BANLIEUE IS THE NEW KASBAH: THE CIVILIZING MISSION AND THE FRENCH HEADSCARF/BURQA AFFAIRS

Abstract

When Jacques Chirac proclaimed that “Wearing a veil…is a sort of aggression,” he was reflecting not only the French association of the veil with radical Islamism, but a history of racist attitudes towards Islam and the veil that was shaped by French colonialism in North Africa.  This paper seeks to explore some of the reproductions and displacements of those attitudes to France’s headscarf affair and burqa controversy.  It also aims to draw some analogies between Muslims and the veil during the colonial era and present-day France, as well as point out some inconsistencies in the arguments favoring the headscarf and (proposed) burqa bans. By drawing analogies to the colonial era and exploring propagations of colonial attitudes to the veil, we characterized the headscarf ban—and by extension, the burqa ban—as a modern-day civilizing mission directed towards France’s Muslim population.