Joan W. Scott was Professor of Social Science at Princeton University, with a focus on gender and politics. In the book The Politics of the Veil, she focuses, critiques, and challenges the law which bans the wearing of “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation in public schools passed in France in 2004 (p.1). The intention of this law, according to French legislators, was to keep France unified in terms of being secular, individualist, and homogeneous; the singularity of the nation was challenged by religion, a “private” matter, being present in the public sphere. Scott does not agree with this notion, claiming that this ban on “conspicuous signs” was more so an attack on Muslim women rather than just a mere means of maintaining singularity
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Scott first leads the reader through the important years of the Islamic scarf debate: 1989, 1994, and 2003. All of these debates, she argues, was resulting from the colonial mindset France still maintained. Her strongest chapter in the book about racism explains how France views their Arab/Muslim population as subordinate to the dominate French populus due to racial context. The wearing of the veil, therefore, has been seen as the “irreducible difference” and “inadmissibility of Islam,” (p. 45). Chapter three addresses laïcité and the notion that the binary is not necessarily between religion and secular needs, but it is more so between the republican and democratic model of secularism itself. The republican model suggests that religion should only be in the private sphere, whereas the democratic model encourages public debate, explanation, and mediation of these differences in educational discourse. Chapter four touched on individualism, with the notion that an abstract person should be realized in fact (p. 125). France believed that the veil as an object of disobeying what the republic stands for ̶ the ability for people to be their “own person” without the submissive constraints perceived in Islamic faith. Chapter five dealt with sexuality, where the main focus was the perception that Muslim women in veils were oppressed in tradition, whereas
Scott first leads the reader through the important years of the Islamic scarf debate: 1989, 1994, and 2003. All of these debates, she argues, was resulting from the colonial mindset France still maintained. Her strongest chapter in the book about racism explains how France views their Arab/Muslim population as subordinate to the dominate French populus due to racial context. The wearing of the veil, therefore, has been seen as the “irreducible difference” and “inadmissibility of Islam,” (p. 45). Chapter three addresses laïcité and the notion that the binary is not necessarily between religion and secular needs, but it is more so between the republican and democratic model of secularism itself. The republican model suggests that religion should only be in the private sphere, whereas the democratic model encourages public debate, explanation, and mediation of these differences in educational discourse. Chapter four touched on individualism, with the notion that an abstract person should be realized in fact (p. 125). France believed that the veil as an object of disobeying what the republic stands for ̶ the ability for people to be their “own person” without the submissive constraints perceived in Islamic faith. Chapter five dealt with sexuality, where the main focus was the perception that Muslim women in veils were oppressed in tradition, whereas