ABSTRACT
The affaire du foulard first erupted in 1989, against the backdrop of Rushdie affair, when three schoolgirls were suspended from a school in Creil for refusing to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. This chapter focuses on the ways in which dominant feminist discourses constructed Muslim women during affaire. Editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Alain Gresh, argues that the aggressive targeting of France's Muslim population during affaire du foulard paradoxically pushed some young Muslims towards a stronger identification with their religion as a form of political resistance. An examination of texts published during the affaire du foulard reveals that nativist feminist discourse follows a distinctly colonial logic that represents Muslim women as either fundamentally similar or essentially other to a reified vision of 'French' womanhood. Beur women's writing has much in common with writing by young beur men in its articulation of a split and strained postcolonial identity caught between the North African heritage of family and French cultural values.
