28 The Nation. October 9, 2017
cially Muslims. In France, the celebration
of the bicentennial of the French Revolu-
tion coincided with an important electoral
victory for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National
Front (attributed to the success of his anti-
immigrant campaigns) and the first of the
affaires du foulard (the attempt to prohibit
girls wearing Muslim head scarves from
attending public schools). The Berlin Wall
also came down in the fall of that year,
opening up discussions on the meaning of
democracy (free markets and sexual libera-
tion included), as well as a flood of cheap
immigrant labor from Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe. These new immigrant workers
were considered a problem, but nowhere
near as much as Muslims, especially after the
Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against
the novelist Salman Rushdie, creating an
international cause célèbre and hardening
many liberal Europeans’ views on the sub-
ject of Islam.
Chin points out that the fatwa was par-
ticularly decisive for many Europeans who
were already worrying about the growing
number of Muslim immigrants and citizens
within their countries. “For many West-
ern Europeans,” she writes, “this was the
moment when Muslim immigrants with
diverse national origins merged into a sin-
gle, distinctive category. This was also the
moment when Islam was first identified
as unbending, an intolerant religion that
explained Muslim immigrants’ failure to
properly integrate.... [T]his was the pivotal
juncture when Islam itself came to be seen
as a central threat to ‘liberal values’...across
all the major Western European powers.”
As many celebrated the victory of liberal
democracy over communism, commenta-
tors also began to point to the “failure” of
multiculturalism and its policies of recogni-
tion and appreciation of diversity. But what
they meant by “failure” was not that the
policies failed to create more welcoming
societies, but rather that Muslim culture
simply wasn’t compatible with the national
traditions of European countries. Through-
out Europe, “their” culture was defined as
antagonistic to “ours.” In what some critical
scholars came to call “the new racism,” cul-
ture became a byword—and not only among
the European right. As Chin notes, it had
“supplanted biology as the key marker of
incommensurable difference.”
Chin cites comments by Margaret
Thatcher in 1978 as an example of what she
characterizes as this new wave of “cultural
nationalism.” Reacting to a report that pro-
jected the arrival of millions of people from
Pakistan in the United Kingdom by the end
of the century, Thatcher observed: “Now,
that is an awful lot and I think it means that
people are really rather afraid that this coun-
try might be rather swamped by people with
a different culture. The British character has
done so much for democracy, for law and
done so much throughout the world that if
there is any fear that it might be swamped,
people are going to react and be rather hos-
tile to those coming in.”T
his increasingly politicized fear of
European culture being “swamped”
soon became a “clash of civilizations,”
a term coined by the Islamic schol-
ar Bernard Lewis in 1990 and then
popularized in a 1993 article by the politi-
cal scientist Samuel Huntington. The term
deliberately evoked the religious wars of the
medieval period in order to rally the forces
of contemporary Western Christian secular-
ism in a crusade against the Muslim enemy.
To disarm this foe, the states of Western
Europe enacted laws and regulations that
ranged from criminalizing certain individual
displays of religious affiliation to limiting
the height of the minarets on mosques. In
their attempts at containment (euphemis-
tically referred to as “integration”), these
European nations tightened the eligibility
requirements for entry and naturalization,
as well as proposed tests of cultural literacy
and linguistic mastery for migrants from
Muslim and other non-Western countries.
In effect, as the sociologist Sara Farris points
out, immigrants were expected to possess
knowledge of their new country “before the
actual contact with [it] begins.”
Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is
more theoretical in its approach, offering
a supplement to Chin’s historical narrative
that focuses on the specific question of non-
Western women migrants, most of whom
are Muslim. Whereas Chin offers one chap-
ter on women and gender, Ferris devotes her
entire book to that subject.
Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, Far-
ris argues, non-Western immigrant women
“became the object of political scrutiny
and stereotyping. Typical orientalist gen-
dered dichotomies began to be applied to
them: if migrant males were usually depict-
ed as brutes and uncivilized, women were
portrayed as passive and submissive.” By
contrast, Western European women were
deemed autonomous and empowered by,
among other things, laws that now permit-
ted divorce and abortion and addressed
discrimination in education and the profes-
sions, as well as cultural practices defined as
“sexual democracy” or “sexual liberation.”Many of these new feminists and na-
tionalists turned their attention to the veils
worn by Muslim women, arguing that they
were the very symbol of the immigrants’
purported backwardness, the sign of an
intolerable gender inequality alien to the
West. The push to rescue Muslim women,
Farris argues, was the result of what she
terms the “ideological convergence” of
calls for gender equality with xenophobic
anti-immigrant campaigns—the “femo-
nationalism” mentioned in the subtitle of
her book. Femonationalism, she explains,
“describes, on the one hand, the attempts
of Western European right-wing parties
and neoliberals to advance xenophobic
and racist politics through the touting
of gender equality while, on the other
hand, it captures the involvement of various
well-known and quite visible feminists and
femocrats in the current framing of Islam
as a quintessentially misogynistic religion
and culture.”
Farris argues that the political anxiety
about Muslims in general took the form of
advocacy for the emancipation of Muslim
women in particular because of “a spe-
cifically economic logic”: Whereas Muslim
and other non-Western migrant men were
viewed as a “reserve army of labor”—that
is, a supplemental labor force to be em-
ployed only when needed—their female
counterparts, working in the domestic-
service and care industries, were seen as a
part of the “regular army of labor,” consti-
tuting an indispensable, irreplaceable labor
force that could not otherwise be found.
This labor force was needed, Farris notes,
to secure the social reproduction of the
population itself.
The importance of this migrant female
labor force to the social and economic well-
being of Western nations was evident in the
state policies of the countries that Farris
studied: France, Italy, and the Netherlands.
These countries provided a variety of sub-
sidies to families for domestic service and
elder and child care, sometimes in the form
of cash payments, sometimes as tax credits.
In this way, they at once commodified and
privatized social services, for which Muslim
and non-Western migrant women provided
“the lion’s share of supply.” This work was
defined by government agencies as neces-
sary and vital; it was also considered a per-
manent feature of the job markets of these
countries, a way of helping Muslim women
to integrate socially and culturally.
Since they did not compete with native
women workers, and as a result of what
Farris notes were the “neoliberal reforms in