Muslim Women and the Public Sphere in Europe

Ruba Salih
U Bologna

Recently a journalist from a very popular Italian TV program called me seeking insight on the issue of polygamy in Italy. She was doing research for the program’s plan to interview Muslim women about their lives married to polygamous men. The idea was to compare cultural ways of dealing with the supposed worldwide behavior of men desiring more than one woman. Besides Muslim polygamous marriages, there would be a series of interviews with adulterous Italian men.

Speaking to the journalist it seemed the subtext of the program would be that polygamy might after all be less morally reprehensible than Western men who lie and cheat on their wives and the rest of society by having affairs. But the desire to enter into and portray an ideal intimate and private world of Muslim women, revealing “harem” secrets and codes to a wide audience, was indeed the hidden agenda of the scheduled TV program.

Egyptian origin polemically called for a mobilization against the hazard of a “polygamy proliferation” in Italy.

Italian conservatives were some of the most interested in this issue. Daniela Santanché, a deputy of the post-Fascist party Alleanza Nazionale, became a frequently cited expert on the topic having written a book aimed at showing how Muslim women are supposedly living under unbearable, oppressive conditions. The book became the basis for her successful campaign to propose a law to forbid the wearing of veils in public schools. Interestingly, some analysts noted how this “no-veil” proposal and campaign on behalf of presumed oppressed Muslim women is a strategy by Santanché to gain grassroots support for her promotion and influence within Alleanza Nazionale at a critical moment within the history of the party.

Who Are These Supposedly Oppressed Muslim Women?
A couple of months ago I attended a public conference on the effects of the reform in 2004 of the Mudawana (the Moroccan personal status code established in 1957) on Moroccan women residing in Italy and France. Many hail the reform of Mudawana as a major step toward gender equality in Morocco.

Muslim women discussing family law reform in Morocco. Photo courtesy of R Pepicelli

Because of the reform, men can no longer “repudiate” their wives in Morocco, or by their own will annul a marriage. Unlike in the past when a man could simply tell his wife or a Muslim family affairs judge that he was annulling the marriage, now such proceeding must go through a divorce court. The 2004 reform also provides women with the right to initiate divorce, the right to marry without a “tutor” (usually her father or brother), and restricts polygamy.

Keynote speakers at the conference, which took place in a well known migrant and native women’s center in Turin, were two young French women of Moroccan origin in the course of obtaining their PhDs from a very prestigious university. Both dressed in suits, one of these women wore a hijab. The conference addressed the effects and the actual gains of the Mudawana reform on Moroccan women in Morocco and in the diaspora, but also highlighted the remaining discrimination women have to face because of the difficulty in implementing the reform.

More than a hundred women were sitting in the audience, most of them migrant women of Muslim background, working as intercultural mediators, lawyers and activists within women’s associations. Yasmina, a young, hijab-wearing university student brought up in Italy with Moroccan origin, sat too in the audience.

As many young practicing Muslims in Italy, Yasmina participates in several organizations and associations at local, national and transnational levels. She has just been appointed as a member of a national consultative body in Italy, Consulta Giovanile per il Pluralismo Culturale e Religioso (Youth Consultative Body for Cultural and Religious Pluralism), recently created by the new Ministry of Interior who is in the process of consulting with various religious and non-religious constituencies for elaborating a new national law on religious freedom.

Yasmina is a prominent member of both the local branch and the national body of the GMI (Giovani Musulmani d’Italia, the Young Muslims of Italy) and an active member of Giovani Senza Frontiere (Youth Beyond Frontiers), a secular organization working on issues of human rights and xenophobia. She is also an associate of the organization Young Women From Minorities, a European organization working on gender and ethnicity issues. At the local level, she is one of the founders of Jusur (Bridges), a local organization providing services, information and help to all foreign students.

A New Counter-Public?
These brief accounts hint at the ways in which cultural politics in Italy are increasingly concerned with Islam and its public and transnational nature. Yet, they also provide an idea of the pervasive yet ambiguous nature of the presence of “Muslim women” in contemporary Italian and European public spheres.

Indeed, “Islam” and particularly “Muslim women”—referring to the symbols, gendered identities, cultural practices and institutions loosely decoded as far-reaching aspects of Islamic faith and ways of life—are ubiquitous in contemporary European public spheres. They may even play a role in the formation of political alliances and agendas, and in shaping discussions about morals and ethics. They are becoming a mirror through which to see the crisis and pitfalls characterizing European societies, families and identities.

And yet, the way in which Islam becomes “public Islam” is not only gendered but also twofold and contradictory. On the one hand, “Muslim women” are a public object of discussion very often leading to their essentialization and domestication, with veiled bodies and imagined harems displayed and consumed on a daily basis. On the other hand, there is an authentic and mounting involvement of several Muslim women in what might be called a “counter-public.” As intercultural mediators, active members of women’s associations, students and prominent figures of local, national and transnational organizations or simply as women displaying their Islamic identities through specific body techniques such as the hijab, these women counter the public discussions objectifying them.

The Post-National Challenge
The notion of counter-public describes the experiences of historically excluded and marginalized groups of women, minorities and poor in producing meanings, social horizons and points of views altering or opposing the historically dominant perspectives and opinions of the bourgeoisie.

The active and public involvement of Muslim women from different cultural and political backgrounds in Europe could be seen as an attempt to articulate an oppositional counter-public which challenges the proliferation of those in the European public who have the power to transform Muslim women’s bodies, practices, symbols and predicaments into commodities, turn them into objects of consumption to feed a European Orientalist imaginary, or use them as political pawns in real politik games. And in doing so, Muslim women are simultaneously extending historical critiques of Rawls and Habermas’ liberal ideas of the public sphere by inserting new elements.

These women challenge a nationally bounded conceptualization of the public sphere and urge us to rethink ideas of nationalities and states in light of new transnational challenges to classic notions and practices regarding citizenship and rights.

Key to the current impasse the nation-state is undergoing is the challenge brought forward by transnational identities and loyalties to the belief that a unitary, homogenous or pure cultural and religious identity is necessary to access citizenship and all the rights that ensue. Not only Muslim women’s bodies and body techniques—as they have become objects of political and public debate about how to turn this key—but also Muslim women’s participation in local, national and transnational public spheres highlight the emergence of new subjectivities whose conscious aim is to make public their multiple, overlapping identities, as well as their multiple loyalties that extend beyond the borders of any particular nation-state.

In this sense Muslim women make palpable the post-national constellations of contemporary European states and societies, showing the heterogeneous, fragmented and multiple nature of European postcolonial identities and the precariousness of national constructions of citizenship in Europe.

Ruba Salih is a social anthropologist who teaches at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her interests include contemporary transnational migration movements and diasporas, multiculturalism, gender, and Islam in the Middle East, and Islam in Europe. She is the author of Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women (2003).