exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

UMUT OZKIRIMLI  and  SPYROS A. SOFOS   Appeared in openDemocracy.com on 13 January 2015 Freedoms are not unlimited but who, when and how can we limit them? Two colleagues agree to disagree. Content warning: graphic and potentially offensive imagery, including torture. Umut – This time it was different. I could not put a finger on how I felt on the morning of January 7, as I was refreshing my Twitter feed every ten seconds, hypnotized by the cold-blooded execution of Ahmed Merabet at the scene of the massacre. I was horrified of course, and angry like everybody else, at the perpetrators, at the structural conditions that have produced them, at the way in which religion had become a cloak for what was essentially a politically motivated act of barbarism. But there was more to it. I was also numbed by disbelief, a profound sense of desperation, even defeatism. In a way, I felt like the Knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, seeking answers to existential questions about life

The French Conseil d'Etat considered back in May that a total ban of the face veil in France would present serious constitutional risks and could not rest on any sound juridical foundation.           Burqa : le Conseil d'Etat écarte l'interdiction - kewego Une interdiction totale du port du voile intégral en France présenterait de sérieux risques constitutionnels et ne pourrait trouver aucun fondement juridique incontestable, estime le Conseil d'Etat.     Keywords: voile intégral nijab burqa musulman conseil etat loi interdiction                 Video from bfmtv    

Earlier yesterday members of the French parliament approved with 336 votes for and 1 against a controversial law banning the voile intégral (the burqa). The vote has not come as a surpise as it has been discussed and anticipated for several months. Although the reasons put forward in support of the ban consider the burqa a “prison for women” and a “sign of their submission to their husbands, brothers or fathers” and therefore identify Muslim women as the target of this law, the legislators crafted the law in such a way as to ban any face-covering material, to “forbid concealing one’s face in public.” On the surface, a gender blind piece of legislation whose authors claim no intention to discriminate against Islam, the law curiously contains elements that clearly negate the declarations of its sponsors. In a display of determined arrogance that totalitarian regimes would envy, the law stipulates that, alongside a fine of  €150, women who will be caught covering their faces will be re