Can't We All Just Get Along?

So it's a trivial incident, what the French call a fait divers, but it has lit up the social media in France, for good reason. I refer to the recent remark by French Minister for Families, Children and Women's Rights Laurence Rossignol, who decried the decision by some high-end clothing manufacturers to market hijabs and other traditional Muslim women's apparel (the modest bathing suit called the 'burkini,' shown here, for example). Rossignol went on to suggest that Muslim women who freely choose such traditional cover-up clothing were like certain "nègres américains qui soutenaient l'esclavage."

First, the linguistic angle: Rossignol's remark was widely--and polemically-- translated across the internet as "American niggers who supported slavery." This is a fair approximation--the word 'nègre' is widely recognized as insulting, and decent people don't normally use it (the minister apologized for the term, but not the sentiment). Then the the English-language press adopted the sanitized term 'negro,' perhaps to defuse what had become a storm of protest in Muslim social media. As it happens, the anti-imperialist cultural movement called 'Nègritude' embraced the term Nègre' (as I learned in this quite interesting article) specifically because--unlike the more genteel word 'noir' or 'person of color'--it was the slur widely used to refer to black laborers throughout the French colonial gulag. Cultural radicals decided to make it their own much as the LGBT community has appropriated the slur 'queer' as a badge of honor. Nonetheless, Rossignol's slip made visible the festering nexus, just below the surface of the French governing elite, of racist feeling directed at blacks, Muslims, and all the other not-quite-French.

But apart from Rossignol's unfortunate word choice, the larger question is one that Europe, and perhaps the US, can't really avoid. Is Islam, particularly in its fundamentalist or Wahabbist forms, compatible with liberal western society? The venerable French feminist Élisabeth Badinter has called for a boycott of the Muslim-accommodating clothing manufacturers. Like Rossignol, she sees the hijab, the niqba, all the items of women's clothing that sequester the female body, as inherently offensive to liberal society. Muslims in the West simply have to accept a view of gender equality that gives women the right--and indeed, the obligation--to display their bodies. After all, as Badinter doesn't say but strongly implies, female bodies are meant to be sexually provocative, inducements to pleasure and procreation, and the refusal of this life-affirming display can only be the result of oppression, of restrictions on freedom that are intolerable in liberal society.

Some Muslim women are no doubt simply, silently accepting the patriarchal rules that keep them from full membership in civil society. This is problematic, for sure, though western liberal society got on pretty well with comparable restrictions on women's freedoms until about three generations ago. Other Muslim women are actually pretty articulate about why bikinis and other hide-and-seek women's fashions are actually more objectifying than liberating. (These are the self-hating, internally-oppressed Muslim 'nègres' Rossignol was quick to dismiss.) I expect fully liberated, westernized women share a wide range of feelings on this question, though for Badinter and other French feminists there is clearly only one right answer.

Does this tiny tempest have relevance for the much bigger questions, the 'clash of civilizations,' the increasingly global incidence of Islamist terror, the challenge to diversity one hears from politicians all over the West? Frictions like the one captured in the photo, above, are indeed part of the larger picture. European nations in particular, with much higher ratios of Muslim residents than the US, really do have to find some common ground--non-pork options in school cafeterias, acceptance of religious-identified clothing, public support for mosques to the same degree as temples and churches--or risk the exacerbation of tensions and alienation that are driving young Muslims toward desperate solutions.

And yes, ministers who use ethnic slurs, even 'by mistake,' should be fired. And so should presidential candidates who promote discriminatory policies. Islamist terror, and the Wahabbism that promotes it, need to be fought with stronger weapons, in other venues. But there's no excuse for allowing public figures to foment hostility and misunderstanding at home.