Law and Islamic Dress: Rights and Fascism in Europe (Human Rights Law in Perspective)

This book conceptualises the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments on Islamic dress as manifestations of the fascist impulse in modern human rights law.The author argues that human rights are thus not an antidote to fascism but are constituted through a fascist inflection and implicated in circulating fascism in the everyday.The inability of human rights to say ‘no’ to laws regulating and criminalising Islamic dress in Europe engenders an institutional Islamophobia in the law and Islamic dress debate in Europe. The author interrogates the historical emergence of human rights, through a methodology of interdisciplinary, theoretical oscillations between feminism, decolonial, phenomenological and neo-Marxist thought to establish the rights/fascism dialectic.She argues that beyond exclusion and erasure the ownership of rights discourse enables the exploitation of racialised and gendered bodies for the maintenance of material and epistemological privilege with a white, Christian, male n