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White men are saving brown women from brown men’– Spivak
The practice of wearing the veil has recently surfaced as a hot topic within political and legal debates in European countries with much of the discourse being underpinned by islamophobia and racism. The lack of consensus on this issue throughout Europe has generated a lot of controversies, particularly exemplified in the Sahin v Turkey and Dahlab v Switzerland cases. In both cases, the courts had made the decision to ban the applicants from wearing the veil in the public institutions they were part of. What was at stake here, inter alia, was whether wearing a veil violated the fundamental principle of gender equality. The European Court of Human Rights held that they did. In both cases the women were adult Muslim women who had chosen to wear the veil by their own free will in accordance with their faith. Yet their agency was not recognised by the courts and societies at large, subsequently, Sahin and Dahlab were respectively prevented from attending university and dismissed from work.
In Sahin and Dahlab there was nothing to suggest that their claims were not genuine nor were they forced to wear the veil. However, by pursuing the argument of gender equality, the European Court of Human Rights did not perceive the applicants capable of making autonomous decisions and ironically inhibited them from pursuing education and work respectively - factors that foster gender equality. Even nineteen years after the beginning of the 21th century women are still treated as a mere secondary consideration - their personhood is reduced to a ‘single piece of cloth’ as it was in these cases. Furthermore, by conflating the wearing of the veil as synonymous with gender inequality, the courts further reify the symbolism of female islamic dressing as tools of oppression and transforms the bodies of Muslim women into sites of contemporary political struggle.
Spivak’s statement ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ is as truthful today as it was in the 1980s. Brown women today are still subjected to a process of subordination, regulated through Foucauldian power relations. For Wendy Brown, the legal discourse is unable to theorise brown women as complex and multifaceted beings and similarly recognise their racialised experiences. Therefore, through reinforcing the language of rights, the law reiterates the narrative of brown women as perpetual victims further entrenching their subordination.
The judgments by the European Court of Human Rights were based on wrong assumptions and prejudices. Yet this was not an issue in the mindset of white male politicians and legislators. Over-regulation of women’s freedom through clothing does not promote gender equality, as those judgments claimed. On the contrary, banning the veil only serves the interests of those white men which Spivak refers to, undemocratically imposing absurd rules on women.
Both ‘brown’ and ‘white’ men – the former through imposing the veil and the latter banning it – have for a long time decided, and legislated on, women’s attire and, hence, their identities. Men always create the law, granting themselves more power to legislate over women and their bodies. What should be targeted here is not the veil itself; rather, the ultra vires influence of ‘white’ men over ‘brown’ women. Those campaigns to decide what women should or should not wear are driven by both misogyny and Islamophobia. The post-colonial dichotomy ‘civilised vs uncivilised’ still applies today, and it is both directed against women and the ‘savage’ other. Spivak’s ‘subaltern’ is embodied here by ‘brown’ women. They have the potential to speak yet they are not allowed to, being subjugated by ‘white men’, arbitrators of the justice pendulum who decide between what is ‘right’ – hence, civilised – and what is ‘wrong’ – or uncivilised.
Women are speaking but their voice are not heard. Banning the veil is only counterproductive for brown women’s emancipation. They are prevented from going out, getting an education and working, exacerbating even more their isolation and their distance from the ‘Western civilised’ society. Women are indeed forced to stay at home, their freedom and right to enjoy life as autonomous beings denied. What is worrying is that Sahin and Dahlab are not isolated cases. Many women are (unfairly) dismissed from their jobs or are offered jobs on the condition of veil’s removal. Additionally, many schoolgirls (for instance, both in France and England) have been expelled from school for wearing headscarves.
Preventing women from getting an education and reaching economic independence favours, once again, women’s subordination to men, paradoxically contravening the same (fabricated) principle of gender equality that ‘white’ men are so fiercely protecting. Unfortunately, this paradox of Human Rights will always exist until those power relations are dismantled.