Outpourings of nationalist self-righteousness seldom provide space for subtlety and contradiction. The French feminist support for the loi sur la laïcité has crossed both historical and cultural bounds. With barely thirty years of meager institutional gains under its belt, feminism has engaged in cross-cultural preaching. It has ventured far and wide from its socio-economic, revolutionary, discourse of the 1970s and 1980s.
In the eyes of feminists, an advanced culture is predicated upon the essential freedoms, or rights, granted by law to its female population. Insofar as freedom might be a typically Western concept-at least how it has found its contemporary formulation and the linguistic heritage from which it has emerged-feminism has had to cross the desert of the interpretative dispersal that frames all Western concepts. Along the way it sprouted its own ideological version.
There is no purity of thought in the West. Not anymore than elsewhere, perhaps. And even less when it is a matter of institutional gains and power politics. When this becomes a state of things, the content of ideas shifts considerably from the cradle of revolt, collective demand and social movements from which it surged forth.
In that regard, it comes as no surprise that two essential points of the loi sur la laïcité have been brushed aside without the bat of an eye. It is the measure of a law’s fairness to be able to address the subtle pluralism on which any society breeds. The fact that the French law aims at curbing the rights of young women, under the purported guise of protecting them from their own families and religious authorities, should not lead one to ignore that such focus on the student-individual’s general rights is otherwise a trait typical to the French public schooling system at large.
http://www.islamonline.net/English/in_depth/hijab/2004-03/article_02.shtml
In the eyes of feminists, an advanced culture is predicated upon the essential freedoms, or rights, granted by law to its female population. Insofar as freedom might be a typically Western concept-at least how it has found its contemporary formulation and the linguistic heritage from which it has emerged-feminism has had to cross the desert of the interpretative dispersal that frames all Western concepts. Along the way it sprouted its own ideological version.
There is no purity of thought in the West. Not anymore than elsewhere, perhaps. And even less when it is a matter of institutional gains and power politics. When this becomes a state of things, the content of ideas shifts considerably from the cradle of revolt, collective demand and social movements from which it surged forth.
In that regard, it comes as no surprise that two essential points of the loi sur la laïcité have been brushed aside without the bat of an eye. It is the measure of a law’s fairness to be able to address the subtle pluralism on which any society breeds. The fact that the French law aims at curbing the rights of young women, under the purported guise of protecting them from their own families and religious authorities, should not lead one to ignore that such focus on the student-individual’s general rights is otherwise a trait typical to the French public schooling system at large.
http://www.islamonline.net/English/in_depth/hijab/2004-03/article_02.shtml
