Visibility,transparency and gossip: How did the religion of some (Muslims) become the public concern of others?

Some contextual elements: Understanding the unintelligibility of the religious act and the incongruity of religious sentiment within French secularism

The laws of March 2004 and October 2010 put France's long history of secularism to the test. At issue was the social meaning given to the public practice of religion both as social ritual and the display of a believer's subjective expressive commitment to transcendence. ⁹ Interpreting religious experience—defining, decoding, and publicly representing it—are delicate but inescapable tasks faced by those responsible for applying the religious dress laws of 2004 and 2010. These include teachers, judges, law enforcement officials and public health personnel. The argument this articles makes is that these laws' insistence on evaluating the public significance of Muslim public religious observance—legally decreeing dress and any other religious sign or gesture socially unintelligible—has the (intended) effect of publicly enforcing Muslims' complete erasure from public space (Beaman, 2013).

My analysis opens with two observations: the 2004 law prohibits the wearing of ostentatious religious “signs.” The 2010 law punishes the “concealment of the face.” The nuances of this terminology are significant. In the first case, the social meaning of the “sign” and the transgression its public display represents, exist quite independently of their importance for the young women concerned. In the second case, the prohibition applies to an act whose meaning, through its prohibition, is reduced to its powerfully communicative function. ¹⁰ The incriminating act becomes subject to a relational interaction, whose fixed point, to which the act must always refer, is the gaze of the other (Citton, 2013: 45). In this context, discussions concerning the possibility and then the constitutionality of the law of October 2010, constantly wavered between considering the full veil a sign (that is, something that embodies premeditation) and considering it a symptom (the material evidence of an internal state). Speaking of “signs,” in March 2010, in its choice of means to insure “the widest and most effective possible” ban on wearing the full veil, the State Council considered two possibilities. One was implicitly behaviorist in deeming it an offense for anyone to require or force another to conceal their face. The other was implicitly “symptomatic” or performative. In its decision n° 2010-613 DC of 7 October 2010, the Constitutional Council mentions that the object of the law is “to respond to practices, which until recently were of an exceptional nature, that consist of concealing the face in public.” The individual, internally derived religious act of covering the face is prohibited in connection with an abstracted notion of “public order” and the minimal requirements of life within society. That abstraction is now enshrined in legal and political thinking over against a citizen's religious expression and realization of their most essential self.

The difficulty of reading and understanding a religious act independently of the symbols and practices that accompany it is discussed by several authors writing on religious experience in secular contexts (Asad, 2003, 2004; Benhabib, 2002; Claverie, 2003; Mahmood, 2009; Fernando, 2010, 2014). In France, religious identity is a reality from which secular, enlightened modern liberal citizens mostly prefer to keep their distance (At Home in Europe, 2011; Parvez, 2011). Behiery calls this the “untranslatability” of the religious. Decoding the religious act is impossible to the extent that common social knowledge limits the ability to read the surrounding world to the secular and constantly reproduces a dichotomous perception of reality when it comes to the phenomenon of truth value of religion. The dichotomies this produces include Orient versus Occident, rational versus irrational, modern versus traditional. All are reinforced by these dominant cultural narratives (Alcoff, 2001; Behiery, 2013) and thereby restrict access to other possible categories that might describe the world and its people more particularistically—more multifariously (Boëtsch and Ferrié, 2001). ¹¹ Mahmood develops a parallel line of thinking, based on an analysis of the controversies over the Danish cartoons, which hinges on the fact that “secular” spaces often find themselves caught at a moral impasse due to the incapacity to understand the concept of religious “insult.” ¹² This impasse, she says, is explained by a paradigmatic political polarization resulting from the conflict between “the secular imperative and the religious menace” (Mahmood, 2009: 65). The rupture between the liberal values of secular regimes (freedom of expression, the emancipation of women and their bodies) and Islamic forms of religiosity reflects the normative representation Europeans have of the religious. That norm is of a singular believer who is ultimately tolerated in political spaces for which the State has absolute authority to draw the borders separating not only the secular from the religious, but to define the forms of religiosity that will be considered socially legitimate from those that will be deemed illegitimate. ¹³ This individualized believer is posited by the secular state as rational whose belief is a choice whose consequences may not be. On the other hand, even if one voluntarily “chooses” to perform certain religious acts, such as wearing the veil, other associated religious practices are not construed by the state as being experienced as choices. Rather they are construed as the result of imposed dictates the believer would never think of submitting to rational scrutiny. ¹⁴ This believer is never conceived of by the secular majority society as an agent performing an act in relation to a “cause” outside the believer's self. This believer's “religious body” therefore remains unintelligible within secular rationality's perspective (Asad, 2004). ¹⁵ “In secular societies, secular modes of reasoning and argumentation are seen as the embodiment of a universal reason, and religious believers are expected to wear their beliefs lightly” (Bangstad, 2009: 191).

Judging which acts are forbidden through the hierarchical positioning of secular versus religious explains the normalization of the opposition between wearing of the veil (full or not) and gender equality in the French context. Asad emphasizes the way the unintelligibility of the religious becomes socially strategic. “The veil has itself become an iconic sign of difference, but a sign reified to such an extent that its strategic use, within Western understanding, completely obscures and overrides the intentions and motivations of the actors/agents who define it” (Jiwani, 2010: 66). Asad, Mahmood and Fernando's “intelligibility” re-enforces the salience of what Foucault and others have called “legibility,” that is, the ability of the state and its representatives to read and classify certain acts and signs and create a standard grid through which “to make sense” of religion. Reducing the wearing of the veil (full or not) to a strictly personal, freely chosen decision has gradually become the only way to decipher it in spaces that were historically constructed to disqualify such choices by reasonable individuals (Bender, 2003; Lichterman, 2005; Parvez, 2011). In the European context, the intelligibility of the religious is generally approached through the dilemma of institutional religion versus individual religion. Believers are expected to perform in conformity with the expectations of non-believers. The reading of religion is defined and limited by a political culture that reduces the scope of possible interpretations and therefore ultimately, constricts the behavior of believers. In France, between 1989 when the first mediatized events of young girls wearing headscarves in public schools occurred and 2004 when the first law restricting the wearing of religious symbols in public schools was passed, the religious experience of veiled women could only publicly register as an issue of individualized autonomous choice. ¹⁶ But like other markers of belonging, the representations of religious belief are inconstant and unstable as to their social and subjectivized meanings and effects. They vary frequently for the believer, just as they do for the outside observer. ¹⁷ Let us examine closely the words and self-representations of some of the women concerned in the religious dress cases. This will help us to see the extent to which categorizing religious acts solely in terms of choice—and forcing them into a dichotomous consent versus obligation frame—renders other possibilities of interpretation and social understanding wholly inaccessible.

The case of S.A.S. v France (CEDH, n. 4385/11) allows us to critically engage the new orthodoxy of the secular centered on the dichotomy between the religious as choice and the religious as obligation now being used to structure French public debate over the issue of Muslim religious dress. In this case, the plaintiff, a French citizen wearing the full veil, explains her act as a free and autonomous choice. She makes it explicit however that her free choice is not a consistent one. She chooses not to wear her veil consistently. She makes the choice based on its appropriateness to the context, whether private or public. She does not wish or intend to cause trouble or to harm anyone. She merely is expressing her desire to be able to live in accordance with herself, particularly with regard to her “spiritual mood.” Her “spiritual mood” sometimes dictates that she wear the garment banned by French law through legislation passed in October of 2010. This understanding and invocation of the existential authority of a spiritual mood introduces a gap in the public ideology of French secularity that pits religious practice as choice (contingent, flexible, and therefore subject to secular democratic state regulation) against religious practice as obligation (a duty of conscience that is inflexible and therefore constitutive of a non-negotiable component of personal integrity). How would it be possible for the law and the secular Republic to accommodate the notion of the secular political validity of a religiously sponsored “spiritual mood” that “dictates” an individual's behavior?

This discrepancy between the discursive and the phenomenological (Tavory and Winchester, 2012: 353) is apparent in S.A.S v France. The reference to spiritual mood attests to an intimate, felt experience of the divine within the individual and to a personal evaluation by the believer of the necessity to perform an act in accordance with that feeling. Intrinsic to the substance of that act is making its experience materially visible both to herself and to others who will witness and interpret it. Here we are in a place where the spiritual universe, the legal framework and the spaces for public and private life intersect. How can this religiously constituted free person's democratic right of full inclusion in French society be reconciled with her public identity as a believer who cannot be part of political society qua believer? ¹⁸ The possibility of liberal secularism rests on the exercise of freedom of conscience. Each person may believe (or not believe) what they wish within their own private space without being exposed to public consequences. Public space is then perceived as a sphere produced by a cultural consensus that prevails over both individual freedoms and over a religious practice reduced to a matter of private preference and personal choice. Liberalism however is never truly honest about this presumption in the first place. In the French case, we need to contrast this liberal ambition for the state to act according to an invisibility of social affiliations and identities with a historical tradition of a democratically harmful selective blindness by the State (Hervieu-Léger, 1996; Laborde, 2013).

The banning of the wearing of the veil is neither trivial nor ordinary. These laws legally define certain behaviors and codes of conduct as either excessive or reasonable. The reality of the physical presence of a belief incarnated in an act (covering oneself) is simultaneously, through the effect of its prohibition, both authenticated and repudiated. Such prohibitions do not take effect in a vacuum. It is important to keep track of their consequences. The social processes that create legal categorizations take place outside as well as inside the realm of law (Leckey, 2013). ¹⁹ The categorizations created and enforced by such legislation interact with other visible and interpretable manifestations of inequality, injustice and discrimination in such a way that the entire citizenry is implicated in a democratically constraining regime of transparency and visibility circulated through the dynamics of gossip and rumor. Public space becomes the place where political community and citizenship are actualized through the prism of visibility: a good citizen has nothing to hide.

Visibility and the circuits of gossip ²⁰

Let's now take a step back. The fixation on religious signs worn by Muslims shares some similarities with the phenomenon of mediatized visibility. This term refers to the way we recognize certain celebrities whom we end up identifying only by their particularities and eccentricities (clothes, hair style, nudity, dancing style, etc.). ²¹ The visibility of Muslim women in the French context is indeed comparable to that of celebrities. It should be studied the way N. Heinich has suggested it be studied: through the angle of visibility, designated as the capacity of being seen by the other as possessing “an objective quality of a person, unequally distributed according to the capital of visibility” (Heinich, 2012: 493). ²² The gaze of those who don't wear the veil (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) is constantly drawn to these garments, which are perpetually exposed to the scrutiny of the other. In France in 2015, everyone knows what a veil, a full veil and a “burqa” look like. ²³ They are immediately recognizable, independent of the context in which they appear, despite the fact that we, as observers, may have never been to Afghanistan or come across a woman wearing a veil anywhere near where we live. French publics have become familiar with these items. Their relationship to these signs is analogous to the link that exists between a pop or movie star and their fans: a mediatized relation, one experiences by proxy (Amiraux, 2013). The ban has paradoxically contributed to creating a hyper exposure of what veiled women want to keep hidden, without consideration for, or attention to, how this private intimacy has suddenly been exposed to outside gaze. For about twenty-five years now, French public opinion has been chattering about veiled Muslim women in much the same way that tabloid headlines gossip about the latest styles and goings-on of a celebrity. ²⁴

Veiled Muslim women are portrayed in the media the way movie and pop stars are. There are important differences, of course. First, the veiled woman embodies the anti-model. Her image displays a prototype of what should never be imitated by viewers. The forbidding silhouette of veiled women is associated with all that threatens the viewer from territorial integrity to social cohesion (Morgan and Poynting, 2012). The image functions as a sort of global memento mori (Amiraux, 2013). It becomes easy to draw the map of menace using the iconography of fear in which the veiled silhouette (with the face hidden or not) is an intensely effective marker. The image's power is still potent after three decades of polemics. These images function like those of public figures whose vocal or film performances we may follow but whose personal behavior we deplore. Second, unlike celebrities who are protagonists on the media circuit that helps construct their public images (and helps assure revenue for them), veiled women remain anonymous and without power in the process of mediation that takes place against their will. Their invidious social visibility and the ensuing gossip transpire without the participation of the veiled women and at the expense of their piety and privacy.

The social visibility of veils marks an intersection of several frames of experience (aesthetic, sensual, symbolic, political, private). This intersectionality forces the wearing of veils into becoming a public political issue. Visibility itself is a kind of capital that with respect to Muslim women wearing veils varies inversely with the political recognition accorded the person. The social relations of visibility are largely asymmetrical. (Seeing and being seen are dissimilar processes.) The inter-visibility of political subjects remains quite limited. In contrast with celebrities and other personalities granted the capital of visibility, women who wear veils are viewed negatively. The asymmetry in visibility compounds the proportional isolation of those wearing them. (Persons wearing a veil are so few in relation to “you and I” and the millions of French and European citizens.) That devaluation is in sharp contrast to the visibility of the “unique” pop star we cherish for her singularity. Women who wear the burqa are estimated to be very few, reflecting their social lack of value, whether we speak of France, Belgium, or the entirety of the European Union. ²⁵ In fact, just as with pop or movie stars, the recognition of the veil as a religious sign is only marginally based on any direct or personal knowledge. Our capacity to recognize the garment is not based on either direct experience (co-presence) or on the privileged link between two people (interconnectedness). These modes of engagement would suggest the presence of social forms of reciprocity in relation to the veil. This is not the case. The “meaning” of the Islamic veil is recognized without any direct experience with it.

This point deserves our attention because in liberal democracies visibility is directly related to the question of citizen participation and recognition. In effect, visibility presupposes the possibility of being allowed a “voice.” To access places of visibility one must also be able to make a place for oneself on the public and political stages. People must participate to be evaluated by others and be recognized. The legal mandate regarding visibility that the dress laws enact means that a person's appearance becomes what is judged, not what the individual does or says (Haroche, 2011a). ²⁶ The prohibition on wearing certain religious signs or garments, presented as regulating the behavior of Muslim individuals to protect national mores, illustrates the asymmetrical power certain public social narratives have over others (Korteweg, 2013). The secular narrative of Muslim veils in France allows the state to ideologically reconstitute the nation as a society that is secular and united (Leckey, 2013). This symbolic action occurs independently of the empirical social realities underlying the wearing of veils or the need that act as injurious to French life. ²⁷ This general frame is explicit. Arguments hostile to the wearing of religious signs are repeated and reproduced by all sides. These arguments' users include feminists, secular activists, journalists, intellectuals, university students, conservatives, progressives, expert witnesses, ministers, and local and national elected officials. This framing permits the discourse about Muslim dress to distance itself from the question of racism. The arguments coalesce into a unifying defense of secularism and a preservation of national values. It is useful to think of these multiple voices as constituting a gossip circuit.

Legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge intersect in these gossip circuits. The mixture contributes to anxiety and even fuels moral panic. Gossip circuits also function to maintaining an elevated level of alert and to reinforcing the discretionary authority of some social actors over others. ²⁸ This constant flow of authoritative declarations on the topic of “veils and scarves” is reminiscent of the social function of gossip. It betrays secrets and perpetuates rumors (Bock, 1982; Spacks, 1985). Gossip is an informal form of personal communication built around those who are absent or are simply treated as such (Bock, 1982). Gossip usually takes the form of conversations between people who know and trust one another (Ayim, 1994; Spacks, 1985). Gossip ultimately creates a kind of authority, irregardless of its initial source. “As the rumor process moves toward forming agendas of actions intended to protect a culture against a potential threat, it contributes to political decisions that, for better or worse, can lead to long-lasting social consequences” (Fine and Ellis, 2010: 204–205). Gossip produces several effects that find their way into the debate at hand. Above all, it makes us feel familiar with a subject at a remove from ourselves (Spacks, 1985). It also allows us to establish connections, to link events and locations regardless of their temporal or geographical distance. ²⁹ Ultimately, it helps circulate assertions which, as they move away from the source and time of issue, begin to function as ways to validate and objectify authority. Gossip facilitates the soft imposition of dominant ideas that subsequently become almost impossible to contest (Birchall, 2006, 2011; Miller and McHoul, 1998). It is here essential to highlight that all levels of knowledge, expertise and status are engaged in the gossip circuits formed around headscarves as well as a number of other subjects. Rumors circulate independently of the cultural and symbolic capital of those who initiate and perpetuate them (Fine and Turner, 2004). Gossip circuits ultimately emphasize the authority of face-to-face discussions taking place behind the backs of absent persons whose characters and behaviors are being singled out for characterization and criticism.

In the early 2000s, two government reports emerged that indicated the first hints of a change of tone in French political language about social cohesion. These illustrate the displacement of the principle of secularism from one of organizing public life (distributed over different institutional and legal forms) to one of defending national values under threat. This displacement came about largely through the employment of language of threat, security and national integrity. The first report was submitted by Francois Baroin in 2003 (Baroin, 2003). The second was the work of a parliamentary commission, headed by Jean-Louis Debré, charged with examining the place of religious symbols in public schools (Mission d'information, 2003). Both reports provided the media with linguistic elements that designated communalism and Islamism (or political Islam, whose danger had been underestimated by the State Council in 1989, according to Baroin's report) as the primary threats to the Republic (Amiraux and Koussens, 2013). After publication, secularism became the right's new political project and Islam became a central concern (Baroin, 2003). A few months later, the Debré report characterized the presence of religious signs as divisive. The legal framework establishing and maintaining the principle of secularism was unsatisfactory, the Debré report concluded, particularly where educational faculty and staff were concerned. Secularism, the report said, was central to the political and social integration of individuals. These reports were influential in President Chirac's decision to launch, in July 2003, the Commission de réflexion sur l'application du principe de laïcité dans la République (the Commission Reflecting on the Application of the Principle of Secularism in the Republic; hereafter referred to as the Stasi Commission). This commission was charged with coming up with ways to establish a form of secularism that would guarantee national cohesion while still respecting individual difference. ³⁰ In 2004, by identifying school as the place that could provide the groundwork for a common destiny for all citizens, the Stasi Commission in turn helped identify and underscore the threats of communalism, the centrality of gender equality in the republican project and Islam as a divisive, suspect religion in need of monitoring (Amiraux and Koussens, 2013; Selby, 2012). The Stasi Commission's work, like that of the parliamentary commission on the wearing of the full veil, neglected to include input or participation by those most directly concerned, Muslim women who wear veils. ³¹ The State produced and constructed its own legitimation process for those defining the social meaning and impact of Muslim dress. ³² Circuits of gossip have also played an important role since 2004 in displacing the onus of enacting state neutrality away from the State and making it the responsibility of individuals to perform through their conduct. Legally banning ostentatious religious signs from public schools has forced school and college girls, by uncovering themselves, to perform neutrality. This is a profound corruption of the historical principle of secularism in which the burden of neutrality lies with the State. ³³

State injunctions on visibility and transparency: Controlling citizens' subjectivities ³⁴

Gossip contributes to the overall stabilization of representations. Gossip thereby helps to define and fix the contours of visual obsessions including those constituting “scopophilia,” the libidinal pleasure or “love” of looking whose affectual discharge can extend to the point of destroying the subject of observation. Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem (1986) described the social relations of scopophilia that structured the way the colonizer became obsessed with the bodies of Algerian women. That obsession gained circulation through postcards that secured a network of future gazes and desires that, in turn, became solidified by their shared scopophilia (Jones, 2012). Studying the photographic postcards of Algerian women, Alloula emphasized the importance of the veil as a marker of refusal of the colonizer's glaze embodying and enacting the colonizer's obsession with Muslim female bodies. Today, the public exposure of garments worn by Muslim women, headscarf or full veil, becomes exhibitionist through the effect of the radical asymmetry—the huge disparity—between the audience addressed (all of society) and the demographically negligible number of veiled women being watched. ³⁵ This point was explicitly spelled out in the case of S.A.S. v France in which the French government explained that there are actually two “faces” to the issue of dignity: there is the dignity of the individual concerned, which is undermined by wearing the full veil in public colliding with the dignity of those not wearing the prohibited garment. ³⁶ Two elements are at work in this visual obsession with religious signs worn by Muslim women: transparency and visibility. Together they allow us to connect what often passes as “anecdotal” with the more formally elaborated political problematic of defining the conditions of citizen belonging.

Transparency is both a virtue of and the necessary condition for the democratic subject. It has been called “the secular version of a born-again cleanliness that few can fail to praise” (Birchall, 2011: 2). Transparency has historically emerged as a gold standard—a guaranteed sign of cultural and moral authority. Transparency doesn't refer to publicity in this context, but rather to the idea that democratic practice cannot do without it. The liberal individual is able to play the role of a good citizen effectively when, in addition to being part of the white majority, they are transparent to their fellow citizens. Transparency here is more a dispositive virtue (that is, one of attitude) than a cognitive one. The visibility accorded to the headscarves of veiled women is derived partly from socially and legally structured frames of recognition (cognitive and cultural) and partly from the asymmetry of visibility understood as a form of social capital, that is the differentials of power between those who are recognized through distinctive signs and those who recognize them. ³⁷ It is my contention that the political movement that sprang up around the two Muslim dress laws – the law of 2004 and the law of 2010 – committed the nation to a redefinition of the human self that purges particular behaviors among certain citizens to make possible a political community that exists through all selves being openly exposed to the gaze of all such legislatively reconstituted individuals. Here, transparency is not opposed to privacy (that the law in fact protects) but to “secrecy.” Gossip is important because of the way in which it penetrates the privacy of the person to betray secrets. This is the way in which gossip threatens subjects. In 2004, and again in 2010, the State positioned itself to become the violator of secrets. The legal injunctions on mandated visibility in fact overturn and reverse the conditions by which uncoerced free selves become political subjects. ³⁸ Cladis, in a reading of the characters in Rousseau's fiction, proposes a distinction that dovetails with this article's reading of the intersection of the injunction of visibility and the normative requirement of transparency. The imperative of transparency personified by Wolmar in La Nouvelle Héloïse, says Cladis, is more akin to the gossip of a small town than to a tyranny of surveillance. Everyone watches everyone and knows everything about everyone else in full cognizance of this state of permanent visibility. Through this mutuality of surveillance society arrives at the body politic. To expose oneself and others to the gaze of all, in this reading of Rousseau, is a participatory process that everyone is aware of. A mutual scrutiny of one another's habits and behaviors, according to this perspective, creates community far more effectively and sustainably than any regulatory measure (Cladis, 2003). ³⁹ The collective gaze creates a collective consciousness, which, according to Cladis, in turn creates a form of solidarity. ⁴⁰

Adopting this perspective this article proposes to understand the debate over the veil in France in new and more socially productive terms—terms that help explain the debate's persistence, intensity and emotional volatility. In this view the debate is not primarily about threats posed by minority communalism or the dangers of political Islam. Rather the debate concerns the underlying structural conditions today for participation in, and the definition of, the republican “pact”—in other words, the politics and culture of the social contract in France today. The decision to legislate against the “concealment of the face” seems to offer the community some sort of collective hold on its political future. Nevertheless, the consequences of that decision have not been systematically thought through with regards to the nature of the original “trouble,” nor the experience, at a distance, with visible religious otherness. The fixation of public attention, both in France and in Europe, on the Islamic veil works in complicated ways to place the question of equality at the heart of political and social debate (Malik, 2008). From this perspective, Islamophobia is only a small part of the discussion. “Religion” here opens onto a much more profound confrontation with the nation's political foundations and the racial matrix of the State (Goldberg, 2001). Analysis that links the debate about Islamic dress laws to philosophical thinking concerning the definition of social contract and the nature of the contemporary civil nation deserves to be pressed further. Prohibition laws solve nothing. They do not allay national anxieties, but they do directly raise the question of the parameters of contemporary citizenship in France. ⁴¹ Laws prohibiting religious signs in schools and the wearing of the full veil in public space imply the requirement of the total visibility of individuals in public space as a condition for trust. Transparency becomes a guarantee of security, a requirement for social interaction, and therefore a precondition for agreement. Secrets become impossible to keep. The legitimacy of a citizen's presence is determined by that individual's exposure of their deepest beliefs according to criteria mandated by law. The question of governance then becomes one of determining the limits of the state's right of intrusive supervision.