Who's afraid of a head scarf?

Recently, I consulted at a seminar about how to use the media to reduce stigma and discrimination relating to HIV and AIDS.  Nine Asian countries participated in the seminar, including Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which sent representatives wearing headscarves.  These two women were journalists, and they were among the most open-minded and enthusiastic of the conference's attendees.

They sprang to mind when I read Robert O. Paxton's New York Review of Books article, "Can You Really Become French?"  In it, he refers to a French immigration case, denying a Muslim woman French citizenship on the ground that her burqa precluded her from assimilating adequately into French culture.  The Conseil d'état ruled that the woman had "adopted a radical practice of her religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community and notably with the principle of equality between the sexes."

The holding seems a bit rich in a country where women didn't vote until 1945.  Moreover, in its drawing a connection between burqas and female submission, the holding also seems ignorant of the plurality of Islamic women's attitudes about being veiled.  In this particular woman's case, she wore the burqa at her husband's request; would the case have come out differently had she chosen to wear it herself?

The court's linkage of the burqa and female submission prompted law professor Danièl Lochak to comment, "if you follow that to its logical conclusion, it means that women whose partners beat them are also not worthy of being French," a thought that highlights other uncomfortable questions about the court's conception of "equality between the sexes":  Is equality between the sexes promoted by denying the benefits of citizenship to the most vulnerable women in society?  Is equality between the sexes promoted by allowing men, but not women, to adhere to conservative Islamic practices?  For that matter, is equality between the sexes promoted by a policy that taken to another -- equally absurd, though equally logical -- extreme requires a woman's mode of dress to be more stylish than a burqa in order for her to be worthy of being French?

I thought back to a conversation I'd had with one of the veiled journalists at the seminar.  "Americans always assume that a woman in a headscarf is being oppressed," I'd said.  "Really?" she asked.  "We thought Americans thought all women in headscarves are terrorists."  Plainly, there's room for more curiosity and less knee-jerk responses on both sides.