Anxieties over the Islamic face covering and over the proper management of otherness in liberal democracies seem to have reached a new peak with the introduction of legislation banning the burka in France and Belgium, and recent proposals for similar statutes in Quebec. What assumptions are contained within Western secularism and revealed in these attempts at legislating women s religious clothing?
This book presents a collection of essays which take secularism/laicite and the regulation of public expressions of religious commitment as their points of departure, exploring the...