BEHIND THE NIQAB ***sold***

Agnès de Féo
Preface by Olivier Roy
(Armand Colin, 288 pages, 2020)

In 2008, the sociologist and filmmaker Agnès de Féo launched what was to become a ten-year-long investigation into the lives of French women who choose to wear the niqab (a face veil leaving only the eyes uncovered). Worn by a small minority of Muslim women, this Islamic garment has, nonetheless, been a major source of intense political, religious, and cultural debate in France. Searching to understand, rather than speculate, De Féo chose to directly approach the people who are concerned about the niqab and make them, rather the veil itself, the subject of her research. Her unprecedented study, based on more than two hundred interviews, reveals the many factors—societal, political, geopolitical, and psychological—underpinning a personal choice that is not always as religious as it seems.

In 2010, De Féo’s project took another turn when the French national assembly passed a controversial law forbidding full face coverings in public, allowing her to observe the impact which at first, she argues, created just the opposite of what was intended—a surge of women wearing the niqab—not to mention an increase in Islamophobia. What De Féo emphasizes is that the niqab is polysemic; the women who choose to wear it each has her own life story, her share of personal struggles, aspirations, and desires, and her own claim to a certain place in society.

The women we get to know in this study differ from the usual stereotypes, which the author summarizes and convincingly refutes in fourteen points at the end of the book. They do, however, share some kinship through their familial backgrounds. For example, for the most part, and especially after the passing of the 2010 law, women wearing the niqab in France are not immigrants as is commonly assumed, but French-born. Most have received a secular education, with parents often not active practitioners of Islam, or even atheists. Their social backgrounds did not determine their choice of Salafism; and by adopting the niqab, they did not necessarily become pious. Many are recent converts who do not speak or read Arabic, nor observe the five ritual prayers.

If the sociological profile of the “niqabees” defies common expectations so do the original insights that this fascinating study offers on the more intimate aspects of wearing the niqab—its aesthetic and sensual appeal, its signaling of virtue and respectability, its protection against the male gaze and resistance to dominant standards of beauty. The niqab can also be a fetishized means of corporal expression, akin to any other, like the wearing of stilettos.

The book ends with sixteen compelling interviews giving voice to stories rarely heard. With finesse and complexity, the author debunks the myths surrounding the wearing of the niqab, and sheds light on a practice subject to misunderstanding and prejudice, offering the reader a window into a previously hidden world.

Agnès De Féo is a sociologist affiliated with the EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales) and a documentary filmmaker. Since 2008, she has been studying women in the Salafist movement in France, and has made eight films on the question of the niqab. Her previous work on the Cham community of Imam San in Cambodia from 2002 to 2012 has resulted in five documentaries, as well as a book, Parlons Cham du Vietnam (Editions L’Harmattan, 2016).