(The German version of this post appears here.)
In Europe, the hijab has become a hate symbol against Muslims. It is embedded in a narrative of women's rights. But in practice, it becomes a way for non-Muslim white Europeans to stigmatize Muslim women in particular. In Austria, the FPÖ (Freedom Party) is the main anti-immigrant party. They are the junior partner of the Christian Democratic ÖVP in the national government under the babyfaced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose "turquoise" faction has embraced the anti-immigrant approach of the FPÖ.
Since taking office in December 2017, this government has used the hijab as an anti-Muslim image, banning them in kindergartens. On the face, the law doesn't have much actual impact, since it's rare for Mulism girls of kindergarten age to wear hijabs anyway. But Kurz and Strache in their 2017 campaign used "Islamic kindergartens" as a bogeyman, relying on phony or wildly exaggerated claims. Needless to say, Catholic kindergartens were not an issue for them.
There is a twisted but demagogically useful logic to this. Children are normally regarded as minors in need of particular care and attention. But trying to turn five- and six-year-old girls into people to be feared is a way to dehumanize Muslims more generally and make people more open to acts of cruelty against them. It's more than a little pathetic for grown men and women to be afraid of a five-year-old girl with a headscarf. It also fits into the long-standing xenophobic "replacement" argument that scary brown and black people will reproduce at higher rates than white Christian Europeans. In that twisted construction, the children are a particular threat to the white European culture. It's a remarkable psychological inversion of the image of children as people to be protected into a special threat to civilization.
We see similar themes among American xenophobes, like the neo-Nazi chant at the infamous 2017 Charlottesville demonstration of "You will not replace us!" that morphed very easily into "Jews will not replace us!" And we see it in the family-separation policy of the Trump Administration at the US-Mexican border. If people can be brought to enjoy the idea and the scenes of crying children kinapped from their parents and held in cages, at what kind of cruelty will they be willing to draw the line?
As Todd Green explains in one of the quotations below, the veil is a traditional women's garment in some Muslim societies that has two basic forms, the hijab and the burqa. A hijab covers the hair, as in this photo of young women in Afghanistan (via Wikimedia Commons):
The hijab or headscarf is the type of "veil" that Europeans most commonly see on a daily basis, ranging from rather plain versions to colorful and elaborately stylish ones. Although traditional Christian bridal veils are also veils. The niqāb is another type of veil that covers a woman's body and most or all of her face. The Afghan form became particularly infamous in the West during the Afghanistan War after 9/11, which is now one of America's "forever wars," in the form of the burqa.
"Hijab" is also used to describe all these types of Muslim female headdress; here I'm using "hijab" in the more narrow sense. With more extreme face-covering forms of the niqāb, there are some actual health concerns that are not present with the hair-covering hijab. From a purely secular viewpoint, the dispute over the jihab is a dispute over women's fashion.
Of course, that's not how the anti-hijab rhetoric of Islamophobes treat it. The usual narrative from them claims that it's a sign of women's subordination and, for immigrants, a sign of a lack of proper "integration" into a European society and part of Islamic fundamentalism. This allows a rightwing politician to pose as a defender of women's rights. But what that it means in practice is to interpret a Muslim woman's hijab as a sign of the Other, of her as a women inferior to non-Muslim European women, even someone to be suspected as an Islamic terrorist or sympathizer.
Todd Green in The Fear of Islam (2015) explains the common European discussion on the hijab:
... criticisms of Islam should not be translated into actions undermining the freedom of religion or the equal opportunity for Muslim minorities to practice their religion as other religious communities do. For example, in Europe, it is commonplace for non-Muslims to voice discomfort over Muslim women who wear hijabs or burqas, perhaps on the grounds that this restrictive clothing undermines equality of the sexes. Such criticism is not necessarily Islamophobic; it can represent a valid perspective, one shared by some Muslims. But if this discomfort translates into legislation that prohibits Muslim women from freely choosing to wear hijabs or burqas in light of the dictates of their consciences, we have ventured into the realm of Islamophobia. The ban on burqas in public spaces in France and Belgium illustrates the violation of this criterion, particularly given that women from other religious communities, such as Catholic nuns, do not face similar restrictions or scrutiny of what they can and cannot wear.
[my emphasis]
And he describes how the Islamophic narrative on the hijab stigmatizes the hijab-wearing women themselves:
The media’s concern for oppressed Muslim women is also illustrated by stories featuring the veil. The veil, whether in the form of a hijab (covering only the hair) or the burqa (covering the entire face), is a standard symbol for the oppression of women in the Western media. It represents Islam’s backwardness and uncivilized nature and is therefore an object of particular concern for the media. Journalists frequently analyze those President George W. Bush referred to as “women of cover.” (p. 243)
A few news articles on the hijab controversy in Austria:
Kopftuchverbot soll ab nächstem Schuljahr gelten Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 23.11.2018
Kopftuchverbot: Einmischung des Staats "totalitär übergriffig" Kurier 23.11.2018
Helmut Brandstätter, Kein Kopftuch ist noch keine Integration Kurier 23.11.2018
Barbara Eidenberger, "Wir sollten Kopftücher aus den Pflichtschulen heraushalten" Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 23.11.018
Türkis-Blauer Vorstoß: Kommt das Kopftuchverbot in der Volksschule? Kurier 17.11.2018
New Zealand women don headscarves to support Muslims after shootings Reuters 03/22/2019
