ABSTRACT

A series of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in the era of the pan-European headscarf controversies has thrown open an important debate over the principle of religious freedom. This chapter focuses on the Cold War internationalization that religious freedom needs to be kept separate from "secularism" precisely to understand their recent conflation in the European cases and in general. The Cold War featured a saturation of politics by Christianity in noncommunist Europe as much as transatlantically in a common project uniting "Western" politicians and churches. The Muslim headscarf cases are troubling not because Europe should return to the public Christianity it has largely given up, so spectacularly and so quickly, but because its version of secularism is discriminatory rather than inclusionary. And some sources of the policing of Muslims may lie, surprisingly enough, in cultures, laws, and doctrines once crafted to stave off secularism.