Conclusion: Desecuritising Human Rights

Summary

However insightful these observations are, we should go beyond fatalism. We must look for answers about how vulnerable women’s (and other) bodily rights might be secured. This demands a look at the public sphere’s relationship to human rights’ realisation. Democracy depends on a space where legitimate dissent is visible and full participation in public life is facilitated (Habermas, 1991). However, a procedural approach (proposed by Habermas) is too limiting when it comes to religion. Religion poses a particular problem for this conception of the public sphere because of the confusion around the assumption that while religion and churches are in the public domain and we need to listen to them, religious groups must use the language of the secular public space. In secular countries, this transforms those who visibly identify with an outcast religion into second-class citizens and bypasses the fact that religion is not merely a collection of beliefs but a way of life. Identifying with a religion – and expressing this through dress – is a communal activity. There are Muslims and Jews who might practise in communal religious activities with-out sticking precisely to the word of the Quran or Bible. We need to turn this idea on its head and propose that the public sphere needs to adjust to recognise manifestations of religious identities. We need to go beyond this dichotomy to ensure that Western universalism does not reject women’s dress, hence human dignity, by erasing and assimilating Muslim woman, and to challenge why institutional religion had to retreat to the private sphere to accommodate Western modernity. Its removal from the political realm explains why new religions are now mobilising to reclaim the public sphere (Butler, 2012). Human rights are a potential tool for protecting women’s bodily precarity but are limited by their Western-centric commitment to a private–public divide (Nussbaum, 2005).

In this era of dissent and difference, Göle (2017b) asks whether a genuine European public sphere that recognises diversity is in the making or the unmaking? That is, can it be a viable public sphere for people identifying openly with religious practises or not? There are clear adverse signs, as we have seen the rise of Islamophobia and the rise of the far right, often the main carriers of opposition to practises such as veiling.