“The political discourse of the Islamists encourages some young Muslim women to veil themselves”

Arnaud Lacheret has a doctorate in political science, and associate professor at the Arabian Gulf University – Bahrain. He publishes in 2021 Women, Muslims, executives … French integration (ed. Le Bord de l’eau).

The scene will mark the spirits: the potential candidate Éric Zemmour, visiting Drancy, takes off his tie and the interlocutor who faces him then removes his Islamic veil. This sequence, which has caused much ink to flow, puts the question of the veil back at the center of the debate, as if it were something essential to understand French society.

My last book Women, Muslims, executives … French integration questions women from the second generation of North African immigration who have succeeded in order to understand their values, their background, their relationship to religion and French society. Obviously, a chapter is devoted to the veil.

The separatist discourse is obviously amplified by the decolonial current carried in large part by the extreme left.

Arnaud Lacheret

In fact, in my questionnaire I ask the question in two different ways. The first, classic, focuses on the image of the veil which “can be interpreted as a submission marker“And the second question, which comes a little later in the conversation, is about”the apparent recent increase in young women wearing the veil“. The women I question, who are not veiled, answer the first question that the veil is a spiritual journey, a religious outcome, a choice freely made … This is the classic argument which would lead to believe that veiling is a purely spiritual and individual initiative, which we can absolutely respect.

However, when we question the same women, a few minutes later, on the apparent increase in the wearing of the veil, especially among the very young, the answer is quite different. They mobilize a double argument.

First of all, young women who veil themselves do so because they feel rejected by the society in which they live. Sometimes following an emotional breakdown, sometimes after accessing higher education in an environment very different from the one in which they grew up or for other reasons, they would find themselves a little lost and would turn in particular to preachers in line explaining to them that a good Muslim can only be veiled.

Read also“Faits et gestes” N ° 22 by Ivan Rioufol: Strip-tease in Drancy

Then, they talk to me about a fairly related phenomenon that would be a “fad”, a reaction to a political discourse that puts the veil at the center of the debate and summons young women to imagine that French society does not like them. This discourse is obviously amplified by the decolonial current carried in large part by the extreme left. The consequence is the same: young women then turn to separatist groups which materialize this separation by wearing the veil.

In fact, and the sociologist Soraya Rachedi explains it well, the phenomenon of veiling responds to a double logic. Of course, a veiled woman will explain that it is a spiritual choice freely made to the one who will question her and she will not be wrong, but we must not ignore the social phenomena that lead to this decision. : first of all the constant debate around the veil which has politicized the question but also the relative isolation of young girls from a certain age which can push them to turn to apparently attractive speeches but which will end up putting them in the background of the society.

The other scourge raised by Soraya Rachedi, and which the women interviewed in my book only sketch, is the influence of the Internet. Where the French authorities have for too long been interested in “salafist mosques»Concentrating all their forces to shut them down, it was the radical preachers who broadcast their speech on Youtube, garnering millions of views and convincing an incredible number of young women that the veil is an obligation in Islam and that Muslim can only be veiled. Faced with this discourse of a power that the outside observer cannot suspect, the more moderate discourse of “institutional” Islam and of Islamologists having a little more height on these questions is inaudible.

If it is not possible to get involved in the question of spiritual development, French society can, and must, be uncompromising on the sociological causes which unconsciously accompany young women in the decision to veil themselves.

Arnaud Lacheret

A young woman will share hundreds of videos of Abu Anas persuading her that a good Muslim must be veiled, modest and submissive before eventually meeting moderate personalities like Chems-Eddine Hafiz or Tareq Oubrou, who are sometimes considered notables, like the “Muslims under Western influenceAnd whose words do not reach young people, or too little, who prefer to watch radical bearded sermons who seem a little enlightened to the rational observer.

Addressing the veil phenomenon politically is therefore not something simple. If it is not possible to get involved in the question of spiritual development, French society can, and must, be uncompromising on the sociological causes which unconsciously accompany young women in the decision to veil themselves.

This is why I am pleading for a new philosophy of the integration policy which does not systematically send, out of benevolence, the inhabitants of the districts to their supposed origins. French integration must be able to give the codes of our society to all our youth, we will not be able to do without a reflection on what it means to “be French”. Because a good part of the third generation no longer knows what it is because no longer any institution, from National Education to social centers, is able to explain it to them.

– .