Feminists are failing Muslim women by supporting racist French laws


Muslim students outside their university in Algiers.
Muslim women outside their university in Algiers. Photograph: ZOHRA BENSEMRA/REUTERS

Is mainstream French feminism racist? I co-founded Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1977 and have long been involved with Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) but increasingly, it’s clear to me that French attitudes towards the hijab and Muslim women are not just incomprehensible, but reprehensible.

The first openly anti-Muslim law was passed in 2004, banning schoolgirls from wearing a headscarf, based on the belief that “religious signs” are contrary to laïcité – political secularism. But the ideological campaign against Islam started more than 40 years ago. Journalist Thomas Deltombe established that, between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, not a week passed without one or the other of the two main French weeklies asking “Should we be afraid of Islam?” or “Is Islam incompatible with democracy?”.

Dailies, radio and TV programmes exhibited the same obsession. It became worse over time, as the audience became convinced that western civilisation was being threatened by Islam in general, and that this danger was embodied in France by the 5 million sons and daughters of North African immigrants, who may or may not be Muslims, living in France.

Now laïcité is used as an argument against Muslims, as this law has undergone a radical reinterpretation by politicians, journalists and lobbyists, and has been falsified. As Saïd Bouamama wrote in 2004, the French version of Islamophobia, trying to pass as political secularism, is just a way of making racism respectable. Even before the 2004 law meant scarf-wearing teenagers would be excluded from schools – thus violating their fundamental right to education – France’s established feminist groups did not accept scarf-wearing women in their meetings.





Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism After the War on Terror by Christine Delphy (Verso, £14.99) is out now