posters, there was loud opposition to them, most notably from France.

Many French politicians condemned the campaign for promoting the wearing of the hijab, arguing that the hijab did not represent freedom. Sarah El-Haïry, France’s Youth Minister, said during an interview on French TV, that the campaign clashed with the secular values of France. The criticism was swift and powerful - enough for the Council of Europe to delete its tweets about the campaign and to take the posters down. Posters, which were part of an anti-hate speech campaign led by the inclusion and anti-discrimination department of the Council of Europe, were apparently far too ‘radical’.

Hande Taner, president of Femyso (a forum of Muslim youth organisations across Europe, which worked on the campaign in collaboration with the Council of Europe), rightly said that this reaction to the posters was “another example of how the rights of Muslim women are non-existent to those who claim to represent or protect notions such as liberty, equality and freedom”.

Muslim women and their right to manifest their religious beliefs through veiling in Europe, have been in the spotlight for a while now, but in 2021 the issue saw such a large amount of action from lawmakers, that anyone trying to keep track of it could be forgiven for thinking this is an unsustainably unwieldy topic. On 7 March 2021, for instance, Switzerland voted in favour of banning face coverings, including the wearing of the burqa and niqab, in public, following a referendum which saw campaign posters reading ‘Stop radical Islam!’ and ‘Stop extremism!’ featuring a woman in a black niqab. Not too far from Switzerland, France passed a controversial ‘anti-separatism’ bill aiming to ‘battle Islamist extremism’ in July 2021. Among other things, the bill facilitates the suspension or closure of Islamic private schools and severely restricts home-schooling, which de facto forces Muslim parents to send their children to public schools which are part of the secular education system, where overt religious symbols like the headscarf are forbidden. It also targets Muslim-run NGOs and forces organisations seeking public funds to sign a ‘Republican contract’, where they state their agreement to abide by the country’s laïcité, or secularism. The anti-separatism bill is a ‘watered-down’ version of the original bill that was initially introduced to the French Senate, which also sought to make it illegal for girls under the age of 18 to wear the hijab in public spaces. If passed, the bill would have been the most recent in a number of legislative measures introduced in France to curtail Muslim women’s clothing.[1]

In the midst of these national legislative efforts to curtail veil-wearing, the European Union’s Court of Justice passed a judgment[2] ruling that “a prohibition on wearing any visible form of expression of political, philosophical or religious beliefs in the workplace may be justified by the employer’s need to present a neutral image towards customers or to prevent social disputes”. This justification included several limitations, specifying that it “must correspond to a genuine need on the part of the employer and, in reconciling the rights and interests at issue, the national courts may take into account the specific context of their Member State and, in particular, more favourable national provisions on the protection of freedom of religion.”

In Europe and much of the Western world, secular laws, rights and freedoms are meant to protect minorities. However, Muslims – one of the fastest-growing religious minorities in Europe - are facing an increasing backlash and Islamophobia.[3] As some scholarship argues, neoliberal democracies are most to blame for the rise in government-based discrimination against religious minorities more generally, and against Muslims and Jews in particular.[4]

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on who you ask), there is no shortage of laws to protect religious minorities and their right to religious freedom anywhere in the world. And yet we constantly see people, especially gendered and sexual minorities, have their rights to manifest their religious beliefs, their rights to pray and worship, violated. The ‘West’ blames the backward ‘Other’, the racialised Muslim, for attacking the secular character of liberal democracies,[5] often pointing to Muslim-majority, Black and Brown countries, to highlight how intolerant Islam and its adherents are of other belief systems.

We’ve seen this many times before and most prominently in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in cases like those of Dahlab,[6] the famous Swiss hijab-in-classroom case, as well as those of Leyla Sahin,[7]Ebrahimian,[8] and eventually SAS,[9] which captured the popular imagination and media headlines. In these and similar cases brought before the ECHR or national courts and legislatures of the European Union’s constituent states, we can trace a continued emphasis on narratives that portray Muslim women as oppressed because of their religion, and the veil - either in its hijab or niqab forms - as being an explicit visual manifestation of Muslim women’s oppression and gender inequality. These judgments, and others like them, display a widespread belief amongst European legislative bodies that there is a need to protect young minds from the hijab and therefore from the supposed oppressive gender modes and gender inequalities it represents and engenders. Thus, the argument for not wanting impressionable students to be influenced by hijab wearing teachers was coded in particularly violent language in the case of Dahlab. It is this kind of thinking, reified in the Swiss hijab-in-classroom law, (inter alia) that culminated in the Swiss ban.

France is currently reproducing a similar line of argument. France’s stated intention in opposing the Council of Europe’s campaign on diversity and inclusion pretends to protect secular French society and its women from the ‘oppressive and regressive ideologies’ of Islam. The repeated emphasis on the discourse of ‘oppressive and regressive ideologies’ shows that the ECHR, and a number of European governments have a monolithic and Orientalist understanding of Islam, which fails to recognise the multitude of conceptions that constitute Islam as a real, lived religion practiced by real, ordinary people. What we are left with is courts, governments and legislatures pandering to a political climate which essentialises difference instead of celebrating a diverse and plural society, the attainment and protection of which was the driving force behind fundamental human rights documents such as the one used by the ECHR. We are also left with legal authorities and governments that can’t deal with questions of intersectionality, i.e. that the aggrieved party is not just a Muslim, nor just a woman, but rather a Muslim woman, and that these two identities combined cause her to be more discriminated against in Western society. In other words, as can be attested by Dahlab, Sahin et. al., (all of which were cases against Muslim women), the hijab and its perceived inherent threat to European security is considered in a vacuum, rather than giving due consideration to the applicant and to her social marginalisation as a result of these intersected minoritising identities.

This recent development in France perpetuates outdated stereotypes of Muslim women in Europe. It furthers what the anti-separatism bill emphasises - the importance of so-called ‘living together’. What it effectively does, however, on top of othering and marginalising citizens based on their beliefs, is to create further binaries, building on ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ - them being Black and Brown bodies, further marginalised by gender and religion. We are seeing this right now in the form of hypervigilant surveillance across the EU, with different police forces across the EU and the UK planning to roll out facial recognition technologies that as we know, will probably harm Black and Brown people disproportionately because of biased faulty technology, and its inability to tell Brown and Black faces apart. As human rights experts suggest, we will likely, as a result, witness increased criminalisation of Black and Brown bodies.

Human rights in general are meant to protect those who are marginalised and vulnerable – the right to freedom of religion (including the right to manifest that religion) is no exception. Given this, France’s invocation of human rights in its veil ban is ironic, as is its justification that this veil ban protects the French Republican value of vivre ensemble (“living together”). If one takes a minority faith community, honing in on a minority within that minority (i.e. women within the Muslim community), and one criminalises their behaviour for simply manifesting their religious belief, one forces those women into an untenable situation. These women are forced to choose between breaking a national law and betraying a belief that is protected by international Human Rights legislation, and to sacrifice participation in public life entirely in order to be true to both their faith and their country’s laws. Suddenly there is a lot less ‘living together’ happening and a lot more living apart.

About the author

Sahar Ahmed is an Advocate of the High Courts of Pakistan and a barrister member of The Honourable Society of Gray's Inn. She also has a PhD in Law from Trinity College Dublin.

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Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

Your Headscarf, Our Choice: Muslim Women and the Right to Veil in Europe

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