Burning the Veil - Q&A with author Neil MacMaster

As part of Islamophobia Awareness Month, author Neil MacMaster revisits his 2012 book, Burning the Veil to examine the history of Islamophobia and the policing of Muslim women’s veil during the Algerian war for independence. Get 30% off this title and others from our IAM reading list by using IAM30 at the checkout.

Burning the Veil explores French attempts to ‘emancipate’ Algerian Muslim women during the Algerian war for independence. The history of the veil and its policing is particularly complex. Can you tell us more about how the veil became a symbol of ‘emancipation’ during the Algerian War of Independence.

NM:

The first thing to note is how the term “emancipation”, in scare quotes, refers not to any contemporary form of feminism but to reactionary types of colonial or neo-imperial domination. Eurocentric models of the ‘western’ nuclear family and gender roles were imposed by occupying powers on Muslim society. In this sense the colonial drive to “emancipation”, imported from outside as part of the ‘civilising mission’, was not rooted in a mass movement organised by and for indigenous women, but was imposed by Europeans who held an unquestioning belief in the superiority and universality of western familial values. Since the 18^th century European Orientalism had developed a discourse in which stereotypes centred on the veil as the most visible symbol of barbaric Muslim patriarchy that subjected women to the supposed horrors of child-marriage, polygamy, repudiation, radical seclusion, and the sexual perversion and slavery of the harem. Time and again colonial invaders of the Middle East and North Africa legitimated their domination of Muslim societies by presenting themselves as the liberators of oppressed women. For example, Lord Cromer, Governor of Egypt from 1883 to 1907, supported such “emancipation” while opposing the suffragette movement in Britain. President Bush and conservative Republicans had little progressive interest in American women’s rights but discovered a newfound mission to free Afghan women from the oppression of the ‘medieval’ Taliban and the sinister burqa.

What is distinctive about the Algerian War is the way in which the French army developed psychological warfare as a key part of the propaganda drive against the FLN. In this drive the veil was to play a key role. During the virtual coup d’état organised by the Generals in Algiers on the 13^th May 1958 propaganda specialists secretly orchestrated a mass gathering of Muslim women who ‘spontaneously’ removed their veils, often assisted by French ‘sisters’, and threw them onto a fire. In reality the dramatic unveiling was organised by counterinsurgency officers who bussed in thousands of women and selected others to lead the choreographed performance that was recorded for the French and international media. The FLN intellectual and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon brilliantly analysed the objectives of the French anti-veiling campaign in a 1959 essay (L’Algérie se dévoile) in which he noted how the response of young Algerian militants was to adapt the veil as an instrument of struggle. Some students now wore a veil, that they had rarely worn, as a sign of opposition; others used the full veil as a means to smuggle guns and bombs through French check-points; others again wore fashionable skirts and make-up to distract French soldiers as they passed the lines. In other words, Muslim women, instead of the silent, oppressed and voiceless victims portrayed in the Orientalist discourse, demonstrated a remarkable inventiveness in deploying the veil in a multitude of ways as an instrument of anti-colonial resistance.

The death of Mahsa Amini whilst in the custody of the morality police in Iran has sparked outrage and protest globally. Do you see any mirroring with the current protests in Iran and the history of the Algerian War of Independence.

N.M:

Superficially the media images of young Iranian women tearing off the veil or burning it in public demonstrations looks similar to the events in Algeria in 1958, but the context is quite different. Firstly, the protests have been in opposition not to an occupying Western power, but to an authoritarian theocratic regime that has enforced subjugation on women according to a profoundly conservative reading of Islam. In other words, this is an internal division within Muslim society, although the clerics – as in Algeria – have condemned the secularised, educated young women as dangerously corrupted by the values of an external ‘Americanization’. Secondly, the anti-veil protests have been organised by and for young Muslim women in a genuine women’s movement, not as in Algeria manipulated by an occupying colonial government and army.

There is a very obvious link between colonial emancipation from the veil and Islamophobia. Can you explore this idea more and how non-Muslim people have historically been part of the problem in supposedly liberating Muslim women?

N.M:

Staying with France, it can be noted that Islamophobia surged dramatically after 1979, linked to a combination of factors: Algerians constituted the biggest ethnic minority presence, despite the fact that they had gained independence in 1962; millions of soldiers and pieds noirs settlers returned from the colonial war bringing with them a bitter prejudice against the “Arabs”. This provided an electoral base for the racist Front National, led by the brutal ex-parachutist officer Le Pen. The Iranian revolution of 1979 created a deep fear of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ and the emergence of terrorist bomb attacks in Paris and elsewhere in 1983 and 1995-6, long before 9/11, fuelled a fear of Muslim fanatics constituting an ‘enemy within’. By the 1980s a series of riots in the immigrant suburbs led to a perception, now shared across the political spectrum, that North Africans were living in squalid high-rise estates, no-go police zones, in which ‘Arabs’ refused to integrate into Republican France. They were perceived as forming dangerous ghettos in which they reinforced a ‘tribal’ existence symbolised by the mosque, arranged marriages, bearded imams, and honour killings.

The veil, once again, became the most potent media image of radical difference. In October 1989 the right-wing head of a school in Creteil barred three girls for wearing headscarves, claimed to be in breach of laicité, the secular, non-religious values of the Republican school. The media fuelled Islamophobia by photographs, not of the girls that wore jeans and a simple headscarf, but of women in full-length Iranian chadors that left only the eyes visible, just as later the horrors of the Afghan Taliban would be symbolised by the image of the blue burqa. However, the hijab or chador is quite exceptional among Muslim women in France, worn by under one percent, yet editors selected images of the maximum veil that carried the most negative connotations of a dangerous other, of sinister masking, and oppressed women behind whom lurked the shadowy male fundamentalist and the potential terrorist. Increasingly the main-stream press deployed the chador image to suggest a nightmare future, of Muslim invasion and domination. A Figaro cover of 1985 typically carried a bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French nation, wrapped in a veil under the heading, “Will we still be French in thirty years’ time”? In an analysis of the press the sociologist Paul Siblot concluded that journalists avoided French terms like “veil” and “head scarves” (after all the Queen wore the latter), for a confusing range of names that most readers did not understand, “chador”, “burqa”, “hijab” etc. but which conveyed a sense of strange otherness and threat. In recent years an anti-veil moral panic has swept across Europe as a key component of anti-immigrant racism, a symbol of the claim that migrants represent an “invasion”.

Looking back at European responses to the veil over the last two centuries, it can be seen how the termination of colonial domination led to an inversion of the ideological representations. During the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Orientalist painting and literature centred on literally stripping away the veil to expose the female body to the erotic eye of the western male (Turkish bath nudes, the harem, belly dancing, and soft-porn postcards), a metaphor of colonial domination. Even the most sacred private spaces of the Muslim family were to be invaded and exposed. With the Algerian War, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and 9/11 a profound political and cultural shift took place in which erotic unveiling was displaced by images of maximum concealment as a marker of a perceived political and cultural invasion, the refusal to integrate, and a threat to national identity.