At just 17 years of age, Sarah Chaari, a veil-wearing Belgo-Moroccan from Charleroi, was crowned Taekwondo World Champion last week in Mexico. The young athlete gave Belgium its second gold medal of a world championship, and the first in the women’s category. What’s more, she is the only athlete in the world to have won the world junior and senior titles in the same year.
In a now familiar pattern, international victories by people belonging to marginalized groups in their own countries are celebrated as national victories. As if these victories opened an enchanted parenthesis in which these people were suddenly considered first-class citizens, worthy of representing their country and personifying the equal opportunities they have enjoyed, the various forms of discrimination they have experienced along the way are conveniently overlooked.
However, it’s hard to avoid this analysis, given the stark contrast between the ingenuity with which this victorious news is relayed and the plight of many Muslim women wishing to wear the veil in Belgium. While young Sarah Chaari’s journey demonstrates a formidable and admirable fighting spirit, we mustn’t forget to consider the sum total of obstacles, hardships and forced questioning faced by many Muslim women. Sarah Chaari’s crowning achievement should not obscure the sum total of forced renunciations, U-turns and disappointed ambitions that mark the path of many veiled women, and which have lasting subjective consequences. Prevented from teaching, studying or practicing their sport freely, subjected to the constant possibility of humiliation, discrimination and insults, the effects of public debate on the lives of women who choose to wear the headscarf can drive the most determined of them to the breaking point.
Success stories or “excellence”, as they are usually called, are not the embodiment of the majority society’s efforts to include minorities, just as they are not the sign that “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Celebrating the excellence of an individual journey by a woman wearing the veil while dismissing out of hand the difficulties encountered by many women who have made the same choice with regard to their religious practices is thus misguided. To suggest to people who are objectively victims of various mechanisms of minorization that their fate rests mainly on the strength of their willpower, is in effect to make them unfairly responsible for the structural problems they face.
