Women's Rights in France

Parliamentary Commission on the Wearing of the Full Islamic Veil: An address read before the French parliament on November 13,  2009

by Djemila Benhabib, author of Ma vie à contre-coran

Mesdames les sénatrices, Mesdames les présidentes, Mesdames et messieurs les dignitaires,

Chers amis,

I thank you, my friends from the Femmes solidaires and the Ligue du droit international des femmes for your relentless, endless work that is so very essential. I thank you for your work on the local scene, with women who are victims of violence and discrimination, for your work with undocumented immigrants. I thank you for your work in the political arena and with officials from the UN. It is on the local level that the work for women’s rights takes root and then resonates on an international scale. Women’s March for liberty and equality is one and indivisible. When one woman suffers somewhere on this planet, it concerns us all, men and women alike. Thank you for making us feel in a thousand ways that we are links in the same chain.

Several years ago, I would never have imagined that my life as a woman, that my life as a militant, would be so intimately connected to feminism and secularism.

I will perhaps surprise you in admitting that I did not become a feminist by turning the pages of The Second Sex, nor by plunging myself into Aragon’s magnificent book Les Cloches de Bâle, where he talks about, among other things, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg, two hallmark figures for feminism and world peace.

I did not become a secularist by bathing myself in the light of Spinoza, of Ibn Al-Arabi, Descartes, Ibn Khaldoun or even Voltaire, my teacher. Absolutely not.

I could have averted my gaze to lose myself in the happy childhood of my generous, cultured family, so open to the world and to others, so deeply engaged in the cause of democracy and social justice.

I could have lost myself in the beauty of the seaside city of Oran, where life was so wonderful. Oran is the city that propelled the literary career of Albert Camus towards a Nobel prize in literature for his renowned novel The Plague.  I could have seen nothing, heard nothing of the anger, contempt, humiliation and violence poured out on women.

I chose to see and to hear, at first with my child’s eyes and ears. Later, I chose to voice the aspirations of all these women who marked my life forever, so that no woman in the world would be ashamed of being a woman. Quite honestly, when I was a child and especially when I was a teenager, I never dreamed of marriage, of a Prince Charming, of a long gown, a big house, children and a family. The handful of marriages I had attended, in Algeria, made me feel like women were objects more than subjects. Needless to say, my perspective was very much in the minority, because women are programmed from childhood to become wives and then mothers. I must have been around five or six, possibly seven years old at most, when I was summoned to join my grandmother in the kitchen – because my natural place was at the stove and the laundry… so that my cooking and cleaning talents could shine when the time came.

In 1984, Algeria adopted a family code inspired by the Islamic sharia (canonical law). I was 12 years old at the time.

In short, this code demands that the wife obey her husband and his parents. It allows polygamy and the repudiation of the wife, strips her of any parental authority, allows the husband to punish her. As for inheritances and giving testimony, inequality is systematically established, since it takes the voice of two women to equal the voice of one man… the same inequality applies to inheritance.

Question: Did Algeria become Moslem in 1984?

Answer: I’ll give you a response shortly, if you wish, during the upcoming debate.

As for secularism, I understood its necessity when, in the early 1990s, the FIS (Extremist Islamists) brought my country Algeria to its knees, through fire and blood, by killing thousands of Algerians. Today we must admit that things have not really changed.

Too many women in the world are humiliated, beaten, assaulted, repudiated, assassinated, burned, whipped and stoned.

In the name of what?

Of religion, of Islam to be specific, and in the name of its exploitation. For refusing an arranged marriage, refusing to wear the Islamic veil or even for asking for a divorce, wearing pants, driving a car or going out without the permission of the male, women, so many women, are subjected to the barbarity of physical cruelty. I am thinking in particular of our Iranian sisters who marched in the streets of Tehran, causing one of the world’s worst dictators – Ahmadinejad -- shudder.

I am thinking of Neda, this young Iranian assassinated when she was 26 years old. We’ve all seen the image of Neda lying on the ground, blood flowing from her mouth.

I am thinking of Nojoud Ali, this little ten year-old Yemenite girl, who was forced to marry a man three times her age. She fought to obtain the right to divorce and won.

I am thinking of Loubna Al-Hussein who shook the government of Kharoum last summer because of the way she dressed.

The worst feminine condition in the world is in Moslem countries. This is a fact and we must recognize it. That is our first responsibility towards all women who defy the worst tyrannical regimes in the world. Who would dare say otherwise? Who would dare claim the opposite to be true? Islamists and their accomplices? Assuredly. But they are not the only ones!

There is also a current of relativist thought claiming that, in the name of culture and tradition, we must accept the regression that confines the other to the perpetual role of victim. This thinking tries to make us feel guilty for our social choices in labeling us racist and Islamiphobic for defending secularism and equality between the sexes. It is this same left that opens its arms to Tarik Ramadan, for him to strut from city to city, from one television stage to another, spitting on the values of the French Republic.

Know that there is nothing in my culture that destines me to be hidden under a shroud, that ostentatious emblem of difference. Nothing destines me to have to accept the triumph of the idiot, the fool and the coward, especially when small minds, the mediocre, are set up as judges. Nothing that prepares me for having my sexual organs butchered without my indignation. Nothing predestines me to a life of physical punishment. Nothing says I must repudiate beauty and pleasure and accept a cold, harsh blade against my throat. And if that were the case, I would deny my mother’s belly, my father’s caress, and the sunshine of my childhood days, without a moment of regret or remorse.

Islamic politics is not the expression of a cultural specificity, as some people in this world claim. It is a political matter, a collective threat that attacks the very foundation of democracy in promoting a violent, sexist, misogynistic, racist and homophobic ideology.

We have seen the way that Islamic movements, with the complicity, cowardice and support of certain political sectors, guarantee the profound regression that has settled into the very heart of our cities.

And yet, in Canada, we came very close to having Islamic courts.

That is already the norm in several communities in Great Britain. From one end of the planet to another, wearing the Islamic veil is spreading and becoming commonplace, even becoming an acceptable alternative in the eyes of some, because it is at least better than the burqa!

What can be said about Occidental democracies that abdicate their responsibility to protect the primordial issues upon which community and citizenship are based: the defense of public schools, public services, the neutrality of the State, for example?

What can be said about the retreat on the accessibility to abortion, right here in France?

However, it is still possible to make societies move forward, thanks to our courage, our determination and our audacity. I am not telling you that these are easy choices. Far from it. The pathways to freedom are always steep and uphill. They are the only pathways leading to human emancipation; I know of no others.

This wonderful page of history, of OUR history, teaches us that suffering is not submitting. Because beyond the injustices and the humiliations, there is also resistance. To resist is to give oneself the right to choose one’s destiny. For me, this is what feminism is about. A destiny is not individual but collective, for the dignity of ALL women. This is how I give meaning to my life, in tying my destiny as a woman to all those who dream of equality and secularism, as the very foundation of democracy.

History is full of examples of religions that go beyond the private sphere and invade the public sphere to become law. Women are always the first to lose in this context. But not only women. Life, in its multiple dimensions, suddenly becomes sclerotic when the law of God meddles with the law of men in order to control our every move. There is no longer any room for progress in science, literature, theatre, music, dance, painting, cinema. In short, there is no room for life. What grows is regression and restriction. Moreover, this is why I have a profound aversion to all fundamentalists of any sort, because I am in love with life.

Let us remember something: when religion directs the life of a community, we are no longer in the realm of the possible, where there is room for doubt, where Reason and the rationality so dear to those of the Enlightenment guide us. Separating the public and the private by affirming the State’s neutrality seems indispensable to me, because only the secular provides for a common space – a system of reference where the notion of citizenship is central, removed from beliefs and disbeliefs, in order to take in hand the fate of the community. Before I conclude, I would like to share with you a letter addressed to one of your elected officials.

I hesitated for a long time before writing to you. Perhaps out of fear of being perceived as a woman coming from somewhere else, bursting into “French affairs.” Let propriety be damned. I wasn’t given any talent for propriety, especially when it’s in the interest of the strongest, the most powerful and the most arrogant. Moreover, if I had had to live according to what others thought, I wouldn’t have made much of my life. When it comes to women’s rights, what is suitable must give way to what is essential.

The essential being this: liberty, equality and the emancipation of women.  I still hear my French friends insisting: speak to him, tell him, write to him. Curiously, their words remind me of the title of a magnificent film by Almodovar: Talk to Her, where in the opening moments, the curtain is furtively raised for several seconds on a dance featuring the body of a woman – Pina Bausch, who so well and forthrightly expressed in her choreographies the violence trained against women.

Mr. Gérin, my remarks are addressed to you. I would like to talk to you, to tell you about the fear I felt on March 25, 1994 when I was living in Oran, in Algeria and the Islamic Army Group (GIA) ordered that the women of my country must wear the Islamic veil. That day, I and thousands of other Algerian women, marched with our bare heads, to challenge death. We played hide-and-seek with the bloodthirsty GIA. The memory of Katia Bengana, a young 17 year-old high school girl who was killed as she was leaving school on February 28, 1994 was hovering over our bare heads. There are founding events in a life, that give a particular direction to the path of every one of us. That was one for me. Ever since that day, I have a deep aversion for everything having to do with the hidjab, veil, burqa, niqab, tchador, jilbab, khimar, in all their forms. Today you head a parliamentary commission charged with studying the wearing of the full veil in France.

Last March in Quebec, I published a book titled Ma vie à contre-Coran : une femme témoigne sur les islamistes (My Life Against the Coran : One Woman Testifies about the Islamists). From the very first sentences, I used the tone of what has become my life, in terms of political engagement, by writing this: “I have lived the premise of an Islamist dictatorship, in the early 1990s. I wasn’t even 18 years old. I was guilty of being a woman, a feminist and secularist.” I must tell you that I am not feminist and secular by vocation but by necessity, by the strength of things, the suffering that impregnates my body because I cannot abide seeing political Islam gain ground here and everywhere else in the world. I became feminist and secular through seeing around me women suffering in silence behind closed doors, to hide their gender and their pain, to suffocate their desires and silence their dreams. There was a time when France considered the question of the Islamic veil being worn in its schools. Today it is a question of the full veil. Instead of  expanding the 2004 law to university establishments, we are debating about the possibility of allowing caskets to walk around in our streets. Is this normal? Perhaps tomorrow polygamy will be the order of the day. Don’t laugh. That’s what happened in Canada; the courts had to intervene. Because after all, it’s easy to blame culture when it comes to oppressing women. By a strange irony of fate, I noticed in several neighborhoods that skirts are getting longer and are disappearing little by little. The array of colors is getting smaller. It has become commonplace to camouflage one’s body behind a veil; wearing a skirt has become an act of resistance. Just the same, the film “The Day of the Skirt” takes place in a French suburb. While in the streets of Tehran and Khartoum women are uncovering themselves more and more, risking their lives, here in outlying areas of the French Republic, the veil has become the norm.

What is going on?

Has France been taken ill?

The Islamic veil is often presented as part of a “collective Moslem identity.” It is nothing of the sort. It is the emblem of the fundamentalist Moslem everywhere in the world. If it has a particular connotation, it is political, especially since the advent of the Islam revolution in Iran in 1979.

Let us not be mistaken about this: the Islamic veil hides women’s fear, their bodies, their freedom and their sexuality.

Worse yet, the perversion is pushed to paroxysm in veiling girls less than five years old. Some time ago, I tried to remember at which moment precisely in Algeria I saw this veil appear in the classroom. During my childhood and up until the moment I started high school, in 1987, wearing the Islamic veil was only marginal around me. In grade school, no one wore the hidjab, not the teachers and especially not the students.

I have been living in Quebec for 12 years. Its motto, written on car license plates, is Je me souviens, “I remember.” Speaking of memory, what should France remember? That it is the messenger of the Enlightenment, that millions of women are nourished by the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, whose name is inseparable from that of Djamila Boupacha. That’s an understatement. I have no doubt that France is a great country; this confers on you responsibilities and duties towards all of us, the smaller countries. Moreover this is why today our eyes are on your commission and why we are expecting you to be courageous and responsible, by forbidding the burqa.

As for us in Quebec, we remember that in 1961, for the first time in history, a woman, and moreover an attorney, was elected to the Legislative Assembly in a bye-election. Her name is Claire Kirkland; she goes on to become minister. An old parliamentary rule mandating that women wear hats to appear in the Legislative Assembly was invoked; she was told to cover her head during sessions. She refused. A scandal. One newspaper headline read: “A woman with uncovered head in the Legislative Assembly!” She fights and wins.

What we must understand from this is that the rights we have gained are fragile and must be fiercely, relentlessly defended. We must understand that they are the result of collective battles fought by millions of women and men committed to liberty and justice. I dare to hope, Mr. Gérin, that the commission over which you are presiding will take into account all these sacrifices and all these socially aware aspirations around the world, over the course of centuries. 

To you, dear friends, if there is one thing, only one, that I would like you to retain from these words, it is this: despite a certain resigned left, the racism of the extreme right and the laisser-faire and complicity of governments, we have the possibility of changing things. More, we have the historic responsibility of advancing the rights of women. In a way, we are responsible for our future and our children’s future.

Because it will take the direction we give it.

We the citizens. We the people of the world. By our gestures, our actions and our mobilization.

All socially aware energy is necessary, from one country to another, beyond borders. The future belongs to us. The woman is the future of the man, Aragon used to say. And as to men, I want to salute one present here today: my father, to whom I owe everything.

I conclude by quoting Simone de Beauvoir: “We have the right to shout but our cry must be heard, it must hold up, it must resonate in others.”

I dare to hope that my cry will echo among you.

*Djemila Benhabib*