Page - 96 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

96 | Elham Manea www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 as a “display of faith and modesty or something more akin to a political statement related to emancipation from the West”.11 Secondly, this intellectual engagement combines forms of political multicultural- ism that justify robust conceptions of religious accommodation. Bruce Ryder’s chap- ter “The Canadian Conception of Equal Religious Citizenship” is an example of this type of discourse. Arguing for greater religious accommodation Ryder contends, The rights to positive accommodation of religious practices [in Canada] which sound so fine in the law books are, of course, not always easily achieved on the ground. Whatever their rights on paper, in a variety of social contexts religious persons have to struggle for comprehension, and then for recognition, and then for accommodation of their religious beliefs and practices. This struggle is particularly challenging for religious minorities whose traditions and practices are often poorly understood. Discourses of the alien, dangerous “other” can quickly fill the gaps left by incomprehension or ignorance.12 A third dimension of this discourse portrays the veil as synonymous with identity, and proposes, therefore, that proscribing the veil is a form of oppression. Natan Sharan- sky’s book Defending Identity (2009) falls within this subcategory. Sharansky argues that “expressions of religious identity have very different meanings in different con- texts. To some women, the veil is not only a religious obligation but a manifestation of their own culture and an expression of who they are. To deny them the right to wear it becomes a form of repression.”13 Hence, according to Sharansky, a law banning the veil (a headscarf in this case) means that Muslims are “coerced to act one way while thinking and feeling another”.14 Fourth, this intellectual discourse considers the whole debate about the veil (head- scarf) to be a constructed discourse used as a pretext to impose a hegemonic secular and/or imperial Western agenda. Judith Butler’s article “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time” (2008) is an example of this type of discourse. According to Butler, The debate on whether girls should be prohibited from wearing the veil in public schools seemed to bring this paradox into relief. The ideas of the secular were invoked to consoli- date ignorant and hateful views of Islamic religious practice (i.e. the veil is nothing other than the communication of the idea that women are inferior to men, or the veil commu- nicates an alliance with “fundamentalism”), at which point laïcité becomes a way not of negotiating or permitting cultural difference, but a way of consolidating a set of cultural presumptions that effect the exclusion and abjection of cultural difference.15 11 Bakht 2012, 82. 12 Ryder 2008, 88. 13 Sharansky 2009, 115. 14 Sharansky 2009, 114. 15 Butler 2008, 13.