Short tales of the hijab

Documentary’s raison d'être

 

Short tales of the hijab

 

“Is it true that there are loads of swimming pools in London just for women?” asked Karima[1], a visibly amused young mother, during one of my recent stays in Paris. A few years earlier, with some female friends, she had persuaded the owner of a private Parisian swimming pool to grant the women access for a couple of weekly swimming sessions. By approaching a businessman the women thought they had ensured themselves against the kind of public outcry which erupts in France every time a journalist or a politician with a craving for publicity reveals that a municipal swimming pool has granted women-only sessions to Muslim or Jewish women or to those who simply prefer to swim without men around. But the local authorities soon got wind of the affair and pressure from the Mayor put an end to the women’s short-lived enjoyment.

 

France vs Britain

 

Karima was a child when in 1989 the first Affaire du Foulard[2] sparked a full-scale political crisis, but she still has vivid memories of the second wave of controversy, which engulfed France in 1994. Then a talented secondary-school student, a few months before the crisis broke, Karima chose to wear the hijab. The fact that the law proscribing religious symbols in state schools was adopted some ten years later in March 2004 did not deter the school from (illegally) expelling her. But it was neither her truncated schooling nor her swimming experience that determined her to leave Paris behind to settle in London. Rather it was the umpteenth media and political onslaught against the veil, the last of which was launched by a communist MP in June 2009. The motion by André Gerin and an assortment of MPs[3] preceded an incoherent state-sponsored debate on national identity and led some one year later[4] to a law barring the wearing of the ‘voile intégral’ (niqab/burqa) in public spaces, despite the latter being worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women[5].

 

As with many other French, Belgian or German Muslims we met during the project, Karima conceives England as one of the rare Western countries where it is still possible for a Muslim to practice their faith freely while tasting the comforts and relative freedoms that European societies can still offer. One of the most striking images many Europeans belonging to a cultural or religious minority see when landing in London for the first time is of customs officers wearing turbans, hijabs and similar garb. This apparent accommodation of cultural and religious diversity is publicly displayed on billboards at Britain’s airports and train stations and even where one would least expect it, inside the British police. 

 
Short Tales of the Hijab, an hour long documentary, was born out of the numerous discussions I had with Fatima Ali, a young French Iraqi theatre director, about the distinctive approaches European societies have towards post-colonial immigrants and their descendants, in particular those of Muslim faith. While comparisons between the French “colour blind” and assimilationist Republican model and the British “multicultural”[6], race relations-based one, have been studied and debated with growing urgency in academic and political circles[7], particularly after 2005’s three weeks long revolt of the banlieues in France and the 7/7 bombings in London, very few documentaries have been dedicated to the issue.

 

Aware of the difficulties in covering all the issues affecting Muslim communities in two, let alone four European societies, we approached the question through the prism of the hijab. The decision seemed logical given our familiarity with the subject[8], and because over the last couple of decades probably no other social phenomenon has better illustrated the contrasting responses of British and French mainstream societies to a minority issue common to both countries. Not that the hijab and related veil affairs entirely explain the differences between the two models of integration but they are reflective of the way both countries approach the expression of religious diversity, particularly for Muslims, and ultimately the freedom to practice one’s religion in the public sphere, a key concern for Muslim women. 

 

European countries join the fray

 

Britain and France were, of course, not the only European countries affected by the issue. As a consequence of the French debates, the hijab became a national obsession in several European countries and is now banned in most Belgium schools while teachers are forbidden to wear it in schools throughout several German states. In this respect the hijab controversies provide a fascinating tool to compare and contrast the treatment of Muslim communities in respective European societies.

 

But what ultimately persuaded us to use the hijab as the central theme of a documentary dealing with the presence of Muslims in four key European countries is our belief that the hijab and more recently the niqab/burka have been exploited as a smokescreen not only to distract the general public from unpopular reforms, discredited governments and/or social and economic crises, but also to avoid addressing head-on the general uneasiness at the increasing visibility and assertiveness of Muslim communities in Western societies; a discomfort made more acute by a global context that over the past decade has increasingly depicted Islam as the new bogeyman. The hijab affair, like the Minaret controversy in Switzerland, is a metaphor for the irremediable presence of Muslim communities in Europe, and viewed as such it is unsurprising that these debates, while concerning an extremely marginal number of women/mosques, have framed Muslim communities as a threat to national harmony and identity.

 

Veil-mania

 

When we began making the documentary, although the recent controversy around the niqab and burqa had already hit the headlines in the French media, we initially decided to push the issue to one side. Having witnessed and studied the political mechanisms of the hijab controversies we genuinely believed that this diversionary trick, recycled for the niqab debate, against a backdrop of plunging markets, rising unemployment, popular strikes and detested pension reforms was too outrageous to be swallowed by the general public. We were also convinced that in the unlikely event of the bill being voted through by the French National Assembly and Senate, the law banning the veil in public places would be deemed unconstitutional by the State Council. Not only were we proven wrong on all counts, but between the beginning of the controversy and the adoption of the law by the French government, several European countries had joined the fray including Britain[9]and Belgium, the latter finding time even in the midst of a severe constitutional crisis, which led to the collapse of its government, to vote through a law banning the veil in the lower chamber.

 

So the public controversy surrounding the full veil, which we believe fulfils the same social and political role as previous controversies over Muslim women’s dress codes, appeared to justify our initial choice for the subject of the documentary.

 

While England and France were two obvious candidates, we also turned our attention to Belgium as the first country in Europe whose Parliament voted for a niqab ban and to Germany, host to a large and established Muslim community,[10] but also in recent times witness to the first killing of a hijabi woman, Marwa el-Sharbini, a 31 year old Egyptian who was tragically murdered in front of her three year old son and her husband in a Dresden courtroom in July 2009.

 

Beyond mapping the key issues and the main characters involved on both sides of the debate, Short tales of the hijab attempts to bridge the yawning chasm between the perceptions of Muslim women shrouded in media and political scare stories and the multiple and dynamic identities of Muslim women living in modern European societies. For this purpose, we have travelled to a number of European locations to follow four hijabi main characters from different generations and backgrounds and have interviewed key actors who have helped us unravel the politics of the veil and contextualise each national reality. Shot against contrasting backdrops, from a historic French town, the deadening banlieues of France, the beautiful architecture of Dresden and the bustle of London’s busy transport system, we have filmed the lives of these women through their work, activities and personal stories - their struggles portrayed as living testimonies against the stereotypical roles assigned to Muslim women in popular culture and politics.