Società multiculturali, difesa dell’identità, principio di laicità. Il caso del velo islamico

The legal controversy, started in France, on the prohibition of the Islamic veil in schools / universities, “neutral” places, shows interesting judicial profiles regarding the freedom of individual choices, even if considered conservative and strongly discriminatory. The analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights underlines the inability to manage new emerging social issues. The veil, in fact, has assumed, in ‘western’ thought, an altered value that has led to denying the multiple meanings that it has actually assumed in the Islamic culture, or in a certain part of it. The polysemic value of the veil must, in fact, necessarily refer to religious practice but also to the tradition and role of women in society. In our vision, distorted and simplistic, we have reduced its symbolic value by associating it with fundamentalism, with a retrograde and misogynist culture. The project of democratic secularism should, instead, be aimed at the realization of a space that is truly open to all and of all in which religiosity constitutes a value of social cohesion only if it lays down any “claim of infallibility” and if it does not confuse the need for “ dialogue cooperation” with that of” occupation “of the legitimate spaces of pluralism, which defines a socially and legally multiple reality