Beneath the veil: Muslim girls and the Islamic headscarf in secular France

Abstract

The ‘affair of the headscarf’ in France was a complex and controversial series of events involving Muslim schoolgirls who were expelled from their secular public schools. In practice, many were expelled simply for insisting on their right to wear the Islamic headscarf while at school. However, the administrative courts consistently ruled that wearing the headscarf was not incompatible with principles of secularism. As this article shows, the events and subsequent legal cases brought by many Muslim schoolgirls following their expulsion highlighted and indeed in some cases exacerbated disadvantages to which some of the girls were already subject. Public debates in relation to the affair had the effect of marginalising and even excluding Muslim girls from public discourse. Nonetheless, the schoolgirls’ own attitudes in relation to wearing the headscarf are noteworthy, since in many cases their attitudes were profoundly associated with the girls’ own sense of identify and cultural affiliations.