MAYANTHI L.
FERNANDO
Reconfiguring freedom:
Muslim piety and the limits of secular law and public
discourse in France
A B S T R A C T
Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first
examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile
the dominant secular oppositions between personal
autonomy and religious authority, and between the
“true” self and religious norms, as they constitute
themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the
2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and
to the attendant public debates, exploring how this
Muslim French religiosity was rendered
incommensurable in secular law and unintelligible in
public discourse. In so doing, I bring into focus
both the underlying assumptions and exigencies of
French secularity as well as some of its aporias.
[Islam, France, secularism, religious liberty, religious
subjectivity]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 19–35, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01239.x
University of California, Santa Cruz
fter a long period of détente, France’s national debate about
A
the Islamic headscarf in public schools—first begun in 1989—
emerged anew in 2003 and culminated in September 2004 with
the enactment of a law banning “conspicuous religious signs”
in French public schools. In early 2004, a group of Muslim, Sikh,
and secular activists formed the One School for All Collective (Collectif
Une Ecole pour Tous et Toutes) to contest the proposed law and to pro-
vide legal counsel and educational support for students who would be ex-
pelled as a result of the law. I was a member of the collective, opting to
sit on the legal subcommittee alongside Corinne and Nadia, two second-
generation pious Muslim women; Malika, a self-declared Algerian feminist;
Ikhram, a Franco-Tunisian lawyer; and Jaswant, an energetic middle-aged
Sikh man.1 (One of the unintentional targets of the new law was the Sikh
turban, precipitating the participation of the small Parisian Sikh commu-
nity in protests against the law.) We met weekly in a café in the 11th ar-
rondissement of Paris in the late winter of 2004, gathered around a black
metal table near the window, copies of legal codes and conventions piled in
front of us, trying to find legal challenges to the law. Most of us on the sub-
committee regarded the proposed law as an attack on religious freedom2
and, consequently, felt that the best and most relevant challenge to the law
lay in advocating for the fundamental right to conscience, a right ostensi-
bly protected by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,
the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,
and other international conventions to which France is a signatory.
It turned out we were wrong. As we began to delve deeper into French
and European law, we discovered that both the French Constitution and
the European Convention on Human Rights make a distinction between
the right to conscience, which is inalienable, and the right to expressions or
manifestations of conscience, which can be subject to restriction. Neither
Corinne, Nadia, nor Jaswant understood practices like veiling and wearing
the turban as optional expressions of belief; rather, they considered them
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
religious duties, as did most of my other pious Muslim
French interlocutors. As Jaswant put it, the five Ks of
Sikhism “are not optional—they are the faith [ils sont le
culte].”3 Nonetheless, regarded by many French as expres-
sions of conscience—“signs,” in the language of the pro-
posed law—the headscarf and the turban fell outside the
purview of the inalienable right to conscience. After a se-
ries of meetings, we came to the conclusion that we sim-
ply had no recourse to challenge the law via a defense of
religious liberty, and we turned our attention and resources
elsewhere.
This article unpacks the conundrum we faced, tracing
the ways in which secular assumptions about freedom, au-
thority, choice, and obligation—assumptions that underpin
French political discourse about religion and French and
European law pertaining to religious freedom—preclude
the public intelligibility of the kind of religiosity inhab-
ited by Corinne, Nadia, and other Muslim citizens who
are part of the French Islamic revival. I begin by examin-
ing how much of the debate about the French Islamic re-
vival, and about the Islamic veil4 specifically, depends on a
series of oppositions between choice and constraint, per-
sonal autonomy and religious authority, and self-realization
and “external” norms. Yet, as I go on to argue, many pi-
ous Muslim citizens challenge the viability of these binaries
by conceptualizing practices like veiling, praying, and fast-
ing both as modalities of personal freedom and as author-
itatively prescribed acts necessary to becoming a proper
Muslim subject. Taking up one dimension of the kind of
religiosity constituted in the French Islamic revival, I ex-
plore how the simultaneous goals of personal autonomy
and submission to God, considered contradictory by nor-
mative secular French standards, are reconciled by Muslim
citizens for whom religious authority does not exist in op-
position to one’s “true” or inner self but, instead, is con-
ceived of precisely as the means to the self’s cultivation and
realization. I then return to the oppositional relation be-
tween choice and constraint, and between autonomy and
regulatory authority, detailing how these binaries underpin
secular European and French law and French political dis-
course about religious freedom, and how, as a consequence,
it becomes difficult, even impossible, for many pious
Muslim citizens to articulate what it means to wear the veil
in a way that is intelligible within dominant legal, political,
and ethical frameworks. By examining, then, how a distinct
form of religious subjectivity is rendered incommensurable
with secular discourse and law, I bring into focus both
the underlying assumptions and exigencies of French sec-
ularity as well as some of its aporias—aporias that are de-
ferred onto and disproportionately borne by pious Muslim
citizens.
As in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa,
the Islamic revival in France encompasses a broad swathe
of doctrinal trends, ethical, religious, and political sensi-
20
bilities, and ritual and hermeneutical practices. Moreover,
in France, this diversity is complicated by generational di-
vergences.5 I therefore do not ascribe the particular reli-
gious subjectivity under discussion to all participants in
the Islamic revival (and certainly not to all Muslims in
France). Most of my interlocutors for this article were “sec-
ond generation,”6 that is, the children of immigrants from
the Maghreb and, to a lesser extent, sub-Saharan Africa; a
few were converts (or “reverts”). All of them had been born
or grown up in France in the blue-collar suburbs (banlieues)
of Paris, Rennes, Nantes, and Lyon. In addition, though their
parents were or had been part of a proletarian workforce,
most of my interlocutors had or were studying for post-
secondary-school degrees, often in communications, ac-
counting, or social work. The practices and sensibilities I
describe here, then, are particularly salient to those I call
“Muslim citizens,” that is, women and men committed to
practicing Islam as French citizens and to practicing French
citizenship as Muslims, women and men who often identify
as citoyens français de confession musulmane (French citi-
zens of Muslim faith) and who comprise a demographically
and politically significant aspect of the revival.
In taking up the religiosity of these Muslim citizens,
I bring together and build on the anthropology of the Is-
lamic revival, the anthropology of minorities in Europe, and
a burgeoning anthropology of secularism. Saba Mahmood’s
(2005) seminal ethnography of the women’s mosque move-
ment in Egypt expanded anthropological theories of ethi-
cal self-fashioning, uncoupling women’s agency from resis-
tance to relations of domination and disengaging women’s
participation in (often patriarchal) piety movements from a
desire, even a subconscious one, for autonomy. Drawing on
Mahmood, other scholars have begun to take seriously pi-
ous women’s desire to constitute themselves as ethical sub-
jects by submitting to forms of social and religious authority
(Haq 2008; Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006)—an approach I
pursue here. Yet I take equally seriously my interlocutors’
simultaneous desire for personal autonomy, and their es-
pousal of a discourse of freedom and self-realization akin
to secular conceptions of the self and of individual agency.7
This desire for autonomy should come as no surprise, given
my interlocutors’ embedment in a French context domi-
nated by the imperatives of liberté (freedom) and volonté
(individual will). Like Lara Deeb (2006) and Gregory Starrett
(1998), then, who have focused on Islamic revivalists’ in-
terpellation by and engagement with modernist ideologies,
I am interested in what effect the fact that these Muslim
citizens have been—literally—schooled in French republi-
can epistemologies and ontologies has on their engagement
with the Islamic tradition. I am equally interested, however,
in how Muslim citizens, drawing simultaneously on certain
ethical practices and epistemologies of self central to the Is-
lamic tradition, speak back to, disrupt, challenge, and re-
configure dominant secular–republican assumptions.

I hope, too, to deepen recent analyses of France’s post-
colonial predicament. Most relevant studies have either ex-
plicitly focused on questions of race and ethnicity (Fassin
and Fassin 2006; Hargreaves 1997; Silverstein 2004) or col-
lapsed race, ethnicity, and religiosity into one overarching
category of “difference” (Keaton 2006; Scott 2007; Touraine
2005; Wieviorka 1997). In contrast, I analyze the specific
problems the “difference” of Muslim religiosity poses, both
for Muslim citizens and for the secular French state. I un-
derstand secularity here not simply as a political doctrine
separating religious and political life but also as a set of le-
gal and political practices of government with concomitant
ethical and political attitudes (Asad 2003, 2006; Jakobsen
and Pellegrini 2008a; Taylor 2007). Talal Asad has written
that because these elements form the epistemological and
ontological basis of modern life, the secular is not easy to
grasp directly, and must be pursued “through its shadows”
(2003:16). I take him to mean that examining the shadow
cast over Muslim French women by the secular republi-
can project, and particularly by the ban on headscarves
in public schools, can tell us a great deal not only about
the specificity of Muslim “difference” but also about the
secular itself—the sensibilities it seeks to cultivate, the eth-
ical imaginary it produces, the relationship between auton-
omy and authority on which it depends—as well as its lim-
its and aporias. Moreover, like Elizabeth Povinelli, I explore
how these aporias—akin to what she calls the “impasses
of late liberalism”—are borne by minorities and subalterns
caught in contradictory mandates that put them ontolog-
ically and politically at risk (2002:3). By illuminating the
shadow spaces of laı̈cité (French secularism), I inquire into
a prevalent form of Muslim religiosity being constituted in
France, the nature of French secularism, and the ways in
which secular law and politics can undo the viability and
intelligibility of certain nonsecular subjects and forms of
religious life.
Opposing conceptions of the Islamic
revival in France
Originating in the Middle East in the 1970s, Islamic revival-
ism is now a global phenomenon. In France, those involved
are primarily the children and sometimes grandchildren
of working-class immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, and
Tunisia who were recruited by the French government and
French industry as the cheap manual labor needed to re-
build France after World War II. Participants also include
young people of West African descent, white and Antillean
converts, and older first-generation immigrants who came
to France as either laborers or foreign students. Various es-
timates put the number of people involved in the French
Islamic revival—which, as I noted earlier, encompasses var-
ious trends—at between 250,000 and 500,000 people out of
a population of about five million Muslims in France.8 As
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
in the Middle East, the Islamic revival in France entails the
unprecedented engagement with scholarly texts and theo-
logical reasoning by people not necessarily trained at tradi-
tional religious institutions (Hirschkind 2006), resulting in
various forms of publicly engaged religiosity (Deeb 2006).
Over the past 15 years, France has witnessed the prolifera-
tion of Islamic bookstores, Islamic youth associations, and
forms of Islamic dress, as well as Muslim demands on the
state for funds to build mosques and a school calendar that
incorporates Muslim holy days—demands that most non-
Muslims find inimical to French republican norms (Bowen
2006; Laborde 2008).
The major point of contention between secular re-
publicans and Islamic revivalists has concerned the head-
scarf. The first “headscarf affair” occurred in 1989, when
three Muslim schoolgirls of Tunisian and Moroccan de-
scent refused to remove their headscarves in class, provok-
ing a national political crisis. Ultimately, the High Court
(Conseil d’Etat) ruled that headscarves were permissible in
public schools as long as they were neither “ostentatious”
(ostentatoire) nor accompanied by proselytism. Despite
the court’s 1989 decision, a new law was passed—almost
unanimously—in 2004 banning the display of “conspicu-
ous” (ostensible) religious signs in public schools.9 As John
Bowen (2006), Cécile Laborde (2008), and Joan Scott (2007)
have demonstrated, various arguments emerged as justifi-
cations for the law: the headscarf violated the avowedly sec-
ular, neutral space of the public school;10 it represented an
unacceptable form of communalism (communautarisme)
and was just the tip of the iceberg of a larger Islamist threat;
and it symbolized the submission of women to patriarchal
religious authority and, therefore, had no place in the sec-
ular public school, the “crucible” (Noiriel 1996) in which
French children are supposed to be emancipated from the
yoke of ostensibly retrograde religious and cultural tradi-
tions. Given its disproportionate affective weight in this de-
bate (Bowen 2006), as well as its legal efficacy, I will con-
centrate here on the third argument—that the headscarf
is a sign of women’s submission—which itself has taken
two forms. Some critics (more in 1989, fewer in 2003 and
2004) have argued that young girls in headscarf are be-
ing forced to wear the veil by their fathers, brothers, or
Muslim community leaders, and that they need to be eman-
cipated by the secular Republic and its laws (Augé 2004;
Long and Weil 2004). Other critics, mindful of studies that
have shown that many young women choose the headscarf
themselves, have advanced a more nuanced argument (one
that has reappeared in current French debates about out-
lawing face veils). These critics argue that the veil, even if
it is chosen freely by the wearer, perpetuates normative re-
ligious authority, polices female sexuality and prescribed
gender roles, and reinforces patriarchal communal norms
not only on the veiled woman in question but also on all
Muslim women in her social orbit (Kintzler et al. 2004;
21
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
Rojtman et al. 2004; Weil 2004). Underpinning all these crit-
ics’ arguments is a clear opposition between emancipation
on the one hand and religious authority on the other hand,
and an understanding of the headscarf as fundamentally
nonemancipatory because it is worn, even by choice, as a
religious prescription.
In contrast to those who see the headscarf as a form
of submission to religious authority, numerous French so-
ciologists have, in recent years, begun to regard the veil as
a form of empowerment and emancipation (Gaspard and
Khosrokhavar 1995; Khosrokhavar 1997; Tietze 2002; Venel
2004). Many of these analysts argue that by becoming a
practicing Muslim and participating in Islamic civil asso-
ciations, young women are able to cloak their desires—for
work, for education, for freedom—in, if you will, a veil of
Islamic legitimacy, enabling them to escape traditional cus-
toms like forced marriage and domestic servitude without
breaking completely with their families and community.
Nancy Venel, for example, writes: “Under the cover of re-
ligion and altruism, [young veiled women] enjoy a relative
autonomy. . . . Through the veil, young women get around
[se dédouanent de] all parental suspicion with regards to
their chastity and the rectitude of their conduct. The veil
allows them to occupy a space of liberty outside the fam-
ily cell . . . and to invert the traditional relations of authority
within the family” (2004:188). These writers also emphasize
that not only the headscarf but also the kind of rigorous
Islam practiced by second-generation youth more gener-
ally is the result of a willed, individual choice, not the ha-
bitual reiteration of parental norms. In fact, a number of
analysts hold that, rather than the reinscription of com-
munal custom, the defining feature of the French Islamic
revival is the individualization of religiosity (Khosrokhavar
1997; Roy 1999, 2007; Venel 2004). Olivier Roy, for instance,
maintains that the absence of Islamic religious authori-
ties who could “state what is the norm,” and the lack of
social, communal, customary, and juridical coercion have
all made religiosity a fundamentally individual experience
(1999:70) so that, “at the end of the day, it is the believer
who decides, not the law, and not the society” (1999:91).
Although Roy does not reference them explicitly, he echoes
the kind of modern religious self described by both repub-
lican philosopher Marcel Gauchet (1997, 1998), who draws
on the Rousseauian tradition (Bowen 2006), and commu-
nitarian philosopher Charles Taylor (2002), who draws on
William James (1999). According to this understanding,
modern religiosity entails following one’s inner voice, rather
than conforming to the “exterior” rules of religious author-
ity (i.e., the church). One’s religion therefore cannot be pre-
scribed but must instead be chosen, guided by a voice felt
and heard within rather than outside the self.
In the political and cultural climate of contemporary
France, where the vast majority of the French public views
the headscarf as the symbol par excellence of the submis-
22
sion of women to patriarchal authority, these aforemen-
tioned sociologies of French Islam have done valuable work
in trying to normalize the headscarf, portraying Muslim
women as modern, even quasi-feminist subjects. Nonethe-
less, these scholars reproduce the same analytical schema
as republicanist critics of the headscarf, in which choice
constitutes the opposite of constraint, such that autonomy
emerges in resistance to or in the absence of normative au-
thority. It is true that many young Muslim French women
valorize the goal of personal freedom and conceptualize hu-
man agency as the capacity to author one’s own life without
outside interference. But it is important to recognize that
they simultaneously also seek to submit to God’s will by un-
dertaking certain normative, obligatory practices like veil-
ing, praying, and fasting. While I recognize, then, the po-
litical efficacy of arguing that the veil is a personal choice,
not an imposition, such a reading of the practice of veiling
misses crucial aspects of a certain kind of Muslim subjectiv-
ity being constituted in France.
Accessing the precise nature of that subjectivity is im-
portant for two reasons. First, as social and cultural an-
alysts of human behavior, it behooves us to understand
our subjects’ practices on an emic level, rather than apply-
ing an interpretive schema that may be familiar to us but
that may have little resonance with the subjective orienta-
tions of the people with whom we work.11 Second, propa-
gating a secular heuristic that regards personal autonomy
as the opposite of social and religious authority, and in-
ternally generated choice as the opposite of externally im-
posed constraints, ironically does an ultimate political dis-
service to pious Muslim French women. Although framing
the headscarf as a freely chosen expression of the wearers’
religious belonging may serve to mark these Muslim women
as ostensibly “modern” religious subjects, it simultaneously
severely restricts their ability to articulate what it means to
wear the veil not as a choice or a personal preference but,
rather, as a religious duty.
Redefining freedom
Khadija is a practicing Muslim, part-time journalist, and
masters student in communications; her parents came to
France from Tunisia in the 1970s, and Khadija has lived in
the Paris metropolitan region all her life. Like many other
young Muslim French women whom I knew, Khadija con-
sidered veiling a necessary element in the cultivation of
a relationship with God. Like other young Muslim French
women, Khadija was also adamant that the headscarf must
be a choice, and that the decision to veil must emerge from
the internal desires of the practitioner and cannot be im-
posed by an outside authority. “I would never tell a woman
to veil obligatorily, no way,” Khadija said. “Because it’s really
something between you and God.” As I was told repeatedly

by a number of young Muslim women and men, quoting the
Quran, “there is no compulsion in religion.”12
Khadija’s comments were echoed by members of the
Muslim Women of Rennes, a local association that does
civic outreach work and meets biweekly to read and dis-
cuss the Quran and Quranic exegesis. When I worked with
them, most of the women were between 18 and 35 years old
and from varying backgrounds: of my primary interlocu-
tors, three were Franco-Iraqi, one was Franco-Maghrebi,
one was Antillean, one was African, and three were white
converts. One evening, we were gathered at the home of
Monique, a convert and stay-at-home mother of two small
children, discussing the role of the individual in interpret-
ing God’s will, particularly with regards to the obligation
of the headscarf. Amira, a feisty high school student with
a cherubic face, took the lead in our conversation. Amira
exudes independence—the 18-year-old daughter of Iraqi
Shiites who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s,
she had grown up in the Rennes banlieues with her sisters
and has had a contentious relationship with her parents.
She described how she came to wear the headscarf:
For me, personally, my approach with the headscarf
was to study the position of the schools, Sunni and Shi-
ite, to research religious scholars’ opinions. And you
know what, there’s a certain unanimity on this ques-
tion. Now, these scholars are men, they are interpret-
ing in a political context that we must not ignore, but
they nonetheless have proof, they are relying on the
sources. [Amira paused] There was a time when I re-
ally questioned the veil, but then I asked myself: Is it
really me asking these questions? Is it me who is inter-
rogating my faith, is it me who is asking myself whether
I want to wear the veil and whether I am sincere, or isn’t
it really society? . . . And it was this that led me to keep it
[the veil], because I said to myself that it isn’t really my
faith doing the questioning, it’s Western society in gen-
eral and French society in particular that are always sin-
gling me out [qui me pointent toujours du doigt]. . . . But
at the time, I really had a moment where I wanted to
take it off because I thought, this is something imposed
by men, I am obeying because I fear God, and men are
using my fear of God to make me submit to a com-
mand. . . . But then I realized that when I pray and when
I put on my veil, everything makes sense [tout reprend
du sens]. The headscarf, for me, makes sense. . . . And
that’s when I said to myself that while it was legitimate
to ask myself all these questions, I was putting into
question something that does me good [quelque chose
qui me fait du bien].
Amira’s emphasis on fulfilling her own spiritual needs
and desires regardless of, and sometimes against, the
wishes of others was reiterated by Hélène, another mem-
ber of the group and a convert of Guadeloupian descent
in her mid-twenties. At the time, she was a social worker
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
and lived alone in Rennes (she has since moved to Paris
for professional reasons). Hélène explained that her deci-
sion to veil was not driven by external factors like her fam-
ily because they were Christian. Rather, “It is truly the de-
sire [la volonté] to apply what I consider as emanating from
the Transcendent . . . that makes me wear the veil,” she told
me. She noted that it had been difficult because the head-
scarf poses such a problem for French society, “but I really
disregard how others look at me because it is my relation-
ship with God that is in question in my choice to wear the
veil. I believe it’s important, in order to become the subject
of one’s life [devenir sujet de sa vie], to not conform to the
opinion of others, because to do otherwise would be self-
alienation [parce que sinon, c’est s’aliéner]. Thus, the impor-
tance, for me, in holding fast to my convictions.”
Hélène’s sense that becoming a full subject entails the
authorship of her own life was reiterated by Saida Kada,
then a member of the activist group Collective of French
Muslims (CMF), which coformed the One School for All Col-
lective. Kada is in her late thirties, highly articulate, and
attractive, and she often appears on nationally televised
debates to represent a pious Muslim perspective. She is
also regarded by many Muslim French women as a model
Muslim citizen: a pious working mother and wife who is
also active in political and civic life. In a collaborative trea-
tise with anthropologist Dounia Bouzar on Muslim women
in France, Kada contends that “To be modern is to say ‘I’—
to not let the clan decide for you, to use reason to put into
question ancestral traditions” (Bouzar and Kada 2003:199).
“Freedom,” she continues, “comes with the access to knowl-
edge, and liberation with the ability to speak [in our own
name]. . . . We [Muslim women] must not let others speak
in our place” (2003:15). For Kada, freedom means the abil-
ity to speak for oneself, to be the subject of one’s own life
story, and not the object of someone else’s version. What
Kada, Khadija, Amira, and Hélène all invoke is a sense of
autonomous human agency as fundamentally grounded in
the capacity to lead one’s life in accordance with one’s own
desires and choices, a conception of agency familiar to sec-
ular republican and liberal sensibilities.
These women’s attitudes toward veiling seemingly val-
idate the sociological analyses of the Islamic revival I dis-
cussed earlier, which regard the headscarf as very much a
choice as well as part of a more general form of highly indi-
vidualized religiosity that privileges following one’s “inner
voice” over conforming to the “external” rules of religious
authority. Yet a closer look at the beliefs and practices of
women like Khadija, Amira, and Hélène demonstrate that
they ultimately upend such a distinctly oppositional rela-
tionship between the self and authority, between personal
freedom and norms. By conceptualizing self-realization
as the realization of the transcendent will—the enact-
ment of which requires submission to certain religious
obligations—these Muslim French women fundamentally
23
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
reimagine the relationship between norms and the self,
such that the “true self” is cultivated and realized not
against social and religious authority but, rather, through it.
Recall Amira’s earlier description of how she came to
wear the headscarf. On the one hand, her comments in-
dicate the extent to which she watches over herself in or-
der to distinguish her own desires from those of others. In
fact, she reaches a point in her life at which she almost
takes off the headscarf because she feels that it may have
been imposed on her by a patriarchal male elite. On the
other hand, however, she ultimately recognizes veiling as
an obligation, accepting the authority of religious schol-
ars to interpret the sources correctly. Although her accep-
tance of this obligation relies on her internal feelings of
self-fulfillment—“when I put on my veil, everything makes
sense,” as she affirmed—Amira is equally persuaded by the
arguments and authority of established religious scholars.
Consider, too, the following explanation by Khadija as
to how and why she decided to wear the veil:
I understood from the books [I read] that I had to cover
[my hair], and during the first year of university, I said
to myself, “Khadija, you can’t stay like this [i.e., un-
veiled].” I talked to the sisters, I read books, and the
books were clear, they said that God had written in
the Quran that the headscarf was obligatory. . . . And the
fact that God required it, and that there was a logical
explanation—well, I said to myself, “Khadija, you’re go-
ing to veil.” And I put on a simple headscarf, where you
could see my neck. You know, I had a real problem at
the beginning. And then, little by little, at the end of a
year, I started to wear the headscarf like this [i.e., a piece
of thick fabric covering her head, neck, and ears].
Amira’s and Khadija’s accounts elucidate how many pi-
ous Muslim citizens understand the relationship between
choice and normative authority. Quite significant, for exam-
ple, is their reliance on the authority of accepted texts. One
of the most salient features of the Islamic revival in France
is the production, circulation, and consumption of reli-
gious manuals and video and audio cassettes by preachers,
many of whom have no classical training at religious insti-
tutions; these audio-visual and written manuals often detail
the proper Islamic behavior for men, women, and children.
Olivier Roy (1999, 2007) contends that the increased avail-
ability of texts and modes of Islamic reasoning, as well as the
absence of state and judicial enforcement of religious law,
has shattered traditional authority in Europe. He thereby
reiterates arguments about the democratization of author-
ity through mass media circulation of religious knowledge
advanced by analysts of the Islamic revival in the Mid-
dle East and North Africa (Eickelman and Anderson 1997;
Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Starrett 1998). However,
while the mass circulation of religious knowledge has in-
deed shifted religious authority from the restricted domain
24
of the ‘ulema (religious scholars) to a public domain, reli-
gious authority has not necessarily been shattered; rather,
in Europe, it has been resituated in nontraditional figures
like Tariq Ramadan (a popular Swiss scholar) and his fel-
low preachers and preacher–intellectuals.13 Moreover, the
availability of religious manuals—in the French vernacu-
lar to cater to an audience of second-generation Muslims
and converts—actually helps to propagate authoritative
and normative modes of being a proper Muslim, as Amira’s
and Khadija’s religious transformations attest.
One of the texts that most influenced Khadija to veil
was Fatima Naseef’s Rights and Duties of the Woman in Is-
lam (Droits et devoirs de la femme en islam, 1999). Another
popular book is Being a Muslim Woman Today: The Legal
Status of the Muslim Woman According to Islam (Être Musul-
mane aujourd’hui: statut juridique de la femme musul-
mane selon l’islam, 1999) by Malika Dif, a French convert
and influential speaker on the Islamic conference circuit
in France. These and other manuals detailing the role of
women according to the Islamic tradition (essentially, what
is expected of a woman and what she should expect from
others) possess two particularly striking features. The first is
their constant reference to “the Muslim woman” (la femme
musulmane), indicating that there is clearly a correct model
of female piety, derived from the Quran, the Sunna, and
the behavior of the Prophet’s wives, a model of piety that
ordinary Muslim women should emulate. The second, re-
lated feature of these texts is the frequent occurrence of
the verb devoir, which means “must,” “to have to,” or “to
have a duty to” (devoir as a noun means duty) as in: “The
woman must, above all, surround her family with attention
and care. . . . She must watch over the physical and psycho-
logical health [of her family]” (Dif 1999:41). The prevalence
of the word devoir highlights the fact that certain types of
behavior, including certain practices like veiling, are nec-
essary to becoming the kind of Muslim woman delineated
in these texts. Texts like those of Dif and Naseef underscore
the lacuna in analyses of Muslim French religious revival-
ism that herald the individualization of religion, the end of
normative authority, and the emphasis on unconstrained,
individual choice. While it is indeed “the believer who de-
cides” (Roy 1999:91), the believer is nonetheless guided by
religiously authoritative texts and arguments that explicitly
state the norm. According to these norms, the headscarf,
like other practices, is both a choice and, importantly, an
obligation, a divine prescription incumbent on all Muslim
women.14 The choice here lies in whether or not to accept
the obligation of veiling.
The following example of a conversation with Nawel
nicely elucidates the particular relationship between indi-
vidual choice and obligation at work in Muslim French re-
ligiosity. At the time, Nawel was a 20-year-old student of
Tunisian descent getting a professional degree in commu-
nications and working as an intern for the influential Union

of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF). She and I were
having coffee when I asked her why she wore a simple head-
scarf tied in a large knot at the nape of her neck that cov-
ered only her hair, rather than a fuller headscarf that cov-
ered her neck as well, or even the niqab, the face veil. She
responded: “The niqab, it’s not my thing, although I respect
the girls who wear it, just as I respect those girls who don’t
wear anything [to cover their hair].” Nawel thereby reaf-
firmed the importance of respecting individual believers’
personal choices, including the decision to veil or remain
unveiled. I then said, referring to the practice of veiling, “So
you have to cover the hair, and if you want, the neck and
ears.” Nawel interrupted me sharply. “It’s not ‘If you want,’ ”
she said. “It is the ears and the neck [that have to be cov-
ered].” Nawel’s point was that one does not simply veil ac-
cording to one’s personal predilections. Proper veiling, an
obligation in itself, has a specific, authorized form—the act
of choosing lies in whether one opts to follow the divine in-
junction or not. In fact, the general goal for pious French
Muslims like Nawel is to undertake willingly what is neces-
sary. In Rights and Duties of the Woman in Islam, for exam-
ple, Naseef writes that it is a woman’s duty to maintain her
house in proper order, and that this duty must be assumed
voluntarily: “In the authentic hadiths about women’s work
in her household, it is said that the wife must accomplish
these household tasks willingly [de plein gré] and without
any compulsion” (1999:185). In other words, religious obli-
gations should become integrated into one’s desire, so that
the desire to perform what are in fact duties flows naturally
from within the self.
Khadija used texts like those by Naseef and Dif to
work on herself, and the transformation she underwent
evokes the process of ethical self-cultivation theorized
by Mahmood (2005) in her ethnography of the Egyptian
women’s piety movement.15 Recall that Khadija began by
wearing a simple headscarf covering her hair because al-
though she realized that veiling was obligatory, she was not
ready—because she did not have the inner desire—to wear
a fuller veil. As she said, “You know, I had a real problem at
the beginning. And then, little by little, at the end of a year,
I started to wear the headscarf like this [i.e., covering her
head, neck, and ears].” Khadija’s desire to veil came about
as the result of purposefully working on herself, inducing in
herself the desire to veil properly, as well as the necessary
love of God, through other “ethical practices” (Hirschkind
2006; Mahmood 2005) like praying, reading, and discussing
the headscarf with other young Muslim French women.
Over the course of a year, Khadija disciplined her desire so
that the obligations considered necessary to being a pious
Muslim woman would be undertaken sincerely and “freely.”
Khadija had once noted to me that cultivating piety
“is a whole path,” and over the course of my fieldwork, I
came to recognize the basic steps of this path. Most of my
interlocutors began what they called their “spiritual jour-
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
ney” (cheminement spirituel) by reading, attending confer-
ences, and talking to friends and acquaintances with bet-
ter knowledge of the Islamic tradition. They then usually
began praying intermittently, increasing over time the reg-
ularity of their prayers to five times a day (many found
it difficult initially to rise for the dawn prayer [fajr], but
they slowly brought themselves to do so every day). They
also began to dress more modestly and to change other
forms of behavior—eating halal, for example, and carrying
loose change to give to homeless people—often taking their
cues from those more advanced on their “spiritual jour-
neys.” The temporal gap between beginning to pray and
beginning to veil was common to most of the practicing
Muslim women I knew, who prayed regularly for months
and sometimes years before putting on the headscarf. Such
a gap highlights the intellectual and bodily disciplinary pro-
cess through which these young Muslim women worked on
themselves by undertaking one step in a series of necessary
practices to induce the desire for the next step toward be-
coming a properly pious Muslim.
What women like Khadija, Amira, Hélène, and Nawel
enact, then, is a complex relationship between norms and
desire in which social and religious authority does not ex-
ist in opposition to the “true” self but is rather the means to
the latter’s cultivation and realization. While self-realization
and self-liberation remain fundamentally important goals
for women like Khadija, Amira, and Hélène, the two princi-
ples are anchored in the Islamic concept of fitra, the natural
faculty within each individual to know God; self-realization
is therefore understood as the rediscovery of one’s original
knowledge of God, and self-liberation as the enactment of
God’s will. When Hélène asserts that becoming the “sub-
ject of one’s life” means not conforming “to the opinion of
others,” she articulates the idea that liberation from others
is fundamental to self-realization, and that it is achieved
by submitting to God’s will, made knowable to humans
through the Quran and the Sunna. Tariq Ramadan, an in-
fluential European Muslim intellectual, puts it in similar
terms. Muslim spirituality, he writes, is the return to one’s
true, God-connected self, which is a form of liberation, but
one that requires awareness, discipline, and constant ef-
fort (2004:119). “Islamic teaching,” he continues, “has given
us concrete tools to help us succeed in this work on our-
selves. . . . The daily requirements of Muslim practice give
us the direction and the first steps along the way to free-
dom” (2004:120). In other words, self-realization is only pos-
sible by actively submitting to religious discipline and re-
making oneself according to the norms extracted from the
revealed texts through centuries of authoritative interpre-
tation. Moreover, practices like praying, veiling, and fasting
are not only signs that intentionally index a Muslim identity
but also, as Ramadan reiterates, are necessary to the cultiva-
tion of the Muslim self.16 Ramadan and the Muslim French
women to whom he appeals conceptualize self-realization
25
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
as the realization of the transcendent will, and as dependent
on, rather than constituted in opposition to, social and reli-
gious authority. They therefore subtly but fundamentally re-
configure secular notions of personal autonomy and mod-
ern religiosity such that normative religious authority and
inner, individual desire are not constituted by a relationship
of opposition, but rather are inextricably linked.17
Yet the kind of religiosity inhabited by these Muslim cit-
izens, with its distinct configuration of personal autonomy,
authority, and the self, was rendered unintelligible on the
discursive and legal terrain on which debates about the ban
on headscarves were waged. Muslim French women were
compelled to defend the headscarf as either a choice or
an obligation—a conundrum I explore in the following sec-
tion on public-sphere discussions concerning whether the
headscarf ban constituted a violation of religious liberty.
Secular law and religious liberty
If we on the legal subcommittee of the One School for All
Collective felt sure that the ban on headscarves in pubic
schools constituted a violation of religious freedom (la lib-
erté religieuse), proponents of the law were equally insis-
tent that it did not, and, moreover, that it constituted an
important defense of religious liberty. They did so by draw-
ing on two key themes that permeate both French political
discourse and French and European law: a semiotically in-
formed understanding of practice as the expression of be-
lief,18 and, relatedly, a notion that freedom of conscience
constitutes freedom of choice.
Time and again, French politicians and intellectuals
supportive of the ban argued that restricting the wearing
of the headscarf and other religious “signs” did not con-
stitute a violation of religious liberty because the believer
could continue to believe—on the inside. For Gisèle Halimi,
an influential feminist writer and lawyer, “Faith, thought,
conscience, as a matter of fact—domain of the subjective—
can be expressed. Behaviors, religious ‘prescriptions,’ basi-
cally signs and insignia, practice, in other words—domain
of the objective—must be banned” (Halimi 2003:66). It re-
mains unclear how Halimi expects faith to be expressed if
not through behavior and signs (words, perhaps? But are
words not signs?), though she is quite clear in making a
distinction between conscience and practice. Zaki Laı̈di,
a political theorist and professor at the National Institute
of Political Sciences (Sciences Po), provides some clarifica-
tion of Halimi’s basic argument. In an editorial in the daily
Libération praising President Jacques Chirac’s call for a law
banning religious signs in public school, he writes: “There
are a thousand ways for a Muslim woman who aspires to
wear the veil to wear it on the inside without wearing it on
the outside [de le porter en elle sans le porter au regard des
autres]” (Laı̈di 2004:159). Both Laı̈di and Halimi draw on
the assumption that the relationship between conscience
26
and practice is a semiotic relationship of signification. For
them, religious practices like veiling are outward manifes-
tations of an already constituted conscience. According to
this logic—which was heavily prevalent in French debates
about the headscarf—banning a practice (understood as a
sign) does not constitute a violation of religious liberty be-
cause it has no effect on the believer’s conscience. Although
Muslim girls (and other religious students) would no longer
be able to manifest their beliefs in certain ways as a result
of the law, proponents of the ban argued that they would
nonetheless remain free to believe whatever they wanted
to believe, thus continuing to exercise their right to con-
science. As Laı̈di noted, Muslim girls could continue to wear
the headscarf “on the inside.”
This logic is not only dominant in French public dis-
course about the headscarf; it also undergirds French and
European legal conventions pertaining to religious liberty.
According to Article 10 of the Rights of Man and Citizen,
“None shall fear for his opinions, even religious, as long as
their manifestation does not trouble the public order as es-
tablished by the law.” The European Convention on Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, to which France is a sig-
natory, echoes the Rights of Man. Article 9(1) guarantees
to all “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and re-
ligion” as well as the right “to manifest [one’s] religion or
belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance,” but,
like the Rights of Man, places certain limitations on the lat-
ter freedom. According to Article 9(2), “Freedom to manifest
one’s religion or beliefs shall be subjected to such limita-
tions as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a demo-
cratic society in the interest of public safety, for the protec-
tion of public order, health or morals, and for the protection
of the rights and freedoms of others.” In other words, both
the Rights of Man and the European Convention on Hu-
man Rights distinguish between conscience and its man-
ifestation or expression. According to European jurispru-
dence, “Article 9 primarily protects the sphere of personal
beliefs and religious creeds, i.e. the area which is sometimes
called the forum internum” (Evans 2001:72). Thus, as Car-
olyn Evans notes, “the emphasis in the interpretation of Ar-
ticle 9 is on the [protection of the] internal: private thought,
conscience, and religion of the individual” (2001:72). While
the realm of the forum internum is inviolable and the right
to conscience inalienable, the right to manifest one’s con-
science is alienable. Moreover, as a result of the clear dis-
tinction made between internal conscience and external
manifestation—essentially a distinction between belief and
practice—a restriction on the manifestation of conscience
(i.e., practice) is not considered a restriction on conscience
itself.19
Underpinning this distinction between conscience and
its manifestation is a specific, secular understanding of the
relationship between belief and practice, one that high-
lights the imbrication of Protestant epistemologies and

sensibilities with the development of modern secularity
(Keane 2007; Taylor 2007). While bodily practices were once
considered integral to cultivating the necessary dispositions
of the religious self, they are now thought of as expressions
of belief (Asad 1993; Bynum 1987; Mahmood 2005). And if
religious practices are neither as integral to religion as are
beliefs nor constitutive of belief, then a restriction on prac-
tice would not, by this logic, constitute a violation of reli-
gious liberty. Of course, as I demonstrated earlier, my pi-
ous Muslim French interlocutors do not share this notion of
practice as a second-order contingent expression of belief.
Yet for nonsecular religious subjects like the Muslim French
women with whom I worked, there is simply no room in
the law to defend conscience-impelled practices under the
aegis of the inalienable right to religious liberty.
Interestingly, there does exist one exception in Euro-
pean law under which the manifestation of conscience
(rather than simply the forum internum) is considered an
inalienable form of religious liberty: when certain practices
are required by a religion.20 The apparent capacity of Euro-
pean law to protect “required” practices and acts of worship
would seem to bode well for practicing Muslims who claim
the veil as a religious duty. However, the European Com-
mission and European Court of Human Rights have under-
stood the notion of “required” practice in a very particular
way. The commission and court have generally been unwill-
ing to accept the so-called subjective assessment of individ-
ual applicants about whether certain behaviors or practices
are required of them by their religion, preferring instead to
rely either on the opinion of recognized religious authori-
ties or on the commission’s or court’s own definition of what
counts as a required practice. (Note that this means that a
secular political authority makes what is essentially a the-
ological decision.) As Peter Edge (2000) and Evans (2001)
both point out, this approach to what is religiously required
privileges members of hierarchically structured and heav-
ily centralized religious traditions (like Catholicism) at the
expense of less institutionally centralized traditions (like Is-
lam or Buddhism). It also acts to the disadvantage of mem-
bers of minority religions, whose tenets probably remain
unfamiliar to European judges. Finally, it diminishes the
claims of an individual who either does not accept all the
teachings of an established religion or who believes that
his or her religion places additional demands than those
deemed necessary by the court or by court-recognized re-
ligious authorities.
The commission’s and court’s approach to what is re-
ligiously required, and its privileging of religious authori-
ties to define the religious norm, ostensibly contradicts the
secular affirmation of modern religiosity as a fundamen-
tally individual enterprise, in which an individual should
be able to interpret for herself what is religiously required.
On second review, however, the court’s approach to re-
ligious requirement and the secular affirmation of indi-
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
vidualized religiosity both assume an oppositional rela-
tionship between autonomous and authority-imposed ac-
tion. According to the terms of this relationship, individ-
ually inspired choices emerge in the absence of authority
(religious or otherwise), and religious obligations (or “re-
quirements”) are understood as nonautonomous behav-
ior defined and compelled by established normative au-
thority. We have returned, then, to the same interpretive
paradigm so common to analyses of Muslim religiosity,
in which the veil is regarded as either actively compelled
by religious authorities and, therefore, not a legitimate in-
dividual choice, or as “chosen” according to a “personal
reading of religion” (Venel 2004:86) and, therefore, a form
of individualized self-expression unmediated by religious
authority.
Within such a paradigm, central to European analytical
and legal understandings of modern religiosity, it becomes
difficult, even impossible, to articulate a practice like veiling
in a way that makes sense to most secular republicans. For
Muslim citizens like Khadija, Amira, and Hélène, the veil is
both an individual choice and a religious duty. Veiling, for
these women, cannot be imposed by an external author-
ity and must be undertaken willingly, according to the dic-
tates of individual conscience, but veiling is also a neces-
sary means of cultivating the kind of pious self delineated
by religious authorities. However, these women are consis-
tently compelled by secular public discourse and law to cat-
egorize the veil as either a choice or an obligation. Consider
the following exchange, which took place during a January
2004 televised debate on the proposed law banning head-
scarves.21 Leila Babès, a sociologist and vocal critic of veil-
ing, insisted that the headscarf was not a religious prescrip-
tion. Quoting verses of the Quran, she maintained that the
hijab was meant only for the Prophet’s wives and was not
a major pillar of the faith, and that the Quran advocated
only modesty, not the headscarf, for Muslim women. Saida
Kada, the Muslim French activist mentioned earlier, replied
that “what Leila Babès says about the veil not being a reli-
gious prescription is her point of view; other women have
a different point of view.” She added that she had no de-
sire to impose the veil on anyone, and that the hijab was,
for her, the culmination of her own spiritual journey in
which she came to realize that the headscarf was an obli-
gation. Kada’s last point was completely ignored; the de-
bate’s moderator turned to the unequal status of women in
Muslim countries, Babès claimed that the Quran advocates
the cutting off of thieves’ hands, philosopher Elizabeth
Badinter (another long-time opponent of veiling) noted
that young Muslim girls were now at the “rear-guard” of in-
tegration and that “we have to defend the young girls we
never hear from,” and Bernard Stasi (head of the commis-
sion that first proposed the law) lamented “the return to
religion, [to] fundamentalism”—a regressive return seem-
ingly embodied by the “fundamentalist” Kada.
27
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
This exchange highlights two important elements cen-
tral to the problem Muslim French women face in claim-
ing the headscarf as a religious duty. First, the vigorous de-
bate surrounding the doctrinal status of the hijab, and the
open question as to whether the headscarf is “really” a reli-
gious prescription, is precisely, as I just noted, what disqual-
ifies it as a religious requirement that would be protected by
the European Convention. Ironically, then, Muslim French
women’s commitment to the validity of internally gener-
ated desire and their refusal to dictate the headscarf for all
Muslim women—that is, the subjective dimensions that un-
derscore their immersion in secular liberal and republican
ethical norms—are precisely what disqualify their religious
practices from the law’s protection. Second, the exchange
exemplifies a certain secular tone-deafness to what Bowen
calls the “multivocality of [the term] ‘obligation’” (2006:176).
When Muslim French women say that they wear the head-
scarf because it is a religious obligation, secular critics as-
sume either that it is compelled by fathers, brothers, and
other male religious leaders, or that these women believe
that the veil should be imposed on all women, or both.22
As became apparent over the course of the exchange cited
above, which is metonymic of the general tenor of public
and private debates about veiling, secular critics could not
conceive of veiling as a truly autonomous choice (i.e., the
result of following one’s inner desire) if it was (also) an obli-
gation, for any reference to obligation entailed either the
negation of one’s personal autonomy or the negation of all
women’s freedom. There was simply no room in the secular
French imagination, or in European and French law, to con-
ceptualize obligation, at least in this instance, as a personal
commitment. Consequently, to speak publicly of the head-
scarf as a religious duty or obligation was, essentially, to de-
clare oneself a “fundamentalist” and to disqualify oneself
as a legitimate interlocutor in public debates about the law.
Not surprisingly, then, most Muslim French women speak-
ing about the headscarf to a secular audience did so through
a language of personal choice and individual freedom. (As
should be clear by now, such language was not disingen-
uous but, rather, the foregrounding of one dimension of
the practice of veiling.) Yet, as will soon become clear, ar-
ticulating the veil as purely a choice (rather than also an
obligation) ironically undermined their case for the right to
religious liberty.
To illustrate how this happened, I turn to the second
assumption fundamental to secular republicans’ insistence
that the ban on headscarves upheld religious liberty: that
of freedom of conscience as freedom of choice, an assump-
tion best exemplified by Patrick Weil’s defense of the 2004
law. Weil, a historian, was a member of the presidentially
appointed Stasi Commission, which first proposed the law
in 2003. In laying out the commission’s approach to the
question of religious freedom, Weil notes that “the histori-
cal success of the French model of secularization—laı̈cité—
28
rests in the fact that it gives priority to the protection of
individuals by the state against any religious group pres-
sure” (2004:147). In fact, historically, laı̈cité has entailed
the protection of individuals against state-directed pressure
or coercion in religious matters by separating the Catholic
church and the French state and demanding that the state
remain neutral with regards to religion, thus leaving in-
dividuals free to practice according to their conscience.
Nonetheless, Weil’s emphasis on the state’s primary duty
to protect individuals from religious groups is telling. Weil
admits that the veil “remains for some an individual sign
of [religious] belonging [that is] freely chosen” (Long and
Weil 2004:86), and he also notes that the European Con-
vention on Human Rights “recognize[s] the right to pub-
licly express one’s religious beliefs” (Weil 2004:143). How
and why, then, should the headscarf be restricted? Because,
Weil argues, “in the schools where some girls are wearing
the headscarf, Muslim girls who do not wear it are subject
to strong pressure to do so [by religious groups]. . . . In the
view of these groups [who apply such pressure], composed
mainly of males, these girls are ‘bad Muslims’ or ‘whores,’
who should follow the example of their sisters and respect
the prescription of the Koran” (Weil 2004:143).23 Weil con-
tinues: “Muslim girls who do not want to wear the scarf also
have a right of freedom of conscience, and they constitute
the large majority” (2004:144). It remains unclear how, if the
large majority of students do not (and do not want to) wear
the headscarf, it constitutes such an enormous source of
pressure, since it would seem that there would exist more
peer pressure not to veil. Nevertheless, Weil’s point is that
the headscarf impinges on the freedom of conscience of
nonveiled girls. He therefore concludes that while numer-
ous international conventions “recognize the right to pub-
licly express one’s religious beliefs” (2004:143), they also au-
thorize “the limitation of the expression of religious faith,
especially in the case of problems of public order or at-
tacks on the rights and on the freedom of conscience of
others” (2004:144). Weil was certainly not alone in making
this argument: the notion that the headscarf impinged on
the consciences of nonveiled girls and constituted a viola-
tion of their religious liberty was one of the most rhetori-
cally and legally effective justifications of the headscarf ban.
As Loubna Méliane, an antiracist activist, put it, “we live
in a secular republic that guarantees the respect for every
person and for his or her convictions. . . . Unfortunately, the
young girls who demand to wear the veil in school are pros-
elytizing and making the other young girls feel guilty [cul-
pabilisent les autres jeunes filles].”24
Weil, Méliane, and other like-minded proponents of
the ban here understand freedom of conscience as the
freedom to choose, but as political philosopher Michael
Sandel (1998) has argued, these two concepts are not iden-
tical. (Although Sandel refers to the American legal tradi-
tion, his analysis holds for the distinction I am trying to

make.) Sandel argues that freedom of conscience has tra-
ditionally meant the freedom to exercise religious liberty
without suffering civil penalties, protecting those who are
constrained by duties they cannot renounce, even in the
face of conflicting civil obligations. But when religious lib-
erty comes to mean simply the right to choose one’s be-
liefs, freely, the result is a devaluation of claims by those
for whom religion is not a matter of choice but, rather,
of duty.25 When religious convictions are understood as
choices or personal preferences, and religious liberty as
the capacity to choose freely with regards to religion, per-
forming a religious duty is reduced to making a religious
choice.
The reduction of freedom of conscience to a more
narrowly conceived freedom of choice underpins Patrick
Weil’s arguments in favor of the headscarf ban, for he
clearly understands freedom of conscience as the right to
choose without any external pressure or social coercion.
According to this logic, any external pressure (here, in the
form of veiled girls) diminishes the right of individuals to
choose freely, violating their freedom of conscience. Given
the present-day hegemony of this logic in France—that is,
that religious liberty concerns the right to choose freely—
it became discursively and politically impossible for Mus-
lim French women to defend the wearing of the head-
scarf as anything but a choice. In fact, many did defend
the headscarf as an internally driven choice, unmediated
by any form of external authority. Kada maintained that
veiled women in France “would simply like to be able to live
out their choices, without having someone impose some
kind of truth on them, whatever it may be” (Bouzar and
Kada 2003:26). In a similar vein, an editorial on the website
oumma.com by another writer, Felwine Sarr, voiced outrage
at the denial of the fundamental right to choose one’s be-
liefs for oneself. “The question here is not about knowing
whether the veil is a Quranic prescription or obligation,”
Sarr wrote. “We only need to say that these Muslim women
who want it (wearing the veil must not be imposed on any-
one) have the freedom to wear it, whatever their own read-
ing of the Text, and as long as their freedom does not in-
fringe on that of another” (Sarr 2003). Sarr’s point is that the
question as to whether or not the veil is a Quranic prescrip-
tion should be irrelevant before the law—that question re-
mains, of course, absolutely relevant to practitioners of veil-
ing since it forms the basis for the practice. Yet Sarr’s to-
tal excising of the question of obligation in her defense of
veiling constitutes an instructive indication of the contem-
porary political landscape on which pious Muslim French
women must make their claims.
Kada’s and Sarr’s defense of the freedom to choose
was reiterated in a December 2003 demonstration against
the proposed law. The demonstration consisted of about
three or four thousand women, many of them in red, white,
and blue headscarves, and most of them under 40. As they
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
walked from the Place de la République to the Place de
la Bastille, they sang the Marseillaise and chanted slogans
such as: “France bien aimée, respectez ma liberté” [My
beloved France, respect my liberty] and “Voilée, dévoilée,
c’est ma liberté” [Veiled, unveiled—it’s my liberty]. Many
of the young women held up homemade cardboard signs
reading: “Foulard, Croix, Kippa: Laissez nous le choix” [Veil,
Cross, Kippa: Leave us the choice] and “Le voile est un choix
personnel. N’otez pas mon droit essentiel” [The veil is a per-
sonal choice. Don’t deprive me of my essential right]. I saw
only one much older woman who made any reference to
the obligation of the headscarf or to the Quranic suras from
which that obligation is derived—and she was conspicu-
ously shunned by the younger demonstrators.
Herein lies the rub. In framing the veil as a freely un-
dertaken choice, the women in this demonstration were de-
manding that the government respect their right to choose
their religion and, thereby, protect their right to religious
freedom. Yet having to articulate the veil exclusively as a
personal choice (rather than as both a choice and a reli-
gious duty) paradoxically undermined their case for reli-
gious liberty because it enabled policy makers like Weil to
consider veiling as simply a choice (really, a personal pref-
erence) rather than a religious duty. For Weil and the Stasi
Commission, the right of one group of girls to exercise their
religious choices seemingly impinged on the capacity of an-
other group of girls to make their own religious choices in
an unconstrained manner (Asad 2006). Because one per-
son’s freedom ends where another’s begins, the decision
was made to protect unveiled girls’ freedom of religion—
understood as the right to choose freely in the absence
of the ostensibly constraining pressure produced by other
girls’ headscarves.
I want to emphasize how much this predominant un-
derstanding of conscience as choice relies on an opposi-
tional relationship between personal autonomy and social
and religious authority. There exists no discursive space
in which to conceptualize or articulate practices like veil-
ing, which pious Muslim French women consider a reli-
gious duty, one that cannot be coerced, and that entails a
very different relationship between desire and social and
religious authority. When the practice of veiling is turned
into a “free choice,” as it must be to make it discursively
and legally intelligible to the secular majority—to claim the
headscarf is an obligation is to out oneself as a bona fide
“fundamentalist”—Muslim French women lose the capac-
ity to express the stakes of what it means to wear the head-
scarf as a religious obligation, enabling lawmakers to argue
that restricting headscarves in schools does not constitute a
violation of religious liberty. In having to defend the veil as
a choice, it becomes impossible for them to articulate, in a
way that is intelligible to a secular public, the fact that it is
indispensable to their religiosity and their sense of self, and
to convey the sense that a restriction on veiling is not simply
29
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
a limitation on personal preference but, rather, a profound
disarticulation of their very selves.26
Yet framing the headscarf as both a personal deci-
sion and a religious obligation constituted, and contin-
ues to constitute, a kind of “double talk” (un double dis-
course), representative of either an incoherent subjectivity
or an insidious plot to mask a “fundamentalist” agenda with
liberal–republican language. As Bowen writes, “the multi-
vocality of ‘obligation’ has become a frequent sign of the
‘double-talk’ of Muslims who say, to other Muslims [and
non-Muslims], that wearing hijâb is a divine injunction and
obligation, and, to non-Mulims [and Muslims], that there
is no compulsion in Islam, and that it is up to women to
decide what to do” (2006:176). Of course, Muslim French
women’s understanding of the hijab as both an internally
driven choice and a religious duty makes sense when one
conceptualizes self-realization and religious normativity as
linked. Within the secular republican imaginary, however,
where self-realization emerges against normative authority,
and autonomous choices are made in the absence of con-
straint, women like Khadija, Amira, and Hélène occupy a
no-man’s-land of discursive and legal unintelligibility.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I want to return briefly to the method-
ological import of Asad’s call to analyze the nature of
the secular through its shadows (2003:16). I take from his
proposition that the shadow cast by French secularism onto
Muslim French citizens reveals a great deal about laı̈cité it-
self, including its limits and aporias. In this instance, the
secular-republican criticism of Muslim citizens’ submission
to explicit norms and “correct” behavior draws on and rein-
forces, yet also unintentionally problematizes, a dominant
conception of personal autonomy. This process is nicely il-
lustrated by Dounia Bouzar’s recent book “Mr. Islam” Does
Not Exist (“Monsieur Islam” n’existe pas), in which she at-
tacks the “normativity” of the Islamic revival in France.
Bouzar argues that young Muslims, in accepting the princi-
ple that norms are to be found in texts, both revealed and
exegetical, are not “putting the norm into question” but,
rather, transforming it into a life ethic, an attitude she finds
antithetical to what she claims is the “critical spirit” and
“individual thinking” of secular modernity (2004:94). What
Bouzar puts into play in her discussion of the Islamic re-
vival is, once again, a series of oppositions between eman-
cipation and religious tradition, individual autonomy and
authority, and conscience and the norm—oppositions cen-
tral to the self-narrative of secularism generally (Jakobsen
and Pellegrini 2008a), and especially to laı̈cité.
I am obviously not the first to point out the tenu-
ousness of these distinctions. Numerous poststructural-
ist critics have argued that “inner” desire, even for free-
dom, is produced through disciplinary or regulatory powers
30
(Althusser 1971; Asad 1993; Butler 1993; Foucault 1978,
1991). Nonetheless, I find the hegemonic espousal of this
opposition between freedom and authority particularly cu-
rious in a country like France, where the state’s explicit
role in forming free citizens has consistently blurred any a
priori boundary between government and individual free-
dom. Laı̈cité is and has been a modality of government,
with concomitant practices, authorizing discourses, and
political and legal institutions that aim to create partic-
ular kinds of ethical and political sensibilities and forms
of sociality (Asad 2006). Since the Third Republic made
schooling compulsory for boys and girls in 1882, for ex-
ample, the secular school has been a privileged institution
for producing normative, albeit “free” subjects inculcated
in a secular morality based on the positivist–humanist val-
ues of reason, freedom, and equality (Baubérot 2000; Surkis
2006; see also Durkheim 1961). The school is a place where,
through a series of disciplinary techniques, individuals are
to be stripped of their “passions” and regional and reli-
gious customs and imbued with the particular moral, social,
and political values and commitments—to patriotism, civic
equality, liberty, and social solidarity—that make men and
women French citizens (Baubérot 2000; Silverstein 2004;
Weber 1976).
Joan Scott has already proposed that the recent
headscarf crisis indexes a deep-seated anxiety about the
problem that sexual difference poses for republican po-
litical universalism (2007, esp. ch. 5). My analysis brings
me to a parallel conclusion about a different set of anxi-
eties and the deferral of a different problem. I wonder if
the kind of criticism of the religious authority and norma-
tivity of Islam expressed by Dounia Bouzar—who is repre-
sentative of a wider discursive terrain—entails a deferral of
tensions inherent in a secular–republican project that os-
tensibly emancipates individuals from various forms of au-
thority (the church, custom, etc.) by bringing the normative
disciplinary authority of the school to bear on its subjects.
I want to suggest that by disturbing the viability of a strict
distinction between normative authority and personal au-
tonomy, pious Muslim French women reveal the intensely
intertwined relationship between government, discipline,
and freedom that has been fundamental to the secular–
republican project. Could it be, then, that the consternation
about ostensible Muslim unfreedom in fact helps to sustain
a secular fantasy of personal autonomy, deferring an under-
lying anxiety about the very interconnectedness of auton-
omy and authority that continues to haunt the Republic?27
In asking these questions, I also want to gesture to their
import—and to the relevance of my analysis of laı̈cité—
beyond the specific context of France. After all, the as-
sumptions I outlined earlier about religious practices be-
ing expressions of belief and about freedom of conscience
as freedom of choice are not restricted to France or even
to Europe; they undergird American law as well (Evans

2001; Sandel 1998; Sullivan 2007). In fact, pious Muslim
citizens’ difficulty articulating the practice of veiling as
both a personal choice and a religious duty within secular
French public discourse and European law mirrors a sim-
ilar conundrum faced by the Catholic American, Protes-
tant American, and Jewish American plaintiffs in Warner
v. Boca Raton (Sullivan 2007). That case concerned the
First Amendment protection of grave markers and decora-
tive memorials in a cemetery in Boca Raton, markers and
memorials that had been outlawed by local cemetery regu-
lations but that the plaintiffs argued were necessary to the
practice of their faith as they understood it. After hearing
from institutionalized religious authorities and consulting
religious texts—“talking theology,” as the presiding judge
put it—the state court determined that the grave memori-
als fell outside the protection of the First Amendment right
to free exercise of religion because they were not explicitly
required by Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish doctrine. What
both the Warner decision and the French case illustrate—
along with a number of other cases (Evans 2001)28 —is the
inability of the law in each instance to countenance per-
sonal or individual religious commitments that are not ex-
plicitly set forth by doctrine or compelled by established re-
ligious authorities.
In considering these two examples, one cannot help
but ask how two very different instantiations of secular-
ity in France and the United States can nonetheless re-
flect such similar conceptions of personal autonomy and
religious authority, and of the relationship between con-
science and practice. These similarities suggest the need for
an approach to secular formations in various national con-
texts beyond that of “local secularisms” provided by Janet
Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2008b). Jakobsen and Pelle-
grini want to provincialize secularism’s claims to transcend
the particular by locating its purported universality and ra-
tionality in particular European and American histories and
in specific religious genealogies. Considering various na-
tional instantiations of secularism (“local secularisms”) and
their relation to different religious traditions, they advocate
replacing the singular category “secularism” with the plu-
ralized analytic of “secularisms.” While I certainly appreci-
ate such efforts and agree that secularism is neither unidi-
rectional nor uncontested in various spaces, I nonetheless
worry that such an analytic deemphasizes the globalizing
power of the behaviors, knowledges, sensibilities, and
political arrangements that have come to comprise the
secular (Asad 2003; Keane 2007). That my Muslim French
interlocutors and the plaintiffs in Warner are rendered un-
intelligible in similar ways in two countries whose contem-
porary secular formations nonetheless have quite differ-
ent historical genealogies suggests a certain effectiveness
to secularity’s normalizing force—its projectness—that an
analytical pluralization fails to adequately capture. Thus,
the claims I make about laı̈cité are both specific to France
Reconfiguring freedom  American Ethnologist
and applicable to considerations of secularity more broadly,
given the ensconcement of a specific French secularity
(emerging out of a particular set of historical circumstances,
interpellating a particular instance of Muslim religiosity)
within a larger set of subjectivities, values, and political
practices that constitute secularism. This tension between
the local and the global is one that must inform any an-
thropological consideration of the secular, which has the
following analytical task: to provincialize secularity’s claim
to transcend the particular while simultaneously attending
to the increasing hegemony of the epistemologies, sensibil-
ities, political discourses, and legal arrangements that con-
stitute secularism as a project.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Fellowships from the Social Science Research
Council and the Chateaubriand Foundation allowed me to com-
plete the fieldwork necessary for this article. Parts of the article
were written with the help of a National Science Foundation Grad-
uate Fellowship and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Disserta-
tion Fellowship. I would like to thank my fellow participants in the
Workshop in Politics, Ethics, and Society as well as other colleagues
at Washington University in St. Louis, where I profited greatly from
the intellectual and institutional support afforded me by an Andrew
W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Modeling Interdisciplinary
Inquiry. I am grateful to Leora Auslander, Dorian Bell, Jean
Comaroff, Enseng Ho, Lisa Rofel, and, especially, Saba Mahmood,
for their comments at various stages of the article. I am particularly
indebted to Neda Atanasoski, Caetlin Benson-Allott, and Megan
Moodie for their keen insights and encouragement. Finally, this ar-
ticle would not have been possible without the incredible generos-
ity of my friends and interlocutors in France.
1. This article draws on fieldwork I conducted between 2002 and
2004 in Paris, Nantes, and Rennes. All names of nonpublic figures
are pseudonyms.
2. There was a significant divide within the collective between
practicing Muslim and Sikh members who framed the law as a vio-
lation of religious freedom and other, more secular members who
considered it primarily an attack on the right to education.
3. According to Jaswant, practicing Sikhs are bound to wear the
Kakaars (or Five Ks) at all times. The five Kakaars are kesh (un-
cut hair), kanga (small comb), kara (heavy silver bracelet), kir-
pan (small ceremonial dagger), and kacha (long undergarments).
Although the turban became the major issue in French schools,
conflicts in Britain and North America have mostly focused on the
carrying of the kirpan, which violates many schools’ public safety
policies banning weapons.
4. What is referred to as “the veil” (le voile) in France is usually a
headscarf either tied at the back of the neck (covering the wearer’s
hair and ears) or pinned at the throat (covering the wearer’s hair,
ears, and neck). While there are women who wear the full face
veil (niqab), such an occurrence remains quite rare among young
women in France. While I appreciate John Bowen’s (2006) deci-
sion to use the French term voile in order both to underscore
the specificity of French usage and to mark the symbolic politics
the term voile implies, I translate the term into English. I do so
largely because the terms voile and voilée (veiled) have become
normalized in Muslim French vocabulary to refer to the hijab (the
generic Arabic term for modest head-covering). I also use—often
interchangeably—the terms headscarf (foulard in French) and veil
31
American Ethnologist  Volume 37 Number 1 February 2010
rather than hijab, following the language of my informants, who al-
ternated between foulard and voile and rarely used the term hijab.
5. Killian (2007) describes the generational differences between
first- and second-generation Maghrebi-origin Muslims in France
with regards to religious sensibilities and, especially, with regards
to veiling.
6. I employ the term second generation with caution, using it to
mark these Muslims’ relationship to the Maghreb (rather than to
France) and to distinguish them from first-generation immigrants
(rather than from “native” French) who, having grown up in their
countries of origin, often inhabit a different set of religious and po-
litical sensibilities, particularly with regards to their relationship to
France (Killian 2006). In other words, I do not use “second genera-
tion” to detract in any way from these citizens’ Frenchness, as can
sometimes be the case in public and political discourse in France.
7. Joan Scott alludes to this phenomenon in her discussion of the
headscarf law, noting that in their defense of the headscarf as an in-
dividual choice and, therefore, an individual right, Muslim French
women “at once invoked individualism in terms familiar to republi-
can discourse and spiritual commitments that rest on a very differ-
ent notion of individual choice” (2007:141). However, because her
focus concerns republican discourse rather than the women them-
selves, she does not explore this intersection further.
8. According to Dounia Bouzar (personal conversation, May 21,
2004), the Renseignements Généraux estimates that 5 to 10 percent
of France’s Muslim population participates in some form of Islamic
revivalism.
9. For more on the evolution of legal and political argumenta-
tion concerning the headscarf from 1989 to 2004, see Bowen 2006,
Eberhard et al. 2005, Laborde 2008, and Winter 2008.
10. Kathleen Moore (2007) and Katherine Pratt Ewing (2000)
have taken up the question of neutrality and the relationship be-
tween state and church(es) in their considerations of secularism
and religious freedom in France. I would hold, however, that con-
ceptions of state neutrality, and attendant notions of public and
private, public order, and “legitimately religious” practices, rely on
prior assumptions about constraint and choice, authority and au-
tonomy, and the relationship between belief and practice.
11. This is, of course, a basic anthropological principle. With re-
gards to religious practices and religious sensibilities, Asad (1986),
Bynum (1987, 1992), and Mahmood (2005), among others, have
argued that religious practices cannot be understood without ref-
erence to the underlying network of concepts that give them
meaning.
12. Given that practices like veiling must be driven by one’s own
desire, Muslim citizens argue that such practices must also be the
result of active, reasoned, conscious choice and not the repetition
of habitual actions, and that the practitioner must understand the
reasons behind a practice—its doctrinal basis and its pragmatic or
theological function—in order for the practice to be meaningful
and effective. They thereby reaffirm a central feature of modern re-
ligiosity (James 1999; Smith 1962) and of the contemporary Islamic
revival (Deeb 2006; Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Starrett 1998).
Moreover, given such a relation between intention and meaningful
practice, these young Muslims find it not only ethically problematic
(because no human being should be forced to do anything against
her will) but also pragmatically useless to force anyone to pray, veil,
or fast.
13. In addition to new figures of authority (like Tariq Ramadan)
who have not received the classical training of traditional ‘ulema,
the latter have also retained their authoritative status in the Islamic
revival. In studying the scholarly position on veiling, Amira read
both Ramadan as well as translations of work by traditional ‘alim
like Yusuf Qaradawi and Ali Shariati.
32
14. Most Muslims who consider veiling a divine prescription
point to two suras (chapters) of the Quran, Sura 24 (Surat an-Nur)
and Sura 33 (Surat al-Ahzab). Sura 24:31 states: “And say to the be-
lieving women that they should lower their gaze and guard their
modesty; . . . that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and
not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers” [the
Quran then lists all those before whom a woman may remain un-
veiled]. Sura 33:59 states: “Oh Prophet! Tell your wives and daugh-
ters, and the believing women, that they should cast their outer
garments over their persons . . . so that they shall be known and
not molested.” Unlike scholars such as Bowen (2006) and Winter
(2008), I have no interest in taking a position on whether or not
the obligation of veiling constitutes a correct interpretation of the
sources.
15. According to Mahmood, “The women I worked with did
not regard trying to emulate authorized models of behavior as
an external social imposition that constrained individual freedom.
Rather, they treated socially authorized forms of performance as
the potentialities—the ground if you will—through which the self
is realized” (2005:31). Of course, as I noted earlier, Muslim French
women valorize freedom in a way that their Egyptian counterparts
do not and, therefore, imagine the relationship between freedom,
authority, and the self in a distinctly different way.
16. I want to be clear that I am not claiming that headscarves
are never worn intentionally as signs meant to signal one’s Is-
lamic identity to others, which has been the predominant analyt-
ical frame for interpreting the headscarf both in France and else-
where in the Muslim world (cf. Göle 1996; Moallem 2005; Moore
2007). I do, however, want to examine the headscarf as something
more than a sign, particularly because the majority of my infor-
mants understand it primarily as an ethical practice. In fact, it is
precisely the hegemonic categorization of the headscarf as a sign
that makes the kind of religiosity inhabited by many Muslim citi-
zens unintelligible within public discourse and incommensurable
with certain exigencies of secular law. To expand the dominant an-
alytical framework beyond its semiotic basis is therefore to take a
step, albeit a small one, in loosening the binds of public discourse
on Muslim French women. For another critique of the veil as a sign,
see Asad 2006.
17. Charles Hirschkind’s study of civic virtue and religious rea-
soning in Egypt comes to a parallel conclusion. Hirschkind con-
tends that rational deliberation and religious discipline are not, as
is often held, contradictory processes, but that in the piety move-
ment in Egypt, deliberation requires the cultivation of certain re-
ligious virtues through disciplinary practices like prayer, Quranic
recitation and memorization, hadith study, and da‘wa (2001:20).
18. For a cogent analysis of the broader semiotic ideology of
laı̈cité, see Asad 2006.
19. Evans points out that this division “between belief and prac-
tice (the first being inviolable and the second open to limitation)
has become part of the orthodoxy of First Amendment case law” in
the United States as well (2001:74).
20. In her study of religious liberty in the European Convention
on Human Rights, Evans writes that the “necessity test” was first
explicated in the commission’s 1978 Arrowsmith v. the United King-
dom decision, when it upheld the arrest of Pat Arrowsmith, a com-
mitted pacifist arrested for distributing leaflets to British soldiers
urging them not to accept a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. In that
decision, Evans writes, the commission “held that not all actions
which are motivated by religion or belief are covered by the pro-
tection in Article 9. . . . By excluding actions that are merely moti-
vated or influenced by belief, the commission suggested that a very
direct link is needed between the belief and the action if the action
is to be considered a ‘practice’ under Article 9” (Evans 2001:115). To

appeal for protection under Article 9, applicants must “show that
they were required to act in a certain way because of their religion
or belief” (2001:115).
21. 100 Minutes Pour Comprendre, January 19, 2004, France 2.
22. This (mis)construal of “obligation” (as either compulsion
or as incumbent on all) undergirds the argument, examined be-
low, that the headscarf constitutes an illegitimate form of social
pressure on nonveiled women, thereby violating their freedom of
conscience.
23. Like the Stasi Commission report itself (Commission de
Réflexion sur l’Application du Principe de Laı̈cité dans la
République 2003), Weil never names “these groups.”
24. “Le foulard à l’école; laı̈cité en danger?” on Ripostes, Chat Le
Monde (Lemonde.fr), October 10, 2003. Interestingly, the concep-
tions of agency concomitant with the discourse of social pressure is
highly gendered: while Franco-Maghrebi and Franco-African girls
are thought to be particularly susceptible to the outside influences
of a social milieu that ostensibly impinge on their agency and
“real” desires, Susan Terrio (2009) has demonstrated how Franco-
Maghrebi and Franco-African male juvenile delinquents are in-
creasingly held to be fully responsible before the law for their crim-
inal actions. Where juvenile delinquency was once understood as
the product of various factors—flawed parenting, bad influences,
teenage immaturity—courts, politicians, and police now ascribe
conscious intention, even total responsibility, to the nonwhite male
juvenile offender.
25. Sandel offers as an example the 1985 case of Thornton v. Cal-
dor, Inc., in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecti-
cut law that gave all workers the right to one day off each week but
guaranteed only Sabbath observers a right not to work on their Sab-
bath. The court found that “other employees who have strong and
legitimate, but nonreligious reasons for wanting a weekend day off
have no rights under the statute” (in Sandel 1998:88). As Sandel ar-
gues, the court here “confuses the right to perform a duty with the
right to make a choice. Sabbath observers, by definition, do not se-
lect the day of the week they rest; they rest on the day their religion
enjoins” (1998:88). In other words, the observance of Sabbath is not
the exercise of a choice but the performance of a duty, one that, for
observant orthodox Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists, goes to the
very heart of what it means to be an observant Jew or Seventh-Day
Adventist.
26. In Les filles voilées parlent (The Veiled Girls Speak) and Des
filles comme les autres (Ordinary Girls), women who were forced to
unveil in schools speak of feeling humiliated, exposed, and phys-
ically and psychically violated, feelings that were reiterated in a
number of personal conversations during fieldwork. See Chouder
et al. 2008 and Lévy and Lévy 2004.
27. Rousseau (1988) was one of the earliest republican thinkers
to grapple with this problem of “how to make men what they ought
to be” without depriving them of their freedom.
28. Another very similar example is the European Commission’s
1978 Arrowsmith v. the United Kingdom decision; for more on that
decision, see N. 20. Evans 2001 also cites a number of other compa-
rable cases decided by the European Court or European Commis-
sion on Human Rights, namely X v. the United Kingdom, Valsami v.
Greece, Efstratiou v. Greece, and Kokkinakis v. Greece.
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