Anglophone observers often understand French secularism, or laïcité, to be a distinctive philosophical framework underlying policies that regulate Muslim life. The French state is usually understood as paradigmatically secular, with a politics of state neutrality toward religion. Theorists of secularism, especially in the Asadian tradition, have long observed that far from this professed neutrality, secularism entails state management of religious categories and forms of religious subjectivity. This pattern has only intensified in France in the past decade. Not only has there been a “privatization of secularism,” in which religious “neutrality” is applied to the private realm rather than the domain of the state, but we have also seen the development of a new, “immaterial” or “moral” conception of public order, which draws on older legal frameworks of “bonnes moeurs” to justify increasing restrictions on private religious expression in the name of a moral order articulated by the state. This “moral public order” relies on particular performances of gender norms and feminine sexuality as part of the proof of “human dignity.”
Against this backdrop of increasing constraints and surveillance in the name of secular “liberation,” French Muslim women pursue practices and spaces of freedom that refuse any binary opposition between secularism and Muslim piety. Drawing explicitly on transnational decolonial feminism (Vergès 2019) and Islamic moral psychology, as well as on “secular sensibilities” of choice, rights, and liberation, French Muslim women pursue their freedom through spaces of gender and racial non-mixité. This aligns with what Sylvia Chan-Malik (2018) describes as the cultivation of “safe harbors,” which these women gloss as soerénité, or serene sisterhood. They engage in gender-based organizing in ways that both combat and elide the political essentializations of Muslim womanhood in France. The practice and virtue of soeurénité articulates a pious ethos of rights, freedoms, personal development, and spiritual solidarity. Soeurénité marks the historical exclusion of women from the national myth of fraternité, while also expressing the joys and the refuge of non-mixed spaces.
Muslim women’s overlapping practices of not-mixing (that is, maintaining spaces closed to men, or closed to white people, or exclusive to self-identified Muslims) develop a culture of what some refer to as “true freedom,” which they contrast with the strictures they face in daily life outside of these spaces. Openly claiming secularity as an “inheritance,” alongside their inheritances of decolonial politics and the affects of sisterly solidarity, these women reimagine the secular beyond the laïque, and freedom beyond colonialist emancipation.
Eric Fassin, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, and other scholars have shown how a colonialist “sexual democracy” has demanded the visibility of sexuality as the condition of women’s freedom and equality, framing a state-sponsored feminism as the alternative to the supposed machismo of the “garçon arabe.” The discourse of gender mixing and visible sexuality has only amplified in France in the twenty-first century, often stepping in where the jurisprudence of secularism fails to provide adequate justification for the management of Muslim women’s bodies and habits of socialization. Against the backdrop of this discourse of heteronormative gender mixing and sexual visibility, homosocial spaces and values generate keen discomfort. Practices of non-mixité are the subject of intense public scrutiny in a wider context where gender mixing has become a political mandate.
Against the grain of expectations from multiple quarters, Muslim women in France engage with the moral language of choice, freedom, and rights in a way that offers a framework for the intensification rather than the dilution of pious aspirations. That is, freedom is cherished as a devotional virtue that can only be cultivated in community, rather than as an individualized expression of resistance. At the same time, the centrality of choice and freedom in French state discourses pertaining to Muslim women attempts to over-determine the language of choice, freedom, and rights by tying these concepts to political secularism. Perhaps because of the way in which they are situated as political secularism’s “other” par excellence, pious French Muslim women may be uniquely well situated to draw out the critical ethical possibilities of secular sensibilities beyond state power. By framing the virtues and utopian potential of non-mixed socialization in terms of choice, freedom, rights, resistance, and even a secularity that is not laïque, the women who cultivate soerénité self-consciously claim an ethical sensibility that is often instrumentalized by the French state. In so doing, they draw out the multiplicity and untapped potential of secularity and freedom as resources for decolonial feminism and for Muslim ethics and moral psychology.
Drawing on decades of ethnography and legal analysis, and amplifying a central argument of a recently published monograph, this presentation highlights how French Muslim women have been mobilizing to “disrupt, decolonize and dismantle the political-theological practices and ideologies of freedom” (in the words of the CfP) that have been built precisely on their subjugation. I situate French Muslim women’s critical accounts of forging freedom and choice within non-mixed spaces of sisterhood in terms of the raced and gendered histories of secularism developed by Mohamad Amer Meziane (2021) and Joan Scott (2018). The presentation also goes beyond previously published work to underscore the parallel Islamic genealogies of freedom, rights, choice, and secularity that inform French Muslim women’s discourses, as important counterweights to the dominant Enlightenment understanding of these values. Islamic ethics of non-compulsion, of consent and assent, and of training the soul as a path to freedom from desire and harm are under thematized ways to understand freedom, choice, and rights as both “Islamic secular” (Jackson 2023), decolonial feminist, and pious sensibilities.
Chan-Malik, Sylvia. 2018. Being Muslim. NYU Press.
Jackson, Sherman. 2023. The Islamic Secular. Oxford University Press.
Meziane, Mohamad Amer. 2021. Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation. La Découverte.
Scott, Joan. 2018. Sex and Secularism. Princeton University Press.
Vergès, Françoise. 2019. Un féminisme décolonial. La Fabrique.
Against the backdrop of increasing constraints and surveillance in the name of secular “liberation,” French Muslim women pursue a vision of freedom that refuses any binary opposition between secularism and Muslim piety. Drawing on decolonial feminism and Islamic moral psychology, as well as on “secular sensibilities” of choice, rights, and liberation, French Muslim women pursue their freedom through spaces of gender and racial non-mixité. They engage with the moral language of choice, freedom, and rights in a way that intensifies rather than diluting their pious aspirations. Freedom is cherished as a devotional virtue cultivated in community, rather than as an individualized resistance. This presentation underscores the Islamic genealogies of freedom that inform these women’s discourses, as counterweights to an Enlightenment understanding. Islamic ethics of non-compulsion, of consent and testimony, and of training the soul are essential ways to understand freedom and choice as “Islamic secular,” decolonial feminist, and pious sensibilities.