'Visible others': a reading of the European obsession with the female veil

This article aims to analyse the current European obsession with the practice of veiling. What emerges from this analysis is that the regulation of clothes and images in the public sphere is an integral part of European history and emerges as a necessary act of sovereign power aimed at instituting a precise law and religious subject through regulation of the licit form of visibility in the public sphere. This act, reinforced by the promulgation of exceptional rules of law, is necessary to maintain the unity and homogeneity of European people, in the past as well as nowadays

The ‘humanity’ of the secular legal subject’: reading the European Court of Human Rights’ decisions over the practice of veiling

The debate over the Muslim headscarf has become an arena of fervent discussion in Europe. Much of the debate reveals an attempt to explain the issue in binary terms, between modern, ‘secular’, universal and ‘religious’, traditional, local values. In this context, the hijab has become the symbol and mirror of the so called ‘clash of civilisations’. Through the analysis of two cases sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), my argument is that the passionate debate over the veil is a false one as the hijab emerges as a visible symbol of a clash between two legal-political systems, similar but contingently dissimilar: in fact, both Islamists and liberals aim at establishing a singular, universal (positivized) law within the same territory through women’s body. Thus, what the analysis of the ‘hijab cases’ reveals, is not only the emergence of a specific fixed and monolithic Christian/secular/liberal law’s subject, but also that the universality of western thought has precluded the possibility of imagining different forms of humanities and, along with it, a legal pluralism able to deal with a new multi-religious Europe

Liberal paradoxes: women’s body, religious expression, and gender equality in a secular age

The debate over the hijab has become an arena of fervent discussion in Europe. The recent political developments have opened a discussion on the relationship between a “secularized” West and an Islamic world. At the heart of this debate is the juridical regulation of women’s body and whether a simple piece of cloth such as the veil should be allowed or prohibited. This article takes into consideration two leading cases decided at the European Court of Human Rights over the practice of veiling which rely on the assumption that the headscarf is incompatible with western democratic values because irreconcilable with the principle of gender equality. I argue that the hijab cannot be seen as an expression of women’s oppression, as the concept of freedom and agency changes in different historical and cultural contexts: thus, what these decisions reveal is that the universalism of the Western/liberal concept of freedom and agency has been the main domain through which to read women’s oppression and their possibility of agency

Law & critique: burkini, bikini and the female (un)dressed body

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Re-negotiating the secular and the religious: young Hamas women in the West Bank

In the 2016 Bir Zeit university elections, Hamas’ women have launched two videos in which un-veiled western-dressed young girls call to vote for Hamas. The videos sparked a passionate debate whereas religious forces accused them to be ‘westernized’ and to abandon the Islamic norm of modesty, while secular forces accused them to promote a form of women’s empowerment linked to their success in accommodating religious values to secular ones. The debate mirrors scholarly works on Islamist women’s subjectivity which tend to adhere to the dominant liberal analytical frames and lack a clear problematization of the relationship between Islam, gender, and new forms of liberal and secular sensitivity: as Islamic practices, secularization, and neo-liberal projects are seen as opposed, most of the literature that analyses women within Islamist movements overlooks the historical and economic trajectories that have operated a shift in the study of the relation between gender, sexuality and religion. In 2017, I have conducted an extensive field research in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Hamas women to unwrap the relationship between Islamism, secularism, and neo-liberalism in the West Bank. By taking a distance from the assumption that religion and secularism are opposing poles of a binary, the paper gives an understanding of Hamas women’s shifting subjectivities in the encounter with new forms of secular modernity: this encounter has signified a shifting understanding of the category of secular and religion, which this paper analyses through a new understanding of women’s every day practices. Hamas women’s understanding of their own practices reveals their embodiment of Islamic and secular values and norms, which are framed and mediated by secular/neo-liberal mode of self-governance

What the veil reveals: a critique of religious and secular debate over the headscarf

The debate over the female headscarf has become an arena of fervent discussion in the West as well as in Muslim majority societies and it is often framed through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between western/‘secular’ and ‘religious’/traditional values. This thesis attempts to contribute critically to the recent debate and ‘obsession’ over the legal regulation of the hijab shared by westerns and Islamists. Trough anthropological, semiotic, political and legal theories, it proposes to give a different reading of the legal decisions over the practice of veiling in order to unwrap the way in which the tension between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ is understood as an absolute polarization. A closer analysis of recent western legal decisions over women’s veiling reveals a disturbing symmetry with a positivized modern view of Sharia law by Islamists as binding women’s bodies to a fixed, transparent and singular ‘universal’ identity that is, I claim, analogous to a universal-ist subjectivity of Human Rights law. Thus, the veil emerges as the metaphor of a clash between two imperialist universalist modern discourses: the secular discourse of a westernised world that is re-humanised through Human Rights and the reactive Islamist discourse. Both aim at creating a fixed and monolithic subject of law through the control of the visible (veiling/unveiling) in the public sphere. The claim of an incompatible dichotomy between liberal/secular and ‘Islamic’ religious values obscures this symmetry. Moreover, I argue that this polarization is the result of a specifically Occidental (Christian/secular) semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law, but also in Islamist discourse. This dichotomy becomes a useful tool to sustain the fiction of a monolithic subject and to operate a re-configuration of religious sentiments and practices in the public sphere to benefit state sovereignty. This re-conceptualization emerges as a necessary sovereign act to preserve the unity and homogeneity of a people

Cosmic voids in coupled dark energy cosmologies: the impact of halo bias

In this work we analyse the properties of cosmic voids in standard and coupled dark energy cosmologies. Using large numerical simulations, we investigate the effects produced by the dark energy coupling on three statistics: the filling factor, the size distribution and the stacked profiles of cosmic voids. We find that the bias of the tracers of the density field used to identify the voids strongly influences the properties of the void catalogues, and, consequently, the possibility of using the identified voids as a probe to distinguish coupled dark energy models from the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. In fact, on one hand coupled dark energy models are characterised by an excess of large voids in the cold dark matter distribution as compared to the reference standard cosmology, due to their higher normalisation of linear perturbations at low redshifts. Specifically, these models present an excess of large voids with $R_{eff}>20, 15, 12$ Mpc h^{-1}, at $z=0, 0.55, 1$, respectively. On the other hand, we do not find any significant difference in the properties of the void detected in the distribution of collapsed dark matter halos. These results imply that the tracer bias has a significant impact on the possibility of using cosmic void catalogues to probe cosmology.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures and 2 tables. Submitted to MNRA

Re-conceptualizing equality in the work place: a reading of the latest CJEU’s opinions over the practice of veiling

This article analyses the definition of religion adopted by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its latest opinions concerning the wearing of the headscarf in the workplace. It argues that, by adopting a secular/liberal definition of religion and linking religious freedom to individual autonomy, the CJEU creates a fixed legal and religious subject who is free and at the same time compelled to experience religion in a particular way. This, in turn, has two important implications: first, it creates a problem of equality as it distinguishes between different equality grounds. Second, contrary to liberal claims to secure the plurality and respect of religious minorities, it opens the door to the exclusion of veiled Muslim women from the European labour market

What the veil reveals: a critique of religious and secular debate over the headscarf

The debate over the female headscarf has become an arena of fervent discussion in the West as well as in Muslim majority societies and it is often framed through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between western/‘secular’ and ‘religious’/traditional values. This thesis attempts to contribute critically to the recent debate and ‘obsession’ over the legal regulation of the hijab shared by westerns and Islamists. Trough anthropological, semiotic, political and legal theories, it proposes to give a different reading of the legal decisions over the practice of veiling in order to unwrap the way in which the tension between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ is understood as an absolute polarization. A closer analysis of recent western legal decisions over women’s veiling reveals a disturbing symmetry with a positivized modern view of Sharia law by Islamists as binding women’s bodies to a fixed, transparent and singular ‘universal’ identity that is, I claim, analogous to a universal-ist subjectivity of Human Rights law. Thus, the veil emerges as the metaphor of a clash between two imperialist universalist modern discourses: the secular discourse of a westernised world that is re-humanised through Human Rights and the reactive Islamist discourse. Both aim at creating a fixed and monolithic subject of law through the control of the visible (veiling/unveiling) in the public sphere. The claim of an incompatible dichotomy between liberal/secular and ‘Islamic’ religious values obscures this symmetry. Moreover, I argue that this polarization is the result of a specifically Occidental (Christian/secular) semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law, but also in Islamist discourse. This dichotomy becomes a useful tool to sustain the fiction of a monolithic subject and to operate a re-configuration of religious sentiments and practices in the public sphere to benefit state sovereignty. This re-conceptualization emerges as a necessary sovereign act to preserve the unity and homogeneity of a people

Cosmic voids detection without density measurements

Cosmic voids are effective cosmological probes to discriminate among competing world models. Their identification is generally based on density or geometry criteria that, because of their very nature, are prone to shot noise. We propose two void finders that are based on dynamical criterion to select voids in Lagrangian coordinates and minimise the impact of sparse sampling. The first approach exploits the Zel'dovich approximation to trace back in time the orbits of galaxies located in voids and their surroundings, the second uses the observed galaxy-galaxy correlation function to relax the objects' spatial distribution to homogeneity and isotropy. In both cases voids are defined as regions of the negative velocity divergence, that can be regarded as sinks of the back-in-time streamlines of the mass tracers. To assess the performance of our methods we used a dark matter halo mock catalogue CoDECS, and compared the results with those obtained with the ZOBOV void finder. We find that the void divergence profiles are less scattered than the density ones and, therefore, their stacking constitutes a more accurate cosmological probe. The significance of the divergence signal in the central part of voids obtained from both our finders is 60% higher than for overdensity profiles in the ZOBOV case. The ellipticity of the stacked void measured in the divergence field is closer to unity, as expected, than what is found when using halo positions. Therefore our void finders are complementary to the existing methods, that should contribute to improve the accuracy of void-based cosmological tests.Comment: 12 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA