The Many Faces of Europe

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Save the veils
When Aisha Awan goes out in crowds, she goes under cover. She wears her body-length jilbab, her hijab (a scarf that hides her hair) and a niqab, a Muslim veil that covers almost her entire face. "I feel more comfortable, like I respect myself more when I'm covered," she says. The only things Awan leaves exposed are her eyes. "You can see somebody's whole history by looking into their eyes," she says.

But when they look at a veil, all some lawmakers see is trouble. Since France banned overt religious symbols in its state schools in 2004, veiled women — whether they wear a head scarf, a niqab or a full-body burqa — have been caught in a storm of debate in Europe. As a British citizen, Awan still has the right to wear whatever she wants. Several German states, by contrast, prohibit Muslim teachers from wearing head scarves in class. In parts of Belgium, civil servants are banned from wearing head scarves at work, and the Dutch government plans to make it illegal to wear the niqab or the burqa anywhere in public. (The estimated number of women in the Netherlands who wear either runs in the dozens.)

Islam isn't the biggest part of the multicultural conversation, but right now it's the loudest. The head-scarf debate — like anything to do with religion — is charged with emotion. France defends its ban in schools as a necessary step to maintain the nation's official commitment to secularism, pointing out that it also applies to Jewish skullcaps and Christian crosses. But Birgit Sauer, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, says the timing of these new laws shows that Europe is still unwilling to accept Islam as an element of its identity. "All these states had trouble balancing religion with secularism long before Sept. 11," she says. "So you have to ask, Why now? What is European and what is not?" That's a question Sauer and other researchers hope to answer with the veil project, a three-year study of head-scarf policies in eight countries — including Britain, France and Turkey — funded by the European Commission.

Sauer's home country offers an intriguing case study. In Austria, voters have historically been kind to right-wing politicians. "All the signs would indicate that we should have a prohibitive law against the head scarf," says Sauer. "But it's rarely discussed. And when it is, everyone says they don't want a ban." That's because Austria officially — and legally — recognizes all religions equally. It protects the role of faith in shaping a person's identity.

European governments need to recognize that Islam — like all religions — is an integral part of the European identity, while Muslims should be willing to bend to certain laws that are in place for the common good, with no exceptions. A U.S.-style hands-off approach keeps church and state separate, but still gives the faithful a space in mainstream society: lift statewide bans on the veil (and all other religious symbols), but leave decisions on dress codes to individual institutions and organizations. So while one school might prohibit teachers from wearing the niqab in class, another might not, giving Muslim teachers a choice of where to work. In return, women who cover would have to accept that in certain situations — at passport control, say — security concerns trump personal beliefs and they would be required to show their faces. In practice, this balance between policy and piety isn't uncommon. All over Europe, governments and religious minorities are meeting in the middle. Under English law, Jewish religious courts have the power to settle noncriminal cases like divorce settlements. And the Netherlands gives equal government funding to faith schools and public schools, on the condition that the faith schools meet strict nonreligious criteria in their curriculums. These concessions don't threaten the secular state; they just give religious communities the chance to be a part of it.