Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Two researchers from Stanford University, Vasiliki Fouka and Aala Abdelgadir, documented and analysed the ban's consequences in 2019. They found that the ban hurt Muslim girls' ability to complete their education and obstructed their access to the labour market. It doubled the gap between the percentage of non-Muslim and Muslim girls completing their secondary education in favour of the former.” Like hypocrisy, double-standard, complicity, racism, commodification, etc, the ban on the headscarf has been normalised . Related The law on theheadscarf The imaginary separatism of salafist women

 “ Neither Jean-Luc Mélenchon nor Emmanuel Macron know what  laïcité  [French state secularism] is , yet Macron wants to teach Muslims that “Islam is in crisis.” 

I recall a colleague who a few years ago, pointing to photos of women wearing the headscarf, asked me: "Why are they still like this?" In an era of globalisation and a triumphing "liberal democracy" "liberating" everybody, my colleague, a white Westerner, thought, and probably still does, that those women are resisting "freedom" and the "free world", preferring "backwardness" and "submission."  "Today, behind the terrible shaming and violent treatment of a Muslim woman and her son, is the ongoing structural violence against Muslims and other people who speak out against inequality and injustice, couched in the corporatisation of everything (including war, which must be maintained for the secular system to profit)." French fear and loathing of Muslim women

"This image has also become a stereotype because it is simplistic in its pitting supposedly free sisters in the West against wretched victims in Arab countries. Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct." The West's gleeful obsession with "oppressed Arab women" Further reading: Islam in Liberalism by Joseph A. Massad "In his analysis of the emergence of 'military humanitarianism,' David Chandler notes that the development of the NGO regime prevalent in the 1980s focused on 'capacity buidling,' 'empowering,' and 'civil society' (and this is of course in line with the democratisation ideas...that Muslims lack civil society and one has to be created for them to advance democracy), 'as they argued the need for a lo...

English schools: on the footsteps of the French ones? Mr Courtney was referring to a speech in February in which Ms Spielman said: "School leaders must have the right to set school uniform policies in a way that they see fit, in order to promote cohesion." By "cohesion" Ms Spielman means conformity . What we are speaking about hear is the headscarf not the veil. The latter covers the whole face not the first. Banning the headscarf at school is considered

Neither Mélenchon nor Macron know what laïcité [secularism] is

" It is also a huge business... " " DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger have designed Ramadan collections, and  Dolce & Gabbana sells abayas , long outer garments, priced at more  than $2,000 apiece.

Etienne Balibar: laïcité or identity? and ... the lastest on the identity crap

Racism, Pure and Simple