Not long ago, in Paris, I met a young Muslim woman named Djamila Benrehab, who, at the age of twenty, had donned not only a black head scarf but a billowy black abaya and, under it all, a tight black bandanna to her eyebrows that left only the circle of her face exposed. Djamila is a big, apple-cheeked, endearing person. She speaks a beautiful lilting French, and is intelligent and quite charming. But she kept on reading. When she came to one of the passages about veils—which many Muslim feminists maintain do not so much prescribe veils as record that the wives of the Prophet went veiled and in this way were able to recognize one another and to be honored by other women for their distinction—she prayed and fasted and decided to wear one, too.
Her mother, who comes from Algeria and had never been veiled, was horrified by her new clothes. But Djamila persisted. She went for job interviews and was always turned down. But her robes got longer and more concealing. Strangers accused her of carrying bombs in her book bag. I am not a terrorist. By last year, she was going to mosque several times a week, and her life, by her own admission, was narrowing.
She uncovered it, crying, but, like the Strasbourg schoolgirl, much featured in the French press, who shaved her head rather than show her hair, she had taken the precaution of clipping hers so that no one who checked the card would see it. She says that Othello, being a Moor in Venice, might easily insist that his wife be veiled and that Desdemona, being a loving, dutiful wife, might just as easily want to prove her loyalty by obliging him; it is, at the very least, an interesting interpretation.
The men she sees are her imam and the men in her family, and I suspect that any marriage she makes now will be arranged. She still rehearses in her sleep. What does a secular Western society like France do with a woman like Djamila? Muslims today are part of the biggest labor migration in Europe since the great migrations of the Roman Empire; some analysts at the European Union say that in fifteen years they could account for twenty per cent of its population. Four years ago, when Djamila began to follow Sharia, or traditional Islamic law, she was, according to French law, an adult, capable of choice.
Her sister, who is seventeen, is by law a child. By last year, as many as two or three thousand girls were said to be going to school veiled in one manner or another in Islamic head scarves, and as often as not were told to remove them or be sent home. What they had in common was a belief in the separation of church and state; they were chosen to determine whether the laws on that were sufficient or needed to be clarified.
