French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools

The common narrative that women are forced into wearing headscarves stems from the West’s white saviour complex and white feminism’s need to liberate ‘third-world’ women, but it is true that even in a moderately religious country like ours, this narrative is still extremely common. But each woman’s story is uniquely hers and each perspective has a myriad of reasons and motivations behind it, so we need to take into consideration that women can, and do, take this decision for themselves. My very first interviewee embodies this narrative but with a slight twist. She is a third year private university student who started wearing the hijab because her family, specifically her father, had forced her to. For safety reasons, she is not allowed to go out on her own and since she joined university, in the absence of her parents, the hijab serves to protect her in public spaces. But even though, she’s gotten used to the presence of the headscarf in her life, it was also in this same span of time that she began to stop identifying as a Muslim. There was a time when she was religious but she stopped believing in organized religion as she had trouble associating the fear that she was told is necessary with her belief in god. She is…