Brussels. 2020
“If you wore the veil, I don’t think you’d have access to this school,” said Loubna (pseudonym), a Belgian teacher of Islam in a Brussels public school. We were talking about the politics of the veil at schools. I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the teaching of Islam in Belgium for my graduate program in anthropology in the United States. Loubna was generous with her time, allowing me access to her classes and supporting my research. As I accompanied her to different schools in the municipality, we talked about our Moroccan roots, our memories of Islamic education, and, as it turned out, our different, yet deeply entangled, veiling experiences.
Loubna’s comment occurred just after a staff meeting with teachers and administration that I joined in early 2020, just before the pandemic. I told her I wasn’t surprised. By then, I already understood that my own unveiled presence made my research access possible. But what I had been unaware of until then was that Loubna took her veil off every morning before entering the building. I found myself opening up to her about my own decade-long wearing of the veil before I took it off.
That moment of sharing has stayed with me, as it said something about how veiling is treated as an issue of visibility. Loubna, unveiled inside the school, was trusted to teach about Islam. I, unveiled, was trusted to enter the building and conduct research on the teaching of Islam. Neither of us could do our jobs had we worn a veil. I find myself returning to that conversation between two Muslim women: about our (un)veiling trajectories—which are at once different, yet bound up in each other—and to a question that preoccupies me: what is it about Islamic (un)veiling that keeps triggering an obsession?
My short answer is that the current obsession with Islamic veiling is structured by a theology of visibility, a secular logic that treats visibility as a moral virtue and a condition for civic trust. This logic renders the veil itself, a mundane sartorial practice, an object of moral anxiety. I borrow “theology” from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, who, in Heaven Has a Wall, argues that U.S. borders function as a political theology that sacralizes executive power. By theology, I do not mean religion, but rather an underlying moral order that governs what can be seen, what must be seen, and what becomes unvirtuous when it is seen on the body.
This moral order draws the line between what is marked as religious and what achieves the invisibility of the unmarked, framed as cultural and national—and, thus, by default, secular and neutral. In what follows, I reflect on my conversation with Loubna and what it can tell us about sacralizing the aesthetic grammar of this (in)visibility and the obsession with Muslim women that haunts the West.
Lila Abu-Lughod described this obsession in her seminal 2002 essay “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” As a critique of liberal rescue narratives in the aftermath of 9/11, Abu-Lughod describes a “Western obsession with the veil” because the headscarf became a recurring object of moral fixation used to justify war in the Middle East, while erasing the complex political conditions that shape Muslim women’s lives (786). Abu-Lughod was not the first to call this fixation an obsession. Marnia Lazreg’s The Eloquence of Silence recalls an earlier colonial obsession, vividly staged through public rituals of unveiling Muslim women in Algeria (135). In her critique of the post-migratory liberal fixation on not-/un-veiling as a “natural state of being” in Belgium, Nadia Fadil observes that “forced unveiling has turned into one of the preferred modes of disciplining Muslims” (86). The registers of “saving Muslim women” have shifted from the colonial unveiling as a civilizing mission to post-9/11 humanitarian rescue to current governance politics and the technology of racial profiling. However, today’s obsession unfolds amidst rising anti-immigration rhetoric and the mainstreaming of far-right politics across Europe.
This obsession is most visible when public life in Europe is, once again, haunted by a moral panic over Islam. In the aftermath of 9/11 through the Arab Spring, following Charlie Hebdo, and again during the so-called refugee crisis, the veil has repeatedly (re)emerged as an issue that needs fixing. Each of these moments provokes an opening through which secular logic expresses its malaise about Islam and performs, borrowing Victor Turner’s register, a (civic) rite of passage: an almost-predictable liminal space, in which bans, regulations, and laws function as ritualized performances. Nadia Fadil et al. call this process “secular affect,” an embodied feeling that treats secular norms as natural and incontestable (6). This emotion-based response materializes through criminalizing the veil, rendering an otherwise mundane practice an “extraordinary” praxis. As this liminality spectacle takes place, it becomes a recurring, widely televised, and entertaining obsession throughout Europe and its public discourse.
In 2015, during a debate on refugees, the German public television channel ARD aired a digitally edited image of Chancellor Angela Merkel in a black chador before the Reichstag, backed by minarets. Defended as satire, it was widely criticized as Islamophobic. The image had also been circulating at far-right rallies, on posters with a veiled Merkel that alluded to her “Islamization” of the nation. Her “open-door” policy was framed as a civilizational threat, invoking the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement.” Although it originated in France, this theory spread rapidly across Europe in the 2010s, rendering Muslims and migrants from Muslim-majority countries an existential threat to (what is imagined as) European culture and civilization.
But why veil Merkel to oppose her migration policy? Why has this sartorial practice become the primary site through which anti-immigration rhetoric organizes its logic of exclusion? As Ulrich Schmiedel helps us understand, religion is central to this imaginary marker, distinguishing between “a ‘Christian Europe’ and a ‘non-Christian non-Europe,’ identified with Islam” (206). White ethno-nationalist Christian ideals crafted to “protect the nation” also render gender and sexuality crucial to its narrative. This gendered and racialized logic is not unique to Muslim women. Alex E. Chávez shows how racialized masculinity is central to the U.S. anti-Mexicanist trope. This line of reasoning is one of the ethno-nationalist project’s exclusionary technologies and, ironically, an integrationist one. In their ethnographic study of German state-funded programs aimed at reforming Muslim masculinity, Jacob Lypp and Esra Özyürek illustrate how such integration interventions both perpetuate orientalist hierarchies and reinforce a masculinity modeled on Christian-German ideals.
The burkini and face-veil bans in Belgium, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands intensified during the mid-2010s “refugee crisis.” At schools in Belgium and France, Muslim female students were reportedly denied entry for wearing long skirts deemed “Islamic.” In 2023, the French government banned female students from wearing abayas (loose-fitting, full-length robes). Shortly after, both Brigitte Macron and Britain’s Queen Camilla appeared in modest, high-fashion, long gowns at an official event at the Palace of Versailles, provoking criticism of the double standard: Muslim schoolgirls face policing, but similar modest clothing is deemed areligious on affluent, non-Muslim women. Such occurrences demonstrate what secular affect entails, a bodily emotional response to religious visibility that feels and looks like “common sense.” Yet this dissent depends on what counts as religious.
The current obsession operates through a reconfiguration of European secularity, in which Christianity passes as national culture and heritage, or what Elayne Oliphant, in The Privilege of Being Banal, calls the “banality” of Catholicism: unmarked Christian material forms essentially no longer count as religion, but it secures its privilege. The veil, by contrast, remains framed as an explicitly religious sign, suspicious and incompatible with public life. The 2024 Notre Dame reopening made this asymmetry visible, a state-staged cathedral ceremony blurring the line between secular authority and Catholic heritage. As Nur Yasemin Ural and Donovan O. Schaefer observe, this logic involves a new, global mode of secular power that centers culturalized Christianity as heritage but sequesters Islam’s visible forms as religious. The veil becomes an object of moral panic within a material regime of visibility that sorts out what counts as religious from what counts as heritage.
In What Is Veiling?, Sahar Amer compellingly shows that the afterlife of this orientalist, colonial obsession is still present in North America, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Yet naming this obsession or tracing its colonial genealogy reveals little about how it actually operates. What instead compels my interest is how this obsession has been aesthetically re-assembled under discourses of national protection and religious neutrality.
Return to Brussels
Returning to that moment with Loubna, I sit with an uncomfortable question: how do I write about my unveiling without inadvertently confirming the secular under critique? Loubna and I made different (un)veiling choices: hers a mundane daily negotiation before work, mine a decision made once, years ago. The veil has different meanings to different women across different settings. Yet secular affect collapses those distinctions into the visibility of the religious only.
Many municipalities notoriously refuse to hire veiled Muslim women teachers. Of course, that would never appear in a job advertisement, but the expectation is made clear before any offer comes. I myself had repeatedly heard similar stories, particularly in certain municipalities in Wallonia, where some school administrations hire exclusively men as teachers of Islam to avoid the question altogether. Since the late 1980s, such stories of veiling and its daily negotiations have absorbed both Flemish and francophone Belgian press.
However, teachers of Islam consistently referred me to the Charleroi case: in 2009, a math teacher dismissed for refusing to remove her veil won on appeal, only to lose again in 2013, after the City Council adopted a strict neutrality policy requiring public employees to remove all visible religious markers. Although rooted in the Constitution’s Article 24, the ruling vaguely exempted teachers of religion, again making religion the institutional frame through which veiled Muslim teachers negotiate their daily access to schools.
By 2020, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled that banning the veil in higher education does not violate religious freedom, sparking a protest in Brussels that challenged the decision. The Collective against Islamophobia in Belgium’s 2019 report found that nine out of ten victims of Islamophobia are women, attributed to their “visibly practicing their religion.” Last year, the Education Minister announced plans to propose a ban on religious symbols, veil included, for all teachers in Belgium’s French Community network public schools, with a 2026 decree expected. What emerges across decades of legal rulings is, borrowing from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political theology that sacralizes visibility, on the condition that it reads as areligious—the civic moral virtue.
Two Shop Windows
In early July 2016, I would often walk around downtown Brussels at day’s end to mark the end of conducting research and the beginning of my reflective process. In Grand Place, I walked by a shop window with a traditional lace-making scene: fans, garments, doilies, and lace-making tools. At the right of the display, a seated mannequin woman was dressed as a traditional lace maker, with round spectacles and a black-and-white gingham scarf tied neatly under the chin.
In late June 2024, while strolling through downtown Brussels after a day in the archives, I found myself in front of another shop window displaying silk scarves, with a mannequin in a 1960s retro-Riviera headscarf style associated with mid-century European glamour. The mannequin’s head wrapped in pastel turquoise-, pink-, and blue-toned silk, knotted at the neck, with oversized white sunglasses perched on top of the scarf.
In Brussels, across eight years, I saw prominent displays of stylish headscarves in downtown shops. Women shoppers were invited to purchase and wear these headscarves as haute couture. But the views of Muslim women who don headscarves differ radically. This asymmetry reveals how the same garment reads as aesthetic and areligious in a fashion display yet becomes an object of obsession when worn by a Muslim woman.
Islamic veiling is not the only form of women’s religious veiling; Catholic women also veil. Why is there no obsession, neither in the media nor in academic discussions, with the return of veiling among Catholic women in the U.S. South? Emma Cieslik and Robert Phillips tell us that American Catholic women are returning to veiling, to Catholic tradition and heritage, out of devotion. Yet to even make their argument, Cieslik and Phillips had to rely on the extensive literature on Islamic veiling, as there is little conversation about Catholic veiling.
Why the obsession? Clearly, the obsession is not with the veil itself. Rather, the obsession centers on who is wearing the veil and what the veil’s visibility is assumed to embody. Loubna and I were allowed access to work—teaching Islam, conducting research about teaching Islam—in a francophone public school. But neither of us would be allowed to do our jobs had we adhered to our practice of wearing a veil, not because of veiling per se, but because that veiling is visibly seen as Islamic veiling.
NB. I am grateful to Hilary Levinson, Sandra Shattuck, and Vincent Lloyd for their generous engagement with this essay.
