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The matter of the scarves, a lawsuit for excision: so many events have come to public attention, yet no answer has been found to the question of integrating the growing Muslim population in to the democracies of Western Europe. With respect to the status of women in the Arab Muslim world, one must be able to, on the one hand, distinguish the values of Islam from the perpetuation of archaic local traditions or the excessive austerity of a mystifying fundamentalism, and on the other hand, reveal the profound connivance between the political logic of subjugation and the religious exigency of Koranic law. Juliette Minces's work permits this to be clearly seen. It denounces the use that has been made of religion to maintain the dominance of men over women and to artificially preserve a decayed social order. The Islamic legislation (Sharia) and the personal statute (code) that inspired it make the woman an instrument that enables the man to establish or
increase his lineage; this is her sole function in the family group, a role maintained in the clan more extensively than anyone has recognized.
This model is in crisis today. But if it is time that societies in the Arab world, deeply affected by intermingling with Western culture, have been changed too profoundly to permit them to return to their previous way of life—as integrationists claim in order to counter nationalists—it remains for women, in an effort to extirpate the social shame, to run the risk of sweeping away the family and patriarchal foundation on which these societies are based.
The veiled woman, therefore, strengthens the social and conventional order. She prolongs the survival of a civilization in transition, in which the dogmatism of tradition is no longer acceptable, and where there is still no progress toward emancipation.
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