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Comparative
Studies of
South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East
Vol. 32, No. 1, 2012
doi 10.1215/1089201x-1545399
© 2012 by Duke University Press
102
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates:
Rethinking Violence, Secularism,
and Islam in Germany
Beverly M. Weber
he ongoing and contentious debates on the presence of the hijab in public space in
Europe present a particular challenge to critical theory and its impulse to critique.
Discourses surrounding forms of Islamic head covering exist at a complex intersec-
tion of notions of democracy, freedom, secularism — and of critique itself, which historically
has been attached to a particular understanding of secularism. In the case of Germany, nego-
tiations concerning the figure of the Muslim woman in relationship to secularism, democracy,
violence, and public space play an important, yet ambivalent, role in a national narrative, one
which imagines a Germany that has successfully emerged from the shadow of the Shoah to
embrace a democratic identity. The ambiguities inherent in such a narrative are revealed in
the contrasting response to two women who both emerged in the public eye based on their
wearing of the headscarf yet are rarely discussed in relationship to each other. In this article
I consider the popular representations of Germany’s so- called headscarf debate, in which
Fereshta Ludin sought placement as a public school teacher, and of the murder of Marwa
el- Sherbini, who was dubbed the “hijab martyr” after her death in a German courtroom at
the hands of a xenophobic man with ethnic German heritage. The juxtaposition of these two
figures reveals the diculty of and need for a critique of headscarf discourses. In the case of
Ludin, the portrayal of the German state as the patronizing protector of the Muslim woman
serves to legitimate the exclusion of those of immigrant heritage from participation in the
public sphere. Similarly, the emphasis on the failure of the German state to protect el- Sherbini
from an armed man in the courtroom functions to distract from an examination of racism in
contemporary Germany. A critique of headscarf discourses thus reveals the need to theorize
anew the relationship among modernity, religious dierence, secularism, and violence. Such
a theorization must address the role of racism in German democracy, construct new relation-
ships between religious/communal attachment and notions of the public/private, and provide
new understandings of secularism and its relationship to a nonviolent future.
Secularism, Post- secularism, Europe
The diculty of a critique of the discourse of the veil lies at least partly in the history of the
European tradition of critique itself. As Wendy Brown has recently reminded us, the notion
of critique that eventually gave birth to the body of theory we today call critical theory is
rooted in the Enlightenment assumption that religious perspectives must be shed in order to
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
103
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
enable rational critique, understood as an ap-
prehension of the conditions of possibility for
any particular phenomenon.
The legacy of this
thought leads to Karl Marx’s distinction between
critique and criticism, in which criticism merely
evaluates or judges religion, while critique is
able to apprehend the social and economic
conditions that require religious illusion.
How,
then, to formulate a critique of the discourse
of religion that draws on the insights of critical
theory? This can function only to the extent
to which critical theory can be turned against
itself: it requires critique of the foundations of
critique, in particular, the presumed necessary
relationship between a form of secularism that
relegates religion to the private and an eec-
tive, inclusive democracy. While the structure
of such a move is certainly not contrary to the
spirit of critical theory, it has proven dicult to
enact in relationship to religion.
Consider, for example, the notion of
the public sphere — more specifically, the role
that the wearing of Islamic head coverings has
played in excluding Muslim women from active
participation in the European public sphere.
Jürgen Habermas’s early elaborations of the
public sphere see it as an emancipatory space
that emerges from rational deliberation on
common issues, ideally resulting in polices that
will serve the common good. An eective pub-
lic sphere must remain inclusive and guarantee
access to all citizens but, to do so, transcends
and brackets out dierence in order to seek the
common good.
Even today, many cultural crit-
ics of forms of racism in Germany replicate this
assumption that dierence can be “productive”
only in the private sphere.
A number of chal-
lenges to Habermas’s early theories of the pub-
lic sphere quickly emerged. For example, a large
body of feminist research argues that in brack-
eting out dierence (or relocating dierence to
the private sphere), the public sphere in eect
works against the common good by excluding
women.
The early modern public sphere actu-
ally functioned to enable the concerns of mid-
dle- and upper- class European men to be repre-
sented as universal; the public sphere continues
to exclude those produced as others within any
given society. Chantal Moue has further ar-
gued that the notion of the public sphere may
go so far as to eliminate not only dierence but
all public dissent.
The most radical critiques
seek not to amend a normative public sphere to
be more inclusive but to suggest that the public
sphere actually produces dominance and power.
“Dierence” does not exist outside the public
sphere but is produced by it;
the expulsion of
that viewed as other by necessity privileges the
dominant groups, who serve as the norm against
which dierence is defined. Indeed, the public
sphere, by seeking to exclude certain forms of
dierence, produces marked bodies in opposi-
tion to an abstracted, disembodied subject of
the public sphere.
Moue has further argued for consider-
ing difference as fundamental to the proper
functioning of the public sphere. She suggests
that the desire for reconciliation, or for elimina-
tion of dierence, that haunts many liberal con-
ceptions of the public sphere prevents eective
public debate.
This dilemma derives in part
from the tendency to conflate the separations
between church and state, religion and politics,
and public and private, and in part from the
conflation of politics with state politics. If what is
truly at stake is the separation between religion
and state power, there is no reason to prohibit
religious groups or individuals from interven-
1. See Wendy Brown, introduction to Is Critique Secu-
lar? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, by Talal Asad,
Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood,
Townsend Papers in the Humanities 2 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2009), 11.
2. See ibid., 12.
3. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An En-
cyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique 3
(1974): 49.
4. See, e.g., Mark Terkessidis, “Wir selbst sind die An-
deren: Globalisierung, multikulturelle Gesellschaft
und Neorassismus” (“We Are the Others: Globali-
zation, Multicultural Society and Neoracism”), in
Zuwanderung im Zeichen der Globalisierung: Migra-
tions- , Integrations- und Minderheitenpolitik (Immi-
gration under the Sign of Globalization: Migration,
Integration, and Minority Politics), ed. Christoph But-
terwege and Gudrun Hentges (Opladen, Germany:
Leske and Budrich, 2000), 204.
5. See Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic
Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of
Moral and Political Theory,” Praxis International 4
(1985): 381 – 401; and Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the
Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Ac-
tually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25 (1990):
56 – 80.
6. See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New
York: Verso, 2000), 30.
7. See Alev Çınar, “Subversion and Subjugation in
the Public Sphere: Secularism and the Islamic Head-
scarf,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
33 (2008): 892 – 93.
8. See ibid. See also Lauren Berlant, The Queen of
America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997).
9. See Chantal Mouffe, “Religion, Liberal Democracy,
and Citizenship,” in Political Theologies: Public Reli-
gions in a Post- secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and
Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006), 320.
104
Comparative
Studies of
South Asia,
Africa and the
Middle East
tion in the larger political arena.
The problem
rather emerges when certain religious commu-
nities, or members or symbols of those commu-
nities, are allowed to appear in public space,
while others are not. Recent laws in several Ger-
man provinces that ban Islamic symbols from
classrooms, particularly the headscarf, while
permitting Judeo- Christian symbols provide an
excellent example. While ostensibly protecting
the secular space of the school, Christian and
Jewish groups and symbols have been privileged
in the name of secularism.
Habermas himself has reconsidered how
to think dierence in relationship to secular-
ism and the public sphere, but with a particu-
lar focus on religious language. He recently
engaged in a series of conversations with the
intention of articulating the possibility for re-
thinking the notion of politics in what he (with
ambivalence) has called a “post- secular” Eu-
rope. Habermas’s remarks have been particu-
larly surprising in their willingness to articulate
a place for religious language in public political
discussions. Here I would like to highlight a few
points from his essay “Notes on a Post- secular
Society.”
In his essay Habermas repeats the tradi-
tional narrative of secularism in Europe as a
path to peace after the confessional wars. His-
torically, secularism was thought to provide
a strategy for ending the violence of religious
conflict by managing the relationship between
religion and the public (particularly the state)
by relegating religion specifically to the private.
While Habermas wishes to consider whether Eu-
rope has moved into a postsecular age, the use
of the term post is deceiving, for in his under-
standing, “post- secularism” is an age in which
one must “adjust” to the “continuing existence”
of religious communities.
As a consequence,
Habermas now argues that religious language,
at least, must be permitted in the public sphere.
Public disputes over religion can provide a space
in which subjects of democracy may emerge —
in finding common political ground, the indi-
vidual cultural identities can be maintained
even as people see themselves as participants in
a common political community.
This intervention complicates the under-
standings of the public sphere in order to re-
dress the potential for exclusion on grounds
of religious affiliation. If we define language
broadly, we could conclude that Habermas’s
argument suggests that the headscarf, as a sym-
bol of Islam, should be allowed in public space.
However, Habermas falls short of providing a
conceptual framework for addressing the fixa-
tion on forms of Islamic head covering, one that
produces the Muslim woman’s body as hypervis-
ible in Western societies while excluding Muslim
women from public sphere participation. This
fixation partially rests on the assumption of the
inherent violence of Islam. In the debates about
the role of Islam in Germany, the incommen-
surability of Islam with the ideals of European
modernity are often fundamentally related to
controversies about human rights, particularly
rights to bodily integrity and gender equality.
Yet Habermas, who has championed Germany
as part of the “avantgardist core” of Europe
to be at the forefront of a Europe committed
to human rights, seems unable to address the
controversies about women’s rights and violence
against women that have been such an impor-
tant part of the debates on integration, Islam,
and Europe.
His focus on defining the extent
of secularism by the numbers of people par-
ticipating in religious communities also is un-
able to engage with the aspects of the state that
institutionalize forms of Christianity in many
Western European countries — via management
of religious education, for example. His focus
on identity (in terms of cultural dierence) in-
stead of embodied practices (like the wearing
of the headscarf ) further limits his discussion
of secularism.
These omissions in Habermas’s consider-
ations of the possibilities for a postsecular Eu-
rope have been at least partially addressed in an-
other context. Anthropologist Talal Asad, who
10. See ibid., 325.
11. Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post- secular Soci-
ety,” signandsight.com, 18 June 2008, www.signand
sight.com/features/1714.html.
12. See ibid.
13. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “Febru-
ary 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a
Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,”
in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic
Relations after the Iraq War, ed. Daniel Levy, Max Pen-
sky, and John Torpey (New York: Verso, 2005), 3 – 13.
105
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
seeks to write an “anthropology of the secular”
in Europe, has elaborated on the epistemologi-
cal assumptions of the secular, with a particu-
lar interest in pain and torture as mechanisms
by which the secular human becomes a human
subject during the Enlightenment.
While he
addresses a radically dierent context than I do,
he makes some intriguing assertions about vio-
lence and secularism that are useful in consid-
ering the role that veils and headscarves play in
discussions of secular and postsecular Europe.
While dominant narratives of the Enlight-
enment see secularism as an important means
to peace via tolerance, Asad suggests that “a sec-
ular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts
into play dierent structures of ambition and
fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence
since its object is always to regulate violence” ().
Thus violence is regulated by the state in part
by the regulation of dierence through struc-
tures of “toleration.” Membership in or exclu-
sion from the state is inextricably linked to the
regulation of dierence: “Secularism is not sim-
ply an intellectual answer to a question about
enduring social peace and toleration. It is an
enactment by which a political medium (represen-
tation of citizenship) redefines and transcends
particular and dierentiating practices of the
self that are articulated through class, gender,
and religion” (). Influenced by postcolonial
theory, Asad writes a narrative of European his-
tory in which the violence of Europe’s religious
wars is not eliminated by secularism but rather
transformed into the violence of national and
colonial wars. Thus secularism has been not a
path to peace but rather a means of displacing
violence. Asad sees a continuing secular vio-
lence that has colonialism as its heritage, a “vio-
lence lying at the heart of a political doctrine
that has disavowed violence on principle.” We
might call this continued violence a symbolic
and epistemic violence that enables forms of ra-
cialized violence. This requires the cultivation
of an other, a “dark jungle” against which the
Enlightenment can be defined ().
Bringing these two very dierent scholars
into dialogue suggests that a European secular-
ism as the management of public and private
spheres in order to end religious violence is
actually founded on the epistemic violence of
constructing an other, one that legitimates the
actions of the nation- state through the regula-
tion — but not prohibition — of violence. The
complex interactions of these aspects of secu-
larism today produce a very limited space in
which Muslim women can participate in the
public sphere. The construction of the other oc-
curs in part through the attention to violence
against Muslim women and the endless dis-
cussions about headscarves — both constantly
represented as “new, invisible” crises that are
inextricably linked to each other. Strategies
presented against gender violence, however,
can also serve to prevent Muslim women from
participating in the political sphere. A very obvi-
ous example of this is the federal working group
on Islam and Germany referred to as the Islam-
Konferenz, in which many of the women chosen
to represent the Muslim community are women
who have rejected Islam as inherently antitheti-
cal to European modernity. This decision rests
on the assumption that the headscarf signals
a form of gender violence. In a complex series
of slippages, a threatened political violence is
then seen to be indicated by domestic violence,
visually signaled by the headscarf. The figure
of the covered woman participating in German
citizenship defines and troubles a boundary be-
tween public and private, religious and secular;
her exclusion from the Islam- Konferenz man-
ages that boundary confusion. In this way a
certain form of secularism, while advocated as
a path to the end of gender violence, ultimately
excludes Muslim women from participation in
the public sphere.
Contextualizing the Headscarf
in the German Context
A visual imagination of the veiled or covered
Muslim woman has long played a role in Ger-
man thought, art, and literature. I discuss a
much longer historical trajectory elsewhere;
here I confine my discussion to the role played
by the figure of the Muslim woman in the con-
14. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 24.
106
Comparative
Studies of
South Asia,
Africa and the
Middle East
text of Germany’s postwar labor migration.
Beginning in the s, Germany signed guest-
worker contracts with a number of countries;
Turkey became the largest “sending” country
after the building of the Berlin Wall cut o im-
migration from East Germany.
Today, some
million residents of Germany are Muslim.
Owing to Germany’s traditionally restrictive
citizenship laws, only percent of Muslim resi-
dents in Germany have German citizenship.
While Muslims from southeast Europe now
outnumber Turkish Muslims in Germany, dis-
cussions in Germany are heavily influenced by
the history of Turkish migration, as well as the
traditions of Turkish secularism.
The figure of the covered immigrant
woman capturing the imagination of the Ger-
man public and dominating discussions of im-
migration in Germany over the previous de-
cades has evolved significantly. The cleaning
woman, the Kopftuchfrau (headscarf woman),
of the s and s was a figure both less
threatening and less present in the popular
imagination. This representation focused on
national, class, and educational dierence to
locate immigrant culture in a rural, traditional,
distant past. This figure occasionally alternated
with the exoticized body of a belly dancer, or a
woman in a niqab, but dominant representations
located dierence in class and education.
Gradually, however, and in particular
after unification, representations of immigrant
women in Germany shifted to emphasize cul-
tural difference — in particular, cultural dif-
ference located in Islam. The cover from
the respected weekly news magazine Der Spiegel
marks this transition — the dierence located
in a nation remains at the forefront, but in the
background sit the quiet Kopftuchmädchen (head-
scarf girls), who are emerging as a dominant
image of Islam. They are accompanied by their
dangerous, criminal brothers, whose violence is
represented in their stance, facial expression,
and the weapons they carry.
This shift to an emphasis on cultural dier-
ence, expressed as religious dierence, came to
a head in when Fereshta Ludin, a German
citizen in the province of Baden- Württemberg,
sought placement as a public school teacher
while wearing a hijab. The right- wing party Re-
publikaner challenged her placement in a par-
liamentary debate, initiating a widely covered
headscarf debate, referred to in German as the
Kopftuchstreit. During this debate the hijab was
alternately seen as a threat to German secular-
ism, Christian culture, feminist progress, En-
lightenment, and European values.
The forbidden schoolteacher revealed
fears as the immigrant woman became upwardly
mobile and began to emerge as a German and
European subject — one who has access to eco-
nomic, political, and cultural citizenship, and
one who, as teacher, would play a key role in the
reproduction of notions of citizenship.
Representations of the murder of Marwa
el- Sherbini in this trajectory are revealing in
terms of the possibilities for cultural, political,
and economic citizenship aorded to Muslim
women. In July , el- Sherbini, an Egyptian
citizen, was killed in a courtroom after bring-
15. See Beverly M. Weber, “Cloth on Her Head, Con-
stitution in Hand: Germany’s Headscarf Debates
and the Cultural Politics of Difference,” German
Politics and Society 22, no. 3 (2004): 33 – 63. An ex-
cellent examination of the construction of the Ori-
ental woman in the context of colonial fantasies
is Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a
Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998). Several scholars have
examined aspects of the role of the image of the
veiled woman in constructing a racialized or “ethnic”
other in contemporary German culture, including
Manuela Westphal, “Arbeitsmigrantinnen im Spie-
gel westdeutscher Frauenbilder” (“Worker Migrants
as Reflected in West German Images of Women”),
Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 19, no.
42 (1996): 17 – 28; Mark Terkessidis, “Globale Kultur
in Deutschland oder: Wie unterdrückte Frauen und
Kriminelle die Hybridität retten” (“Global Culture in
Germany, or How Oppressed Women and Criminals
Are Rescuing Hybridity”), in Kultur- Medien- Macht:
Cultural Studies und Medienanalyse (Culture- Media-
Power: Cultural Studies and Media Analysis), ed. An-
dreas Hepp and Rainer Winter (Wiesdaden: VS Ver-
lag für Sozialwissenaften, 1999), 2:237 – 52; Helma
Lutz, “Unsichtbare Schatten? Die ‘orientalische’ Frau
in westlichen Diskursen — Zur Konzeptualisierung
einer Opferfigur” (“Invisible Shadows? The ‘Oriental’
Woman in West ern Discourses — Toward a Concep-
tualization of a Victim Figure”), Peripherie 37 (1989):
51 – 65; and Christine Huth- Hildebrandt, Das Bild von
der Migrantin: Auf den Spuren eines Konstrukts (The
Image of the Migrant Woman: Tracking a Construct)
(Frankfurt: Brandes and Apsel, 2002). Verschleierte
Wirklichkeit also provides a comparative perspective
of representation of women in Islam, Judaism, and
Christianity as well as the construction of the Mus-
lim woman by the West. See Christina Von Braun and
Bettina Mathes, Verschleierte Wirklichkeit: Die Frau,
der Islam und der Westen (Veiled Reality: Woman,
Islam, and the West) (Berlin: Aufbau- Verlag, 2007).
16. An excellent discussion of early discourses at
work in conjunction with worker migration is Rita
Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
17. See Sonja Haug, Stephanie Müssig, and Anja Stichs,
Muslimisches Leben in Deutschland im Auftrag der
Deutschen Islam Konferenz: Forschungsbericht 6 (Mus-
lim Life in Germany, Commissioned by the German
Islam- Conference: Research Report 6) (Nuremberg:
Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 2009).
18. See ibid.
19. See Irmgard Pinn and Marlies Wehner, EuroPhan-
tasien: Die islamische Frau aus westlicher Sicht (Euro-
Fantasies: The Muslim Woman from a Western Per-
spective) (Duisburg, Germany: Duisburger Institut
für Sprach- und Sozialforschung, 1995), 39; Huth-
Hildebrandt, Das Bild, 46; and Westphal, “Arbeitsmi-
grantinnen im Spiegel westdeutscher Frauenbilder.”
107
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
ing charges against Alex Wiens. Wiens, a sym-
pathizer of the right- wing National Democratic
Party (NPD), had called her an Islamist and
terrorist at a playground when she asked him
to allow her son to use a swing. At the time of
her murder, el- Sherbini had just completed her
testimony against Wiens, who had appealed his
fine for insulting speech. While the murder
quickly gained attention in Egypt (el- Sherbini’s
home country) and Iran, seen as an example of
growing European Islamophobia, the German
press did not react to the case for nearly a week.
By the time German ocials and the media did
respond, el- Sherbini was being referred to as
a “hijab martyr” in the Islamic world, and her
death acknowledged as the first Islamopho-
bic murder in Germany. Yet discussions of her
case relocated violence outside of Europe, to
the anti- European sentiment of the so- called
Muslim world. The reduction of her case to an
example of martyrdom abroad and to a woman
insuciently protected by the German state in
German coverage both exclude her from par-
ticipation in democratic public spheres.
Read together, the discourses surround-
ing the cases of Ludin and el- Sherbini reveal
some interesting points about the contemporary
German debates on integration. Neither one in-
volves a Turkish German, yet both are used to ex-
amine the experience of the Turkish immigrant
population as Germans. In one, a German citi-
zen claims her rights to religious freedom under
the German constitution in order to be allowed
to teach wearing the headscarf. El- Sherbini, an
Egyptian citizen, claimed her rights under Ger-
man law and the constitution to testify against
Wiens for Beleidigung aus Fremdenhass (xenopho-
bically motivated slander). While the headscarf
played a marginal role in el- Sherbini’s case, she
became known as the headscarf martyr.
Reading these two cases together dem-
onstrates the difficulty of engaging intersec-
tional dierences in the German public sphere.
As Susan B. Rottmann and Myra Marx Ferree
point out, public discussions have been largely
unable to include a focus on race. Not only is
this focus absent in terms of its intersection with
gender and other forms of dierence, but even
in terms of the importance of antiracism in Eu-
ropean values, or in terms of European Union
(EU) policies. Court cases about whether public
school teachers can wear headscarves to work
dominate public discourse, while debates about
German compliance with the EU antidiscrimi-
nation laws are largely avoided.
While Ludin’s
headscarf was viewed as indicative of the wide-
ranging violent impacts of a growing Islamism,
el- Sherbini’s death, once it finally appeared in
the press, it was viewed as an isolated instance.
Despite a recent spike in incidents in racist vio-
lence, journalists, politicians, and even repre-
sentatives of Muslim organizations took pains to
emphasize that the murder of el- Sherbini was
not evidence of extensive institutionalized rac-
ism or Islamophobia.
Fereshta Ludin and the Headscarf Debates
Germany’s incarnation of headscarf debates
chronologically roughly parallels the emergence
of France’s second “aair of the veil.”
In
Ludin had completed preparation for a career as
a teacher and was ready to be placed in a student-
teaching position. The Republikaner, which at
that time had seats in the Baden- Württemberg
parliament, initiated a parliamentary debate
in which the party argued that the Baden-
Württemberg constitution must be honored, in
which it states that “youth are to be raised in the
fear of God [ . . . ] Children will be raised on the
basis of Christian and Western educational and
cultural values.”
Because of the state’s monopoly on teacher
training and education, Ludin was placed as a
student teacher in a public school.
Ludin suc-
20. See Susan B. Rottmann and Myra Marx Ferree,
“Citizenship and Intersectionality: German Feminist
Debates about Headscarf and Antidiscrimination
Laws,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender,
State and Society 15 (2008): 481–513.
21. For a discussion of the French headscarf debates
in the context of racist and colonial discourses, see
Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). On the exten-
sive discussion of the French headscarf debates, see
Jane Freedman, “Secularism as a Barrier to Integra-
tion? The French Dilemma,” International Migra-
tion 43, no. 3 (2004): 5 – 28; Christian Joppke, “State
Neutrality and Islamic Headscarf Laws in France and
Germany,” Theory and Society 36 (2007): 313–42; and
Bronwyn Winter, “Secularism aboard the Titanic:
Feminists and the Debate over the Hijab in France,”
Feminist Studies 32 (2006): 279–98.
22. Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, Plenarproto-
koll 12/23, 20.03.97, 20 March 1997, 1632.
23. See Annette Schavan, Antrag der Abg. Helmut
Rau u. a. CDU und Stellungnahme des Ministeriums
für Kultus, Jugend und Sport Islamische Lehrkraft im
Vorbereitungsdienst –Islamischer Religionsunterricht
in deutscher Sprache (Application of Representative
Helmut Rau et al., CDU and Position Statement of the
Ministry of Culture, Youth, and Sport. Islamic Teacher
in Training—Islamic Religious Instruction in the Ger-
man Language), 29 April 1997; and Thorsten Schmitz,
Kein Stoff für die Schule: Der Fall Ludin; Wer steckt
unter dem Tuch? (No Cloth for School: The Case of
108
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cessfully completed her two years as a student
teacher and received good grades and positive
feedback. No parental complaints were lodged
against her.
However, after completing her
student teaching, she was prevented from place-
ment as a public school teacher. Then minis-
ter of culture Annette Schavan reasoned that
as the wearing of the headscarf is controver-
sial and not clearly required by the Koran, its
wearing must be an inherently political symbol,
yet one that infringes on a student’s freedom
from religious participation (negative religious
freedom).
One must note here that the wear-
ing of a Christian clerical collar or nun’s habit
by public school teachers had not been ques-
tioned in these discussions.
Ludin then sued for the right to a teach-
ing position. She argued that her headscarf
was a personal decision, an article of clothing
worn for religious reasons but without a desire
to missionize for Islam. The lower courts found
against Ludin, citing state neutrality, Ludin’s in-
ability to fulfill her duties as a civil servant, and
the “visibility” and “demonstrative character” of
the headscarf, regardless of Ludin’s intentions.
The conflict between Ludin’s freedom of reli-
gion and Baden- Württemberg’s rootedness in
Christian values, said the court, must necessar-
ily be resolved to Ludin’s disadvantage in order
to arm Christianity’s place in the provincial
constitution, which is one of relationship “only
to cultural and educational influence, not to
specific religious realities.”
In September
the Federal Constitutional Court decided for
Ludin (five to three), but on the basis of a lack
of existing laws in the Bundesländer (individual
provinces) regulating the relationship between
church and state in the classroom.
In other
words, this decision essentially emphasized that
questions regarding education are the purview
of provincial, not federal, law. The decision im-
plies that a nondiscriminatory law that treats all
religions equally and bans the headscarf could
be constitutional: any such law would have to
adhere to “strict equality in the handling of dif-
ferent religious beliefs, both in the justification
as well as in the enforcement of such employ-
ment duties.”
In the wake of this decision, eight of
Germany’s sixteen provinces passed headscarf
bans.
Note, however, that many headscarf
bans have explicitly banned Islamic symbols
and permitted Christian symbols, while others
are implicitly interpreted to permit Christian
and Judaic symbols. The Baden- Württemberg
law, for example, reads:
Teachers in public schools . . . may not exter-
nally represent political, religious, worldview,
or other similar positions that would potentially
endanger the neutrality of the province vis- a- vis
students and parents [ . . . ] In particular, exter-
nal behavior that would evoke the impression by
students or parents that the teacher is against
human dignity, the equal rights of people ac-
cording to Article of the Basic Law, the basic
freedoms, or the liberal democratic order, is
not permissible. [ . . . ] Symbols of Christian and
Western educational and cultural values or tra-
ditions do not infringe on this ban.
Berlin is the only province to pass a law explic-
itly banning all religious symbols in the class-
room.
Ludin challenged the constitutionality
of the Baden- Württemberg law but lost before
the Federal Administrative Court in June .
Ludin, Who Is Hiding under the Scarf?), Süddeutsche
Zeitung, 23 July 1998.
24. See Schmitz, Kein Stoff für die Schule.
25. See Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend und Sport
Baden- Württemberg, Pressemitteilung Nr. 119/98, 13
July 1998.
26. See Verwaltungsgericht Stuttgart, “Tragen
eines Kopftuchs im Unterricht durch Lehrerin. Urt. v.
24.3.2000 — 15 K 532/99” (“The Wearing of a Head-
scarf by a Teacher in the Classroom. Decision of 24
March 2000”), Neue Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsrecht
19 (2000): 959 – 61; Verwaltungsgerichthof Mann-
heim, “Religiös motiviertes Tragen eines Kopftuchs
als Eignungskriterium für Lehramtsbewerberin. Urt.
v. 26.6.2001 — 4 S 1439/00” (“Religiously Motivated
Wearing of a Headscarf as Criteria for Suitability for
Employment for a Teacher Applicant”), Neue Juristi-
sche Wochenschrift 54, no. 39 (2001): 2899 – 2905.
27. Verwaltungsgerichthof Mannheim, “Religiös mo-
tiviertes Tragen eines Kopftuchs.”
28. Bundesverfassungsgericht (BverfG), 2 BvR 1436/
02 vom 3.6.2003, 24 September 2003.
29. Ibid.
30. The eight provinces that ban the headscarf are
Baden- Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Bremen, Hes-
sen, Lower Saxony, North Rhine – Westphalia, and
Saarland. Claudia Breger, “Religious Turns: Immigra-
tion, Islam, and Christianity in Twenty- fi rst Century
German Cultural Politics,” Konturen 1, no. 1 (2008),
konturen.uoregon.edu/vol1_Breger.html#.
31. “Landtag von Baden- Württemberg 13. Wahlperi-
ode. Drucksache 13/3091,” 14 April 2004.
32. Thomas Gasparini, “Die Kopftuch- Gesetze der
Bundesländer” (“The Headscarf Laws of the Provin-
ces”) Welt Online, 29 August 2004, www.welt.de
/print- wams/article115090/Die_Kopftuch_Gesetze
_der_Bundeslaender.html.
109
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
Ludin at this point chose to end her battle in
the courts rather than pursue her case back to
the Federal Constitutional Court. There was
discussion about the European Commission
reviewing these laws for adherence to EU anti-
discrimination guidelines, but this has not been
pursued. This may be because French, Turkish,
and Swiss headscarf bans have been declared
acceptable by the European Court of Human
Rights (a judicial institution linked to the Coun-
cil of Europe, not the EU); the assumption is
that given these precedents in the European
Court of Human Rights, the commission would
not find dierently.
The Headscarf as a Marker against Secularism
As evidenced by the language of the Baden-
Württemberg ban, the discussions surrounding
this case have constructed Christianity and the
West as per se supportive of freedoms and the
liberal democratic order. Their relationship to
secularism, then, does not need to be exam-
ined. By definition, they support secularism
(and as I discuss below, European tolerance).
Throughout the Ludin case, the covering or re-
vealing of her body became the marker of her
ability to participate in a modern, Enlightened
German or European society, defined by its val-
ues of secularism and tolerance. The content
of these relationships is deeply contradictory.
While Ludin was initially challenged for not
being Christian, she was later perceived to be
unable to fulfill her duties because she was in-
adequately secular. Both positions construct the
Muslim woman as inherently unable to emerge
into a position as subject of the German state,
unable to participate in European democracy.
The shifting and contradictory meanings of the
headscarf converge, however, in their exclusion
of women of immigrant heritage from cultural,
economic, and political citizenship. A certain
consistency emerges primarily in terms of the
regulation of otherness in order to manage a
Europe constructed as secular norm. This is
particularly apparent in the dissenting opinion
in the Federal Constitutional Court’s decision,
which argues that the headscarf potentially en-
dangers the “religious peace in society.”
Thus
the headscarved woman not only is unable to
emerge as a European subject but also serves as
the marker of a threat to foundational notions of
that subject. The dierential laws that emerged
following this case suggest in fact that Christian-
ity is being privileged as a tradition informing
the secular German state. However, exclusion is
founded not by any action of Ludin’s but rather
by the possible interpretations of her headscarf
in the future. This becomes a sort of phobia, as
Claudia Breger points out, of the uncontrollable
resignification of the headscarf.
The “Conict of Cultures”:
Secularism as Battle between Tolerance
and Condemnation of Violence against Women
In the press, courts, and legal scholarship, secu-
larism discussions are often framed as a “con-
flict of cultures” that reveals the “true danger”
of Islam in Europe, and one that occurs because
immigrants do not arrive from “secular coun-
tries” — Germany is suering from “foreign re-
ligiosity.”
In the context of the headscarf de-
bate, the notion of the clash of cultures became
a debate about tolerance with two streams: what
decision would demonstrate “European tol-
erance” vis- à- vis an intolerant Islam and how
much tolerance was too much. One can see this
in particular as courts seek to legitimate the ex-
istence of crucifixes in the schools while simul-
33. For a more complete overview, see Weber, “Cloth
on Her Head.”
34. BverfG, 2 BvR 1436/02 vom 3.6.2003, par. 99.
35. See Breger, “Religious Turns,” 23.
36. Johann Bader, “Darf eine muslimische Lehrerin
in der Schule ein Kopftuch tragen?” (“Can a Mus-
lim Teacher Be Permitted to Wear a Headscarf in the
School?”), Verwaltungsblätter für Baden- Württemberg
19, no. 10 (1998): 365; Ulf Häußler, “Religion und Inte-
gration,” Zeitschrift für Ausländerrecht und Ausländer-
politik 19, no. 1 (1999): 36; Helmut Kerscher, “Ein Stück
Stoff und seine Folgen” (“A Piece of Cloth and Its Con-
sequences”), Süddeutsche Zeitung, 4 June 2003, sec.
Themen des Tages; Michael Bertrams, “Lehrerin mit
Kopftuch? Islamismus und Menschenrecht” (“Teacher
with Headscarf? Islamism and Human Rights”), Deut-
sches Verwaltungsblatt, no. 19 (2003): 1225 – 34; Bun-
desverwaltungsgericht, “Die Einstellung als Lehrerin
an Grund- und Hauptschulen im Beamtenverhältnis
auf Probe” (“The Appointment of a Teacher to Elemen-
tary and High Schools as a Civil Servant in Training”),
Juristen Zeitung 58, no. 5 (2003): 254; Helmut Goerlich,
“Distanz und Neutralität im Lehrberuf — zum Kopf-
tuch und anderen religiösen Symbolen” (“Distance
and Neutrality in the Teaching Career — On the Heads-
carf and Other Religious Symbols”) Neue Juristische
Wochenschrift, no. 40 (1999): 2929 – 33; Martin Mor-
lok and Julian Krüper, “Auf dem Weg zum ‘forum neu-
trum’? — Die ‘Kopftuch- Entscheidung’ des BverwG”
(“On the Way to a ‘Forum Neutrum’? The Headscarf
Decision of the Federal Administrative Court”), Neue
Juristische Wochenschrift 56 (2003): 1020 – 21; and
Burkhard Schöbener, “Die ‘Lehrerin mit dem Kopf-
tuch’ — europäisch gewendet!” (“The ‘Teacher with
the Head scarf’ — Turned toward Europe!”), Juristische
Ausbildung, no. 3 (2001): 186.
110
Comparative
Studies of
South Asia,
Africa and the
Middle East
taneously denying Muslim symbols: “Children
associate little with the mere everyday object on
the wall, which demonstrates no immediate re-
lationship to a concrete person or to facts of life
[Lebenssachverhalt ]. The crucifix is so much — be-
yond its religious meaning — a general cultural
symbol for a culture which is rooted firmly in
values drawn from Jewish and Christian sources,
yet is open and has become tolerant through
rich but also tragic [leidvoll] historical experi-
ence.”
This explanation of the crucifix is typi-
cal of a larger tendency to assume that Christi-
anity (sometimes expressed as Judeo- Christian
culture) inherently is more capable of being
tolerant than Islam is, although this citation is
unique in its pointing to fascism as a cause of
that tolerance. Ludin embodies the cultural op-
posite of emancipation because the headscarf
reveals Islam’s tendency toward violence, as well
as cultural exclusion, while tolerance becomes
exclusively Christian: “Tolerance of those who
think dierently is a particular cultural marker
of Christianity.”
The converse is also true: per-
mitting the headscarf would merely evidence
Christian tolerance: “Shouldn’t this headscarf,
the symbol of a supposedly repressive religion,
be banned in the name of progress? Or wouldn’t
it be precisely an exemplary sign of Western tol-
erance to permit the headscarf ?”
Ludin’s insistent self- representation, and
her desire to claim rights as a citizen in Ger-
man democracy through recourse to the con-
stitutional court, is obscured by the emphasis
on cultural clash framed as conflict between
a peaceful, tolerant state and the violence of
Islam. The violence of Islam against women, it is
perceived, will rise if headscarves increase their
presence in the German public. This location of
violence within the Muslim family functions in a
twofold way: to limit the emergence of the Mus-
lim subject to the public sphere via relocation to
the private sphere of the family and to obscure
the forms of racism that may be preventing the
emergence of the immigrant woman as political
subject.
Feminist responses have been particularly
contentious. In the case of Ludin, responses
were dominated by Alice Schwarzer, a main-
stream feminist who even today continues to be
the public face of German feminism — to the
frustration of many feminists, however — and by
women of Muslim heritage who reject Islam and
argue that Islam is fundamentally incompatible
with women’s rights. The feminist responses re-
ceiving the most attention belie research that
suggests that many women who choose the
headscarf also insist on women’s autonomy in
work, education, and relationships.
While the
only mainstream feminist publication, EMMA,
founded by and still largely influenced by
Schwarzer, most recently has begun to include
stories providing perspectives complicating the
role of the headscarf in German culture, such
feminist responses continue to be dominated
by perspectives arguing that opposing the
headscarf ban is a sign of either “too much” or
“naive” tolerance, while the headscarf is per se
a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism.
The Murder of Marwa el- Sherbini
When el- Sherbini was murdered in a German
courtroom, she had just completed her testi-
mony against the right- wing NPD sympathizer
Wiens, who had appealed his fine for insulting
speech against el- Sherbini, having called her a
terrorist and Islamist. In the courtroom, Wiens
37. BverfG, 2 BvR 1436/02 vom 3.6.2003, par. 113.
38. Dieter Bednarz, “Allah- Mania,” Spiegel Special,
no. 1 (1998): 112. On Islam’s tendency toward vio-
lence, see Wulf Reimer, “Kopftuchstreit in Plüder-
hausen: Eine muslimische Pädagogin verwirrt Baden-
Württemberg” (“Headscarf Debate in Plüderhausen:
A Muslim Teacher Confuses Baden- Württemberg”),
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 July 1998, sec. Nachrichten;
Brigitte- Johanna Henkel- Waidhofer, “‘Man könnte
meinen, die Türken stehen wieder vor Wien’: Hitzige
Debatte im Südwesten über Lehrerin mit Kopftuch;
Landesregierung muss entscheiden” (“One Would
Think That the Turks Are at the Gates of Vienna Once
Again: Heated Debate in the Southwest about a
Teacher with a Headscarf; The Provincial Parliament
Must Decide”), AP German Worldstream (Stuttgart),
8 July 1998; and Alfred Behr, “Muslimin beschäftigt
den Stuttgarter Landtag” (“Stuttgart Parliament
Concerned with Muslim Woman”), Frankfurter All-
gemeine Zeitung, 11 July 1998, sec. Politik. On Islam’s
tendency toward cultural exclusion, see Brigitte J.
Waidhofer, “Lehrerin mit Kopftuch” (“Teacher with
Headscarf”), AP German Worldstream, 13 July 1998.
39. Bednarz, “Allah- Mania,” 112.
40. See Sigrid Nökel, Die Töchter der Gastarbeiter
und der Islam: Zur Soziologie alltagsweltlicher Aner-
kennungspolitiken; eine Fallstudie (Daughters of the
Guestworkers and of Islam: Toward the Sociology of
Everyday Politics of Recognition: A Case Study) (Biele-
feld, Germany: Transcript, 2002).
41. On the role of the headscarf in German culture,
see Lamya Kaddor, “Wäre Gott heute für das Kopf-
tuch?” (“Would God Be for the Headscarf Today?”),
EMMA, September – October 2009. On the headscarf
as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism, see Elisa-
beth Badinter, “Das Kopftuch ist ein Symbol” (“The
Headscarf is a Symbol”), EMMA, September – October
2009; and Alice Schwarzer, “Kein Kopftuch in der
Schule!” (“No Headscarf in the School!”), EMMA,
September – October 2009.
111
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
continued his racist speech, declaring that Mus-
lims and non- Europeans had no right to be in
Europe. El- Sherbini’s story challenges the nar-
ratives about Muslim women in several ways.
When Muslim women seek to wear the head-
scarf while working as public school teachers,
the headscarf is seen as evidence that Muslim
women are victims of Muslim patriarchy and
pawns of Islamist movements. Yet like Ludin, el-
Sherbini was a self- assured woman claiming her
rights under German law in the German court
system — even though not a citizen. Her death
was not at the hands of a family member — in-
deed, her husband was shot by a policeman who
entered the courtroom after the stabbing and
assumed the husband was the perpetrator. The
discourse at home and abroad largely trans-
formed her from an active participant in the
democratic process to a hijab martyr.
The German Central Council of Jews as
well as the German Central Council of Mus-
lims both gave public statements condemning
the crime, but federal and local ocials were
slow to react publicly to the murder. Wiens was
convicted of murder. All court officials were
cleared of any wrongdoing in the shooting of
el- Sherbini’s husband. In the media re-
searcher Sabine Schier was charged with slan-
der and fined €, or two months’ imprison-
ment because she stated in an interview that the
mistaken shooting of the victim’s husband by
a police ocer must be examined for possible
racist connections (upon appeal, these charges
were dropped).
Though the headscarf was not specifically
mentioned in the complaint against Wiens, the
fact that el- Sherbini wore a hijab was perceived
to be provocation for both the verbal attack and
the murder. Her murder was seen internation-
ally as indicative of a growing German and Eu-
ropean Islamophobia.
Also widely reported
were the contradictory reactions of el- Sherbini’s
family: the father calling for an end to all forms
of hate, the brother swearing vengeance.
As
this reaction widened to the US and the British
press, increasing pressure was put on German
media and government ocials to respond to
the crime; seven days after the murder, stories
began appearing. These stories drew connec-
tions from el- Sherbini’s murder to the Mu-
hammad cartoons that appeared in Denmark
in — , however, to the case of Ludin.
Those connections already suggest a German
imagination of a chaotic “overreaction” on the
part of the Muslim world, as responses to the
cartoon controversy were often portrayed.
Racist Germany?
When the media and government ocials began
to respond, it was often to point out why this case
does indicate German racism. One Dresden
ocial even claimed that clearly Dresden was
not racist, since he himself had a Korean wife.
The charges brought against media researcher
Schier in for suggesting that racism might
have led to the shooting of el- Sherbini’s hus-
band show the fear of naming racism as existing
outside of the action of individuals, as poten-
tially even present in German institutions, even
as they also function to prosecute hate speech.
When the crime is labeled xenophobic, racist,
or Islamophobic in motivation, the crime is seen
as a rare crime committed by a fanatic individu-
al.
Potential violence, however, threatens from
without in the imagination of masses of Muslim
protestors who were pictured in the news cover-
age that did exist.
In many cases the media emphasized that
Wiens was a so- called Russlanddeutscher — a Rus-
sian of German heritage. Because of Germany’s
42. See “Murder of Egyptian Woman and Islamopho-
bia,” Korea Times, 19 July 2009; Kate Connolly and Jack
Shenker, “Racism Row: The Headscarf Martyr; Mur-
der in German Court Sparks Egyptian Fury at West’s
‘Islamophobia,’” Guardian, 8 July 2009, final edi-
tion; Alaa Al Aswany, “Egyptian Author on Murdered
Muslim Woman: ‘The Reaction of the German Gov-
ernment Was Not Fair,’” by Volkhard Windfuhr and
Bernhard Zand, Spiegel Online, 20 July 2009, www
.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,637805,00
.html; “Afghan Daily Condemns Silence over Action
against Uighurs in China,” BBC Monitoring Trans Cau-
casus Unit Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring,
12 July 2009; Birgit Cerha, “Die Wut Ägyptens; Isla-
mische Welt über Bluttat entsetzt” (“Egypt’s Anger;
Islamic World Horrified by Bloody Murder”), Frank-
furter Rundschau, 13 July 2009; “Egyptian Fury at
Dresden Murder: Protestors Accuse Germany of Rac-
ism,” Spiegel Online, 7 July 2009, www.spiegel.de/
international/world/0,1518,634842,00.html; “Irani-
ans Protest Killing of Veiled Egyptian Woman in Ger-
many,” BBC Monitoring Trans Caucasus Unit Supplied
by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, 11 July 2009; and Alaa
Al Aswany, “Western Hostility to Islam Is Stoked by
Double Standards and Distortion,” Guardian, 21 July
2009, final edition, sec. Comment and Debate.
43. See Cerha, “Die Wut Ägyptens.”
44. See Wolf Schmidt, “Vorwärts und vergessen?”
(“Forward and Forget?”) Taz, Die Tageszeitung, 24
July 2009.
45. See Andrea Dernbach, “Weiße Rosen für Marwa”
(“White Roses for Marwa”), Der Tagesspiegel, 12 July
2009, sec. Politik.
112
Comparative
Studies of
South Asia,
Africa and the
Middle East
historic policies of privileging “blood” in im-
migration to Germany, Russians of German
heritage were considered desirable immigrants
until recently and thus were given relatively
easy access to citizenship. In the initial stories
about el- Sherbini, there was an anticipation of
a discovery that Wiens’s Islamophobia had been
“pre- programmed” during his time in Russia.
Repeatedly, comments asserted that Germany is
not Islamophobic and that Wiens’s emigration
from Russia contradicts accusations of a Ger-
man Islamophobia: “What does this uprooted
man have to do with us Germans?”
Indeed, the
murder supposedly tells us “as much about the
dominant Islamophobia in Russia as about xe-
nophobia in Germany.”
One of the few stories
to actually take on the impacts of this murder
for debates on multiculturalism in Germany,
published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, drew paral-
lels to the Los Angeles riots and suggested
that el- Sherbini’s murder was the consequence
of conflict between two “niche cultures.”
This
desire to locate the roots of violence outside of
“German” culture is reinforced by an absence.
The Russlanddeutscher, once understood as “Ger-
man” enough to be a more desirable immigrant,
now is conveniently “not German.” Wiens is un-
problematically referred to as a Russlanddeutscher
now to emphasize his dierence from German-
ness. This can cover up the racialized under-
standings of Germanness that led to a notion of
the Russlanddeutscher in the first place.
Certainly, in this case it is important to
acknowledge where the German legal system
was working against racist speech. This suggests
that a German secularism has emerged in which
a subject might be marked by dierence and yet
be able to claim some rights under German law.
The functioning of the legal system in the regu-
lation of hate speech, however, does not serve as
evidence that racism or Islamophobia is absent.
When one considers el- Sherbini’s murder and
the responses to it in comparison to the ongoing
and extensive discussions about the headscarf
debates, it becomes obvious that the focus on
the headscarf can indeed function to obscure
forces of discrimination in German society.
Feminists in Germany have further been
slow to consider el- Sherbini’s murder as a prob-
lem relevant to feminist analysis. This response
is partially due to a thorny problem facing
analyses of violence against women. How can
one challenge the representations of Islam as
inherently violent, of Muslim men as inherently
violent, and also challenge the violence against
Muslim women that does exist? Western femi-
nists have largely failed to find an alternative
way to talk about violence that would allow for
productive engagement with Islam. And those
who seek to take on these dicult questions are
largely ignored by the German government as
well as by the mainstream media, which instead
consistently turn to a very few voices who insist
on total rejection of Islam.
The media coverage of el- Sherbini’s death
reveals issues that would seem to call for a femi-
nist response. For example, most initial press
coverage states that Wiens also called el- Sherbini
an Islamist whore. According to Steen Winter,
who was a rare journalist to actually examine
el- Sherbini’s complaint and testimony, she de-
nied this claim.
She brought her complaint to
reject her positioning within German society as
a terrorist and Islamist. While she may have at-
tempted to depoliticize the headscarf, and deg-
ender her claims to human rights, the repeated
circulation of a notion of an “Islamist whore”
suggests the power that the sexualization of the
Muslim woman’s body continues to have in Ger-
man discussions of integration.
46. Hannes Heine, “Am Start für den Staat Opfer
der Hetze: Die offenbar rassistische Messerattacke
auf eine Ägypterin im Landgericht Dresden wird zu-
nehmend zu einem Politikum; Warum ist die Tat so
brisant?” (“At the Start for the State, Victims of In-
ammatory Speech: The Apparently Racist Stabbing
of an Egyptian in the Provincial Court of Dresden are
Increasingly Becoming Political; Why is The Crime So
Controversial?”), Der Tagesspiegel, 9 July 2009, sec.
Zweite.
47. Sibylle Krause- Burger, “Ein Unbehauster in sei-
nem dumpfen Drang” (“A Man without a Home, His
Listless Urge”), Stuttgarter Zeitung, 15 July 2009.
48. Tomas Avenarius, “Empörung in Alexandria: Pro-
teste nach Mord an Ägypterin in deutschem Gerichts-
saal” (“Outrage in Alexandria: Protests after the Mur-
der of an Egyptian Woman in a German Courtroom”)
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 July 2009, sec. Panorama.
49. Andrian Kreye, “Kampf der fremden Kulturen:
Die Multikulturalismus- Frage im Messermord von
Dresden” (“Battle of Foreign Cultures: The Question
of Multiculturalism in the Dresden Stabbing”), Süd-
deutsche Zeitung, 14 July 2009.
50. While I cannot address this in detail here, it is in-
teresting to note that Swiss newspapers expressed
outrage that el- Sherbini’s case was receiving so much
more interest than violent attacks by youth against
Swiss tourists in Munich were given. See “Bluttat mit
internationalen Konsequenzen: Ein Mord in Dresden
erregt Empörung in der muslimischen Welt” (“Bloody
Deed with International Consequences: A Murder in
Dresden Causes Outrage in the Muslim World”), Neue
Zürcher Zeitung, 14 July 2009.
51. See Steffen Winter, “Justiz: ‘Bloßer Hass,’” (“Justice:
Simple Hate”), Spiegel Online, 31 August 2009, www
.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,646122,00.html.
113
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
While accusations of Islamophobia or rac-
ism are firmly rebued, the state is willing to
entertain the possibility that security may be lax
in German courtrooms.
An investigation was
opened into the possibility that the presiding
judge inadequately provided for el- Sherbini’s
security in the courtroom, though no charges
were brought. Necla Kelek, an outspoken pro-
ponent for a headscarf ban, sees el- Sherbini
as doubly victimized: by the headscarf, which
she argues is necessarily oppressive to women,
and by the court’s inability to protect.
The
discourse of security removes el- Sherbini from
her active participation in German democracy
through claiming antidiscrimination protection
and testifying at the trial. Instead, el- Sherbini is
located as the recipient of physical protection
at the hands of the court, as paternalistic repre-
sentative of the state.
Reconguring the Public Sphere?
One must, however, consider the ways that dis-
cussions in the wake of el- Sherbini’s murder
may be functioning to reconfigure the public
sphere. While it was an argument rarely at-
tended to in the press, Stephan J. Kramer, the
general secretary of the Central Council of
Jews, responded early to the murder by arguing
that attacks based on race, religion, or nation-
ality are fundamentally attacks on democracy
itself. Kramer’s remarks evoke the potential for
a secular democracy that does not regulate dif-
ference through a condescending tolerance. In-
stead Kramer seeks to respond to the “largely
unchecked hate propaganda against Muslims
spread by everyone from marginal extremists
right through to people at the centre of society”
with the hard work of respect.
Journalist Hilal Sezgin also seeks to rec-
ognize and name racism in her contributions
to the online version of a popular Berlin daily
newspaper, the Tageszeitung. She counters the
claim that accusations of Islamophobia or dis-
crimination against Muslims are merely appro-
priations of el- Sherbini’s death by Egypt and
Iran.
Sezgin evades the reduction of racism to
an individual act, reminding the public that a
racist act gains its significance in a specific con-
text. She also criticizes the many voices who have
argued that if any country knows how to be self-
critical when it comes to racism and violence,
it is Germany. Germany will demonstrate such
maturity, she contends, not by being insulted by
claims of discrimination but by being disturbed
enough to investigate whether such claims are
true. She argues,
The growth in Islamophobia in Germany means,
for example, that a pattern has been established
in our public speech that evokes specific images
(veiled women, scenes of masses of raised be-
hinds in prayer), ignores some questions (“Why
doesn’t Islam possess the same legal rights as the
Churches?”), and privileges others (“Why have
they still not learned any German?). This pat-
tern classifies members of a population group
through stereotypes, and allows the individuals
to appear more as performing mouthpieces of
their supposed “culture” than as individual ac-
tors with their own preferences and decisions.
Sezgin’s discussion suggests that Islamophobia
functions specifically through the regulatory
practices of secularism. These reduce represen-
tations of individuals to their association with
Islam, while ignoring the structural privileging
of Christianity — for example, through contracts
with the state.
Andreas Fanizadeh, also in the Tagesze i -
tung, criticizes the inability to name and con-
front racism from a dierent perspective. He
emphasizes that the reduction of this act to a
question of Left versus Right also prevents ev-
eryday Germans from working to prevent rac-
ism.
He further argues that while laws have
improved for minorities living in Germany,
who are discovering more trust in German civil
society, these improvements have come at the
cost of increasing attempts to cut off further
immigration.
52. See “Bluttat mit internationalen Konsequenzen.”
53. See Necla Kelek, “Verstoß gegen die Menschen-
würde” (“A Violation of Human Dignity”), EMMA,
September – October 2009, 98 – 99, www.emma.de/
ressorts/artikel/kopftuch- burka/verstoss- gegen
- die- menschenwuerde/.
54. Stephan J. Kramer, “In Solidarity with All Mus-
lims,” Qantara.de, 13 July 2009, www.qantara.de/
webcom/show_article.php/_c- 476/_nr- 1187/i.html.
55. See Hilal Sezgin, “Das reine deutsche Gewissen”
(“The Pure German Conscience”), Taz.de, 22 July 2009,
www.taz.de/1/debatte/kolumnen/artikel/1/das- reine
- deutsche- gewissen/.
56. Ibid.
57. See Andreas Fanizadeh, “Aufstand der Anständi-
gen?” (“Revolt of the Respectable?”), Taz, Die Tages-
zeitung, 18 July 2009, sec. Meinung und Diskussion.
114
Comparative
Studies of
South Asia,
Africa and the
Middle East
Headscarves, Violence, and the
Potential for Critique
The relative inattention to the el- Sherbini case is
indicative of the eectiveness of the discourses
that were created during the headscarf debates.
The headscarf can trigger an already existing
set of discursive regimes that assumes the total-
ity of a successful tolerant secularism that con-
structs a nonviolent European heritage. The ref-
erence to the headscarf activates a tradition that
has located the origins of violence — primarily
as gendered violence — so firmly elsewhere that
Germany is successfully able to evade a discus-
sion of forms of racialized violence within its
own borders.
The power of this discourse challenges the
potential for critique within critical theory. As I
outlined earlier, the notion of critique emerges
from a tradition that specifically links critique
to a secular position. Criticism might be seen as
directed at an object or phenomenon, while cri-
tique is directed at the conditions under which
an object or phenomenon can come into being;
the existence of that very distinction, however,
has long been associated with the critique of re-
ligion itself. How, then, to turn critique against
itself — to direct critique at the very notion of
secularism as it is raised by debates on head-
scarves and veils? In a dierent context, Judith
Butler sees one possibility in the work of Wal-
ter Benjamin, in that he continually points to
an interruption in the narrative of Enlighten-
ment progress that occurs when the premodern
erupts into the modern.
Alternatively, Butler
suggests, one might turn to the work of Michel
Foucault, who conceptualized critique as an at-
titude outside of a Kantian regime of reason
and saw it both as a challenge to the evaluative
frameworks within which criticism occurs and
as an interrogation of the conditions under
which the subject emerges.
My analysis im-
plies similar questions: under what conditions
does the headscarf come to signify the violence
and danger of Islam? What frameworks enable
the public criticism of the headscarf ? What are
the conditions for the coming- into- being of the
secular subject, the subject who can act as agent
in the public sphere? The cases of Ludin and el-
Sherbini point to the need for a critical project
that interrogates secularism itself as the frame-
work within which the headscarf is judged.
A juxtaposition of the discussions of the
Ludin and el- Sherbini cases reveals much about
these questions. While Ludin’s case can be used
to illustrate the supposed arrival of a threaten-
ing Islam into the heart of Europe’s democratic
institutions, el- Sherbini’s murder in a German
courtroom is used both to discursively expel the
roots of violence from Europe (by locating sys-
temic violence in Russia and Egypt, while rep-
resenting el- Sherbini’s murder as an isolated
incident) and to legitimate increased emphasis
on security.
These two women both sought active par-
ticipation in public debate and temporarily ne-
gotiated a position in a secular public sphere —
not only with the headscarf but because of it.
Yet the headscarf ultimately leads to their ex-
pulsion from the public sphere. This occurs
metaphorically in the case of el- Sherbini, when
public memory marks her as victim but excludes
her as agent in a democratic process. Ludin’s ex-
pulsion is not only from the public sphere but
from a special public space, when she is denied
a position as a public teacher. The headscarf
thus occupies an ambivalent function: it serves
as the means by which these women emerge
into public space, but ultimately, it also acts as
the marker of cultural otherness that prohib-
its their participation in a democratic public
sphere. The subject of democracy remains ab-
stracted and unmarked but firmly “European.”
The field thus constituted can only partially
represent the subject of democracy as wearing
a hijab; she is quickly appropriated as the victim
of external violence, or she disappears entirely.
The use of cultural dierence to obscure
the question of racist violence evokes the tra-
dition of legitimizing violence against peoples
of color in colonialist discourses through the
reference to a backwardness that must be “en-
lightened” through European conquest.
This
58. See Judith Butler, “The Sensibility of Critique: Re-
sponse to Asad and Mahmood,” in Asad et al., Is Cri-
tique Secular?, 110 – 11.
59. See ibid., 112 – 14.
60. See Beverly M. Weber, “Freedom from Violence,
Freedom to Make the World: Muslim Women’s Mem-
oirs, Gendered Violence, and Voices for Change in
Germany,” in Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009):
202 – 4; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identi-
ties, Traditions, and Third- World Feminism (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 83 – 117; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of
the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 288 – 89; Cengiz Barskanmaz,
115
Beverly M. Weber
Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates
leads to another diculty for the potential for
critique, when critiques of Islamophobia in
turn themselves become associated with anti-
Enlightenment ideals. While this happens fre-
quently in public discussions of the headscarf, a
particularly obvious example occurs in a leftist
magazine for politics and culture, Konkret. An
October issue illustrates a discussion be-
tween two journalists about the potential for a
critique of Islam with a cover image of a woman
whose face is completely covered by a niqab. One
journalist, Kay Sokolowsky, takes the position
that the critique of Islam, while necessary, has
been appropriated by racists, while the other,
Alex Feuerherdt, argues that Islam should be
understood per se as a reactionary, antimod-
ern political ideology. Again, the veiled Muslim
woman serves as the emblem for a debate about
the relationship between Islam and modernity.
She marks not only the limits of “tolerance” but
also the limits of enlightened antiracism. Secu-
larism itself, alternatively, remains outside the
possibility of critique, which in the logic of this
discussion can only be directed at Islam itself.
The discursive exclusion of Muslim
women from democratic participation is incom-
plete, however, and reveals ruptures that may
have been forced precisely by the inability to
engage with the racist violence that emerged
in the face of el- Sherbini’s success in a battle
against racist speech. Since el- Sherbini’s mur-
der, many women have expressed a new willing-
ness to acknowledge experiences of discrimi-
nation owing to the wearing of a headscarf.
Sezgin’s and Fanizadeh’s contributions to the
discussion cited above, while evoking little re-
sponse, nevertheless emerged in a forum with
fairly wide readership. They seek to consider
an institutionalized racism that could exist out-
side of individual intent and consciousness and
to place Wiens’s actions firmly in that context.
These are all ways in which constructions of sec-
ularism, democracy, and religion will continue
to be negotiated and renegotiated in the public
sphere, as Muslims see themselves increasingly
empowered to challenge Islamophobia in pub-
lic institutions.
An approach to European secularism
that derives from the assumption of a Euro-
pean history that promotes peace, juxtaposed
with a Muslim tradition that promotes violence,
not only obscures Europe’s own history of co-
lonial and racist violence but actually prevents
Muslim women from participating in the pub-
lic sphere. A vision of democratic modernity
rooted in the exchange of ideas in the public
sphere will always be thwarted so long as these
blind spots in European history prevail. How-
ever, the headscarf discussions, read together,
also reveal an alternative, reconfiguration of
the public sphere. They point to the possibility
for a critique of secularism that can function
without the epistemic violence of constructing
an other. This reconfigured sphere activates
the desire for a utopian Europe that prioritizes
human rights in the service of a revised secu-
larism. This revised secularism seeks to incor-
porate an understanding of dierence into the
public sphere, beyond notions of tolerance, in
order to reveal the structures of xenophobia,
racism, or Islamophobia at work. Such a secu-
larism would imagine the elimination of racist
violence as part of the larger goal of religious
peace. Such a secularism also could imagine
the headscarved teacher participating in a secu-
lar democratic public sphere and acknowledge
xenophobic attacks as examples of existing rac-
ist violence. Only in this way could democratic
structures be imagined that ban rather than
regulate violence.
“Das Kopftuch als das Andere: Eine notwendige post-
koloniale Kritik des deutschen Rechtsdiskurses” (“The
Headscarf as the Other: A Necessary Postcolonial
Critique of the German Discourse of Justice”), in Der
Stoff, aus dem Konikte sind: Debatten um das Kopf-
tuch in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (The
Cloth of Which Conicts are Made: Debates about the
Headscarf in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), ed.
Sabine Berghahn and Petra Rostock (Bielefeld, Ger-
many: Transcript, 2009), 362 – 64.
61. See Kübra Yücel, “Seit dem Mord reden wir offe-
ner” (“Since the Murder, We Speak More Openly”),
Taz.de, 31 July 2009, www.taz.de/1/politik/deutsch
land/artikel/1/seit- dem- mord- reden- wir- offener/.
