European Law and the Veil: Muslim Women from Victims to Emblems of the Enemy

This chapter identifies a shift in the ratio of European judicial decisions banning or limiting the right of Muslim women to wear traditional attire. It holds that first generation "veil bans" relied on a victimization narrative, and purported to liberate Muslim women from their assumed oppressive patriarchal culture. To the opposite, more recent decisions by the two European courts (the ECtHR and the ECJ) have abandoned this pattern and began to construct Muslim women as willing emblems of an irreconcilable Islamic “Other”.