2010

Muslim women, fragmented secularism and the construction of interconnected 'publics' in Italy (*)

Ruba Salih

Introduction

Most discussions on Islam in Europe, or rather on the compatibility of 'Islam' and 'Europe', suggest that the issue at stake is around the extent to which European societies should allow challenges to the allegedly secular nature of their institutions and political cultures. This representation is dominant in both political and popular debates and stems from the idea of a clash between modern, secular outlooks, embodied by the histories and institutions of secular liberal political cultures and nation-states, and religious, often overlapped with 'fundamentalist', groups and projects construed as threatening secularism with their craving for recognition in the public sphere.

This understanding is further reinforced by a naturalisation of the French republican approach to public Islam. The normative French discourse that represents the performance of an Islamic pious identity in a public place as tantamount with the refusal to partake in liberal citizenship, or as a challenge to secularism, has been a-critically assumed by the media and by political constituencies in several countries to be the most appropriate framework for interpreting the issue of public Islam in Europe at large. This is more puzzling when considering that the French formulation of laïcité could be seen as rather exceptional in the European landscape (Roy 2007; Bowen 2007).

In what follows I would like to suggest that while it can bear some problematic significance in the French context, the Islamic-challenge-to-secularism explanation proves to be inadequate when applied to other European countries that have experienced a very different and specific history of secularisation (Casanova 1994).

This contribution will focus on the debates and questions arising in Italy around public Islam, young Muslim women and secularism (1). On the one hand, these debates, rather than simply bearing an interest on their own, throw a new light on the nature of Italian secularism, ultimately helping to reposition the accusation towards Islam as a threat to the secular public sphere. By contextualising public Islam in a wider framework, the paper suggests that there is hardly anything that makes Islam in Italy exceptionally and uniquely alien to secularism. On the other hand, the focus on young Muslim women's identities and agencies sheds light on the very specific and weak nature of Italian secularism and leads to reversing the terms of the question. Rather than Muslim constituencies, in Italy it is the Catholic Church that is striving to re-occupy a position in the public sphere that has been shrinking since the 1970s, while, as I will argue, young Muslim women are contributing to the expansion and redefinition of the nature of secularism and liberalism in the specific Italian context, rather than challenging it.

This contribution will suggest that young religious Muslim women in Italy partake in several different but interconnected 'publics' which concur in forming their subjectivity and sense of self as moral agents in society. On the one hand, they are the object of discussion in a dominant 'public', where they are represented as victims of an oppressive culture and religion seen as incompatible with a modern and liberal society. On the other hand, young Muslim women are actively contesting and challenging these dominant ideas by way of their construction of an alternative 'public' that extends transnationally. These alternative 'publics' make visible individual and subjective ways of navigating between religious and worldly authorities, contributing to the reinforcement of a liberal, rather than regulatory and normative, conception of how to be a Muslim woman in contemporary Europe.

In line with the argument by Jouili in this issue, my understanding of 'Muslim women' shies away from single sided understandings which portray their agencies as either resisting, in the liberal sense, patriarchal norms and values, or as submitting unwarily to them (El-Guindi 1999). Neither are young Muslim women in Italy only engaged in the self-fashioning of a pious subject, acting in adherence to a transcendental will (Mahmood 2005).

Agency cannot be predetermined. It must be analysed in the particular contexts that allow for an analysis of specific modes of being, responsibility, and affectivity. In this paper agency is understood not just as the ways through which women resist norms, but also in terms of the multiple ways that women inhabit sets of norms that derive their legitimacy from both worldly and religious forms of authorities.

Key issues in this paper are also linked to how young Muslim religious women - and the political cultures they embody - challenge a nationally and (in the Italian context) Christian Catholic bounded conception of citizenship and of the public sphere. Transnational identities and the public expression of modesty and piety end up questioning loyalty to one nation, culture or religion, as a main or exclusive prerequisite for membership.

Is there a secular Europe?

Defining what secularisation entails historically and in contemporary times is not an easy task. Eminent scholars provided a variety of insights into the subject, showing how religion never disappeared but reinvented itself anew at various stages in history (Taylor 2007) or how secular doctrines more or less arbitrarily confined the religious to the realm of the private (Asad 2003). Furthermore, it has been convincingly argued that a dialectic between the religious and the secular has long existed in the history of liberal Christian cultures, whereby a Christian logic has simultaneously adapted to and infiltrated into secular spheres (Martin 2005). Secularisation, from this perspective, is more an ideological projection on history than an actual process of separation between the religious and the mundane.

Secularism and the ensuing political cultures varied greatly in liberal democracies. Indeed, an element that tends to be forgotten is that the specific type of secular political culture that emerged in Western liberal countries derived as much from states' ideologies as from the religious outlooks on the role of religion in modern societies. For example, while Protestantism fostered secularism because the separation of Church and State was seen as crucial for the reinforcement of a religious civil society, Catholicism, as will be shown later, has had a very different outlook on the separation between Church and state. (2)

A further important differentiation is that between secularism and laicism. While the latter entails an ideological and dogmatic denial of religion that comes to be marginalised and arbitrarily confined to the private sphere by the law of the state, secularism is, at least in theory, a historical process that has brought, to various degrees, civil society's distance from the realm of the sacred, rather than the refusal of religion tout court. Analysed from within this perspective, French laïcité, and its resistance to accommodating a religious presence in the public sphere, is far from being the norm in Europe. Laïcité in France structures the political space and serves the aim of blurring social questions while strengthening alliances that cut across lines of class and political cultures. As Roy rightly argues, contemporary laïcité is based on a myth of consensus around Republican values, while in real terms 'France is experiencing the crisis of its identity through Islam' (Roy 2007:16).

These insights suggest that the idea of a homogenous secular Europe is profoundly misleading and is therefore not an appropriate framework within which to analyse the challenges posed by the emergence of plural religious traditions in Europe. The idea of a homogeneously secular Europe is a myth that serves the aim of creating an imagined community vis-à-vis Muslims (Roy 2007).

In Italy, the tensions arising from the gendered visibility and publicity of Islam, although occasionally mobilising around a secular/religious public discourse, seem to reflect a different kind of anxiety. This stems from a particular historical conjuncture characterised by a painful transformation of citizenship, from an ethos perceived as culturally and religiously homogeneous to a post-national, multi-religious fact on the ground. However, this transformation in itself does not account for the whole picture. In Italy, these processes are taking place in the face of two interrelated aspects: an increasingly flexible and fragmented economy generated by globalisation, leading to unprecedented levels of poverty and to a void of civic solidarity (Habermas 1998) which, in turn, paves the way for a restoration of highly exclusionary notions of community and loyalty based on religious homogeneity (Grillo 2005). Secondly, Italy shows a rather unique history of legal and cultural secularism compared to other European countries (Roy 2007).

When dealing with the crisis and challenges of citizenship in Europe, there is a tendency to marginalise the role that the majority religion has played in the process of fabricating imagined communities. Indeed, along with language and culture, religion, or we would better say religious unity, has been a fundamental ingredient in building nations. (Asad 2003; Salvatore 2005). In the post-Welfanian Europe, 'the state's domestication of religion started to consolidate as a means to cement national unity. Religious homogeneity was considered a precious source complementary to linguistic homogeneity in building the nations' (Salvatore 2005.10).

In the Italian context, the religious ingredient is a crucial one in the imagination of a homogeneous moral community.

The Christian Catholic nature of the country is evoked as the major issue at stake in the confrontation with public Islam. The debates around the project of relocating and expanding the local Islamic cultural centre in the city of Bologna offer a clear illustration of this. In 2007 the mayor of the city of Bologna announced that an agreement with the local Islamic community had been reached to relocate the Islamic centre in an area of 50,000 square meters in the S. Donato neighbourhood. Reactions to the project predictably took place in both the local and the national political arenas, with the Northern League proclaiming a protest march (with pigs) in the area where the centre should have been built and local trade associations, neighbourhood committees and the most prominent members of the local Church vigorously opposing the project and calling for the mayor to resign. Urged by the vice-mayor of Bologna to help facilitate the crisis now being defined by media and local politicians as 'the mosque emergency', I attended several meetings with local members of the municipality, Islamic constituencies and neighbourhood associations. The members of the local branch of the association Young Muslims of Italy, (which will be discussed later in the paper) met often with the most active members of the social centre of the neighbourhood, a group of elderly former partisans, in order to get to know each other and to discuss possible forms of collaboration to help reduce the fears in the neighbourhood.

While at grass-roots level the meetings proved to be an effective way of countering the reciprocal fears and seemed to represent the beginning of a long-term process of building reciprocal trust, the local and national media continued to portray the 'mosque emergency' as leading to an inevitable clash between 'Muslims' and the local population, implying of course that the former did not belong to the latter.

A leading role was played by the Christian anti-defamation league and by eminent members of the clergy in Bologna, who mobilised against the idea of the expansion of the Islamic cultural centre in Bologna, arguing that it would pollute the 'traditional' Christian landscape of the town. A mosque, it was said, is not like any other faith space because Islam, it was argued, is foreign to our social context. According to the Archibishop of Bologna, the Islamic centre could not be compared to the Catholic parish: the latter, he stated 'belongs to our social texture ... and it speaks Italian'.

The construction of a hierarchy between a Christian civilisation and Islam draws heavily on gender and women as symbols of an irremediable clash. Pierferdinando Casini, the leader of the Union of the Democrats of the Centre (UDC), a major political party espousing Christianity as its main political culture, recently posted his vision on the Christian heritage of Italy in the following terms:

... we should not be ashamed of stating who we are, where we come from and where we want to go. Defending our Christian tradition means defending ourselves, our history, because we do stop on Sunday and not on Fridays, because we have not admitted polygamy in our society, because we do not accept infibulation, arranged marriages between children, we are for equality between men and women and we believe in religious freedom. We are sons (sic) of our civilisation and our civilisation stems from our Judaic-Christian roots. Affirming those roots does not mean making a statement of faith but rather it means defending ourselves. (3)

What is striking in this excerpt is not only the definite association between Christianity and the nation, but also the unambiguous ways in which gender and women are mobilised to draw a hierarchy between Islam and Christianity. Christianity is represented, in opposition to Islam, as the civilised religion supporting women's liberation and freedom of religion. In continuity with past colonial narratives, it is symbolically over women's bodies that boundaries of community and nation are drawn. Muslim women's bodies today are public spaces over which different agendas of modernity, secularism, liberalism and religiosity are inscribed.

Muslim young women in Italy, empirical improvisations and multiple 'publics'

As the last quotation hints, in the last few years Italy has witnessed an unprecedented interest in the condition of oppressed 'Muslim women'. While a few left-wing constituencies present Islamic religious practices in the public sphere as the most radical challenge to Italian secularism, the dominant and most widespread narrative in Italy is one that sees Islam as a challenge to the national identity and values, i.e. a national culture, solidly anchored in Christian roots.

The notion that Islam is incompatible and inferior to Christianity and Christian civilisation is a popular one in Italy and has proven to be a dominant one in the public sphere. One example is the acclaim and wide audience reached by the books written by the late Oriana Fallaci, particularly The Rage and the Pride (2002) and The Force of Reason (2006). In these books, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Italy, the journalist constructed populist and racist arguments about the incommensurability between 'Islam' and 'Muslims' and the European civilisation, which, despite her self declared atheism, she conceived of as imbued with Christian values and ethos. Prime Minister Berlusconi and Pope Benedict XVI also helped fuel the notion of a hierarchy between Christianity and Islam on several occasions.

The various and seemingly oppositional views very often converge in presenting pious Muslim women as weak anti-liberal subjects, symbolic icons of fundamentalism, in need of 'secularisation' (or Christianisation) and re-education as citizens by way of liberating them from the oppression they supposedly experience under the pressure of their religious community or family.

It is in this context that the idea of banning the veil in schools was proposed in 2006 by Daniela Santanchè, a member of the post-fascist right wing party Alleanza Nazionale. The proposal however was also supported by left-wing and feminist constituencies. However, what is interesting is that the proposed law to ban the veil has been interpreted by most political analysts as a major instrument within a power battle internal to the Alleanza Nazionale party. Several observers saw the 'no-veil' law proposal and the general championing for the 'oppressed Muslim woman' as a strategy by Santanchè to gain support from her party grass roots, which would enable her to have a more prominent role in the context of her party decision-making process at a particularly delicate moment within the political life of the party itself. Indeed, the championing of the cause of the 'oppressed Muslim woman' has been beneficial to Santanchè who was able to capitalise on the popularity she achieved through this campaign and run as a candidate for Prime Minister in the last political elections in Italy (2008). (4) A similar self-appointed champion of Muslim women's rights is Souad Sbai, a woman of Moroccan origin in her fifties, who by campaigning on behalf of her oppressed sisters managed to become an MP in the same party.

Along with conducting a campaign which aims at approving a law to forbid the veil in public schools, the above mentioned Daniela Santanchè is the author of a book arguably illustrating the suffering and terrible conditions under which Muslim women live. Santanchè also appointed herself as the rescuer of Muslim women in the context of an honour killing which caused an outrage in the Italian media. (5) Hina Saleem, a young woman of Pakistani origin, was ferociously killed by her father and other members of her family and buried in the family garden in the summer of 2006. Hina was to become the emblem of a national campaign against what was represented in the media as genetically-based Islamic gendered violence. Particularly striking were the photographs circulating in the media. One in particular became the official picture, and portrayed Hina wearing blue-jeans and a very tight green undershirt showing her belly, like those very fashionable among European teenagers. Evidently the choice of that specific photograph was not accidental, but part and parcel of the fabrication of the super-empowered Muslim woman, the heroine who pays the highest price for her desire to challenge Islam and tradition and to be a secularised, one of us.

The production and consumption of 'Muslim women' in the dominant public sphere is counteracted by the increasing visibility of Muslim women in alternative publics. A conference I attended in 2007 on the effects of the 2004 reform of the Mudawana (the Moroccan personal status law) on Moroccan women in Italy and France provides a powerful evidence of this presence. The conference took place in a well known 'migrant and native Italian women's centre' in Turin, north Italy. The keynote speakers were two young women of Moroccan origin, both in the course of finalising their PhDs on subjects related to women's rights in the diaspora and at home. One of them espoused secular ideas and attires, the other, a member of a moderate Islamist party, displayed a pious and religiously committed identity. Also the audience seemed to have heterogeneous attitudes towards religion, as it appeared from their diverse styles and aesthetics of faith. Many women wore a hijab and different shapes of Islamic dresses, although some did not.

One of the presentations was devoted to the results of a research project undertaken in the north of Italy on the effects of the reform of the Moroccan personal status law on migrant women, while the other was emphasising women's gains through the reform, but also the remaining discrimination women have to face due to the difficulty in implementing the reform itself. Part of the presentation was illustrating the particular predicament of women of Moroccan origin in France who face multiple problems due to the remaining gap between French and Moroccan family laws. The first presenter concluded by envisaging a greater political power of the Moroccan residents abroad in their country of origin. This young French woman of Moroccan origin even proposed a 'European code of Arab Muslim law' to be applied the Arab diasporas in Europe (see also Buskens 2003). Among the audience several women took the floor. Most of the women worked as intercultural mediators with Arab Muslim and migrant women in different towns in northern Italy. In particular, two religious Muslim women joined very passionately in the discussion criticising the new Mudawana as a cosmetic intervention addressed to a western audience which does not solve women's discrimination.

In the audience was Yasmina, a young university student of Moroccan origin, she also wears a hijab and is an active practicing Muslim. Yasmina partakes in several organisations and associations at local, national and transnational levels. At the time, she had just been appointed as a member of a national consultative body 'Consulta giovanile per il pluralismo culturale e religioso' (youth consultative body for cultural and religious pluralism) which was instituted by the Ministry of Interior under the centre-left coalition run by former Prime Minister Romano Prodi. Yasmina is a prominent member of both the local branch and the national association of Young Muslims of Italy (Giovani Musulmani d'Italia), and she is an active member of Youth Without Frontiers, (Giovani Senza Frontiere) a secular organisation working on issues of human rights and xenophobia composed mainly of Italian members. She is also an associate of the organisation 'Young Women from Minorities' an international (European) organisation working on gender and ethnicity in Europe. At the local level, she is one of the founders of Jusur (Bridges), a local organisation which applied for funding from the University of Turin in order to provide services, information and help to foreign students who settle in Turin.

Yasmina's activism is in no way in contradiction with her pious self, which she displays in public, performing a strict observance of religious duties. During the refreshment that was offered after the conference, Yasmina was curiously the only Muslim abstaining from food, in contrast to the other Muslim veiled and non-veiled women. Later, Yasmina explained to me that according to her own interpretation of one hadith all practicing and devout Muslims should fast on 'Ashura, which was of course occurring that very same day. Her individual fasting is one among many examples one could provide suggesting that piety and the various forms it may take can emerge from, and reinforce, an individual and liberal agency rather than being community-driven or even coerced from within a common tradition.

In further conversations during several other encounters we had over time, Yasmina explained to me the grounds on which she persuades her family to grant her freedom of movement to fulfil the duties of her very busy life. Piety, her strong religious education and the attribution of religious ethics to her mundane actions provide her with the strength to confront pressures and to negotiate great spaces of freedom.

The last time I saw Yasmina was at an academic summer school organised by the Italian Association of Women Historians on 'women and religions' where I was invited to lecture on women and Islam. Thinking that Yasmina could have added enormous value to the session with her own knowledge, skills and identity as a young pious Italian Muslim and her multiple ways of combining piety and mundane life, I invited her to co-teach a seminar for the students. The occasion proved to be quite burdensome and harsh for Yasmina who was received by the students and some members of the teaching staff as the representative a de-localised, a-historical and fixed Islamic tradition and culture, which she was held responsible and even accountable for. Questions were addressed to her on a whole range of topics, from 'the Islamic view' on homosexuality and torture, to her choice of wearing an Islamic attire, to whether she had a boyfriend and what kind of marriage she would have chosen. Yasmina's responses, between discomfort and self-confidence, pointed to an attempt, very visible amongst other young Muslims in Europe, to reconcile change with religious orthodoxy, subjectivity and individuality with a collective religious ethos, continuity and identification with an Islamic tradition with adaptation, a process that Olivier Roy has aptly called of 'empirical improvisation.' (Roy 2007).

Yasmina is by no way an exception in the landscape of second generation Muslims. Meriem, for example, is also a university student and a spokesperson of the GMI section of Bologna (where I conducted most of my research). Aside from being a pious young woman and an active member of the Islamic association, Meriem was a candidate at the local elections that took place in 2006 for the Consulta (a migrants council body) in Bologna in a list that was pretty transversal in terms of ethnic, national, religious and gender affiliations. At a meeting organised by a local feminist organisation to introduce the female candidates to the local citizenship, Meriem described herself as someone involved with gender equality, human rights and youth interests from an Islamic perspective.

Islam in Europe, and Islam in Italy makes no exception in this regard, is going through a de facto secularisation, by way of both creative reformist projects and 'empirical improvisations' that allow the pious and believers to live according to the rules of secularised societies, while maintaining a degree of religious orthodoxy that grants a sense of belonging to a transnational community of Muslims. Following Catholic and Jewish models, Muslims in Europe are also engaging in a movement from legal norms to values, leading conservatives and modernists alike to engage with the rules of the games and democracy. This process helps to expand rather than restrict the liberal character of society.

This process is possible because, as Roy argues, Muslims in Europe are increasingly experiencing Islam as the result of a disassociation between religion and the culture of majority Muslim countries. This emerged clearly in several interviews conducted with young Muslims in Italy, members of the GMI. The following excerpt of an interview with a young Muslim woman, very active in the Bologna branch of the association, is an eloquent example of this process of detachment of Islam from culture:

Morocco is a Muslim country, so to speak, because the majority of people there are Muslims, but it is very much influenced by traditions, that get mixed up with Islam, and transform it in another thing. Living here I have learnt from other people, people who have studied the true Islam, with no intrigues and such things ... once, for example, I was in Morocco and was talking with my uncle, who is only twenty years old, by the way, we were discussing something about Islam and religion, he made a mistake and I corrected him because I was sure that Islam says something different, and so he said to me: 'How do you think you know, you were born and brought up in Italy. This is a Muslim country and therefore I know better than you'. But at the end it is not true because there, traditions influence too much Islam. At the end, you do not know where Islam finishes and where traditions start and vice-versa. That's why often I have a very detached relationship, because I don't want to be influenced...

These words are illustrative of the ways in which young women partake in several public spheres across borders which contribute to define and situate their Islamic identity. Here, clearly, this young Muslim-Italian makes a claim about authenticity but her words also point to how young pious women can be detached from a tradition or a culture that they see as contaminating a 'true', modern and universal Islam. The latter does not need to be anchored to the tradition of the Muslim majority world.

Along similar lines are the words of another young Muslim-Italian of Moroccan origin, also a member of the Young Association of Italy, who claims:

I do not have a special link to Morocco, since I did not grow up there, I do not have friends, I came here when I was three years old, I go there only one month every year, it is not enough to build real friendship. On the one hand, here I have everything: my parents, my best friends, my association, (GMI) I can live my Islam in the way I like it, that's why I feel attached here.

Here again there is a clear indication of how young Muslim women in Italy live their pious and religious identity through a rather liberal approach, which does not necessarily mean individualised or disenchanted, since indeed it is the membership in the Association which provides them with both a collective and a subjective dimension of belonging to a Muslim tradition and to the local context.

Fragments of secularism, religion and the public sphere in Italy

In the liberal view, the state guarantees citizens freedom of religion only on the condition that religious communities, each from the perspective of its own doctrinal tradition, accept not only the separation of church and state, but also 'the restrictive definition of the public use of reason' (Habermas 2006: 6). The institutional precondition for guaranteeing equal freedom of religion for all is that the state remains neutral towards competing world views. The extent to which this neutrality is at all present in Italy is a decisive question in the context of the current paper. (6)

While in contemporary France laïcité represents an ideological radicalisation of secularism, with the state interfering and controlling religion and religious choices rather than pursuing separation (Etienne 2004), Italian secularisation is structured around the opposite process, with the Catholic Church striving to re-occupy a space that was never fully abandoned although it was increasingly secularised since the seventies.

France shows a long history of secularism and anti-clericalism that started with the French Revolution, continued all the way through Napoleon Bonaparte's concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801 (when the Church was put under state tutelage), and culminated with the Law of separation of 1905. The latter is considered the starting point of the contemporary form of French laïcité, which sanctioned the final secularisation of the French state and its religious neutrality while, at the same time, curtailing the Church's remaining aspirations to dominate or influence the public sphere and culture (McGoldrick 2006).

In Italy the notion of the secularity of the public space is very distant from the French one. The most common definitions of secularism would appear wanting. Here, it is not possible to define secularism in terms of neutrality of the state to religion or, alternatively, in terms of autonomy of the church from the state. Even the 'differentiation' of roles and functions between state and Church is more blurred than in other contexts (Taylor 2007). Moreover, the de-privatisation of religion (Casanova 1994) is not a recent phenomenon in Italy, where Catholicism has never ceased to play an open role in the public and political spheres and informs people's political cultures, although not so much their daily behaviour.

In Italy one can sense fragments of secularism both in the political and cultural spheres. It could be argued that Italy shows a weak legal secularism coupled with a strong influence of the Catholic Church and religious values on both politics and society. In the context of legal secularism, one should note that it is only quite recently, in 1984, that the Italian parliament voted a new Concordato regulating the relations between the state and the Roman Catholic Church, which replaced the old Concordato included in the Patti Lateranensi signed between Mussolini and the Roman Catholic Church in 1929. At the time, the Catholic Church was recognised as the state religion, and the Italian state agreed to conform civil law on marriage and divorce to the law of the Catholic Church. Catholic religious education was made compulsory in schools and the Church was exempted from paying taxes to the state. Bishops and Archbishops, on the other hand, were requested to recite an oath of alliance and loyalty to the Italian state.

The most relevant change in the 1984 Concordato is the stipulation that Catholicism is no longer the state religion in Italy. However, it still enjoys privileges with respect to other faiths, in particular concerning the teaching of the Catholic religion at school, the freedom of Catholic private schools, the fiscal advantages of religiously based organisations, amongst other things. In this sense, rather than strictly a 'secular' state, Italy would be better defined as a state where the Catholic religion is established while other religions undertake separate agreements with the State to be recognised (Bhargava 2003).

But leaving aside the institutional arrangement between the Catholic Church and the State, the secularisation of society also has specific characteristics in Italy, making the Italian political culture around secularism the other exception in Europe. It could even be argued that the process of secularisation of society and the public sphere which characterised the recent history of other European countries has never really taken place in Italy. (cf. van der Veer 2006). This is evident from the pervasive presence of Catholicism within political and civic organisations and, more generally, within the national political culture. The major governing party for more than 45 years until the end of the first republic was the Christian Democratic Party. Catholic organisations have prominent public and political roles in civil society, and exert a crucial influence in contexts as diverse and crucial as hospitals, universities, charity, research, health and reproductive centres, schools, trade unions and, most importantly, the media.

The 'weak secularity' of the country due to the deep influence of the Catholic Church on Italian political culture, society and legislation has been particularly evident in the course of the last few years where two major debates on reproductive technologies and civil unions pervaded the public and political spheres. On 19^th February 2004, law n. 40, a heavily religiously inspired law severely restricting access to reproductive technologies and virtually banning research on stem cells was approved by the Italian Parliament generating disquiet and concern amongst liberal, secular and feminist constituencies, comprising well known scientists of the calibre of Rita Levi Montalcini or philosophers such as Gianni Vattimo, who joined forces in promoting an abrogative referendum of four articles of this law. In response to that, there was a massive mobilisation of Catholic organisations, parties, civil society and anti-abortionist movements. Supporters of the necessity to limit women's access to reproductive technologies cut across the traditional divisions of right and left wing constituencies, and included several members of left wing parties and trade unions who mobilised around ethical and religious points, aiming at 'protecting the legal rights of the embryo'. John Paul II directly took part in the debate urging Catholics to reconsider the importance of their roles in public and institutional spheres where significant collective decisions are taken as well as in the political realm'. This, according to the Vatican, would help to contain philosophical currents, anthropological visions and political conceptions which are manipulated by pre-conceived ideologies which may threaten democracy. Another eminent figure of the catholic world, Cardinal Ruini, invited citizens to boycott the vote in order to cause the failure of the referendum for lack of quorum. Eventually, only 26% of the population went to vote causing the failure of the referendum for lack of quorum.

Similarly, under the former Prodi government (2006-2008) there was an attempt to approve a much awaited law on civil unions. When finally the coalition reached (not without conflicts within the coalition itself) an agreement on a text, the daily newspaper of the Conferenza Episcopale Italiana (CEI Italian Episcopal Conference) Avvenire titled in Latin: Non Possumus, not only mobilising around moral or ethical concerns on the sacredness of 'natural law' on which a naturally and religiously derived idea of the family is based, but threatening a watershed in the Italian political landscape, meaning that Catholic members of Parliament would have had to respond directly to the Vatican on their votes. (7)This was seen by some observers as a very dangerous request directed at Catholic MPs, asking them to prioritise their loyalty to their faith over their duties as citizens, represented as mutually exclusive. Catholics were divided. While some totally supported this position, for others, such as former President of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, this seemed like an unacceptable veto that would transform individual members of Parliament holding Catholic values and ethos into a political lobby.

This stands in sharp contrast with what happened in 1974, when a referendum confirming the national law on divorce was approved by a majority of 58% of votes. At the time, aware of the popular support for a more secularised legal and political culture, in the aftermath of 1968, many eminent figures of the catholic civil society (the Azione Cattolica Italiana for example) voiced the need to divert from the aim of imbuing legal and political structures with catholic values and ethos, and to rather address society's increasing disenfranchisement from religion by way of a new evangelisation, as John Paul II later called it.

In Italy therefore the Roman Catholic Church has, through various phases, continued to be highly involved in the public and political spheres, exerting pressure on both the public opinion and the Catholic-oriented political parties and figures in and outside of Parliament. Despite a general decrease of daily or weekly worship and religious rituals in the country, not only Catholic religious ethos continues to permeate people's values and the political debates, but there are clear signals of the Church's aspirations to re-conquer space in the political landscape.

Conclusions

The argument of this paper is that Muslim women in Europe are not in fact posing an exceptional challenge, but they are rather renewing historical critiques of Rawls and Habermas' liberal ideas of the public sphere.

The classic liberal understanding of the notion of the public sphere stems from the Habermasian notion of a space of social life in which public opinion can be formed. A sort of intermediate space where ideas are exchanged amongst equal and gender-neutral participants, leading to shared understanding of the common good. This classic notion, however, neglects the role of religion in the formation of people's ideas. In the classic liberal understanding, religion is seen as preventing individuals from making rational deliberations. Yet, as Eickelman and Salvatore (2002) have suggested, both in the Muslim majority world and in Europe, religion has played a crucial role in informing ideas about a just moral order (2002:101). For example, in the Muslim majority world some strands of Sufism in the last three centuries have been determinant in creating a notion of a 'social Muslim', offering a platform for contesting or deviating from conventional or normative notions of the good Muslim. Similarly, saints in fifteenth century Morocco were positioned between religious and worldly spaces of legitimacy and authority. These interconnections between the religious and the mundane spheres are not unique to the Islamic majority world. In Europe, as sociologist David Martin has argued, a Christian logic has never ceased to be present, simultaneously adapting to and infiltrating into secular spheres (Martin 2005).

A further critique to the classic liberal notion of the public sphere, and equally important for the purpose of this paper, is the one stemming from a feminist perspective. Nancy Fraser (1990) criticised the idea of an abstract and gender-neutral subject of rational deliberation, arguing that, historically, the public sphere has been dominated by a male, white and bourgeois subjects and suggesting that this exclusionary mechanism has been a constitutive, rather than an accidental, element of the dominant public sphere. Moreover, a crucial aspect of Fraser's analysis is that private interests and identities should not and could not be 'bracketed', as classic theory of the public sphere and current political debate would maintain.

While Fraser saw secularisation and universal emancipation as the only framework within which subaltern or counter publics could emerge, her insights could be used to precisely deconstruct majority normativities, whether secular or religious. Indeed, while the feminist critique to the artificial and political nature of the boundary between 'private' and 'public' did not include religion, (it rather excluded it) religious identities, values and ethos, and their bodily expressions, cannot be bracketed, but inform the ways ideas and agencies are enacted in the public sphere.

The role of Muslim women in the process of making Islam public, and their involvement in discussions and mobilisation over their rights as transnational citizens leads to the articulation of 'publics' simultaneously interacting with and challenging the dominant 'publics' where 'Muslim women', their bodies, their practices their symbols, their predicaments are commodified, turned into objects of consumption to feed a western public Orientalist imaginary or are used as political pawns in Realpolitikgames.

Muslim women's public expression of their religious identities and their transnational affiliations pose a twofold challenge to the nation-state in the Italian context: to its national conception of rights and membership and to its underlying Christian nature (Asad 2005).

On the other hand, at a very moment in which, as Roy (2007) aptly suggested, Muslims in Europe are going through 'empirical improvisations' which allow them to formally respect orthodoxy while adapting to European societies, and the Vatican in Italy is determined to re-occupy a space that is seen as threatened by plural political cultures, both religious and secular. The Catholic church in Italy strives to recreate a bond that revolves around the idea of a homogeneous religious Christian community, defined by shared ethos, morality and values, that are threatened by the increasing gendered visibility of Islam. Interestingly, as shown in the paper, this ethos places a heavy emphasis on the control of women's bodies and on the preservation of a moral community whose boundaries are defined by the restoration of the nuclear heterosexual family and the reiteration of the Christian nature of the country.

Young women like Yasmina or Meriem, and their complex selves, simultaneously pious and liberal, local and global, are witness to the existence of very lively and gendered 'publics' whose crucial role in processes of refreshing liberal democracies should be acknowledged rather than repressed (Benhabib 2004). In this context, Muslim women's agencies could be seen as sharing terrain, although from a different horizon, with other movements and social actors (gay and lesbian, feminist, black) mobilising for a re-conceptualisation of citizenship and the public sphere in contemporary plural societies (Henkel 2006). What these different agents have in common is that they all are ultimately interested in diversity rather than equality, and emphasise a gendered subject rather the neutral abstract bourgeois male as the subject of deliberation in a liberal democracy.

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Notes

*. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2009) 17, 4 409-423. © 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00085.x.
The first version of this paper was presented at the workshop on "Muslim women" in Europe: Bodily Performances, Multiple Belongings and the Public Sphere, which Annelies Moors and Ruba Salih organised as part of the Mediterranean Research Meeting of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute of Florence (Italy), 21-25 March 2007. The paper was subsequently presented at the conference "Muslim diasporas: religious and national identity, gender, cultural resistance" June 1-3, 2007 at York University in Toronto, Canada and at the University of Amsterdam in October 2008. I wish to thank all those who helped to refine my analyses through their comments and feedback. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers of Social Anthropology for their insightful comments.

1. These reflections build on several years of engagement with the issue of gender and Islam in Europe (see Salih 2003, 2004).

2. Another commonly used meaning of secularism stems from the American tradition where the outcomes of the religious tensions were to result in a notion of freedom of faith substantially different from both the French laicite´or from the Italian quasi secularism. Secularism in the early years of the US meant granting to the settlers the positive freedom to continue to exercise their religious faith without feeling in danger (Habermas 2006).

3. Difendere l'identità cristiana significa difendere noi stessi.

4. The veil was represented as a symbol of submission rather than as a religious symbol threatening the secular public sphere. This theme was also part of the French discourse, but was raised as a derivative issue with respect to the main discourse of the preservation of the secular nature of the public sphere (Asad 2005).

5. See Uccisa perché non voleva sposare un cugino; La madre avvertì Hina: «Non venire a casa, papà vuole ucciderti».

6. In the current context, we are witnessing a clear contradiction between theory and practice. The liberal view aims at making religion a private matter, but asks comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, to provide proper reasons in support of their religious arguments in the public sphere. However, when Muslims articulate a political or cultural discourse based on faith, they are immediately urged to revert to a notion of religion as purely transcendental and private.

7. Pacs, i vescovi tornano a Pio IX. "Su quel testo non possumus".