gus. With any kind of luck this practice will spread to other countries as they attempt to keep religion out of government. france has good reason to be concerned. It's all about religion.
Many uneasy as Paris eyes scarf ban
By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 1/17/2004
boston.com
PARIS -- Kenza Refsi, 18, furtively breaks away from a cluster of friends near her high school and with a shy smile that exposes her braces, she agrees to discuss why her teachers won't let her dress the way she wants.
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It's not that she wants to wear a thong with low-riding pants, or a nose ring, or a halter top that exposes her midriff.
Those fashion statements are considered acceptable for teenage girls at Lycee Jean Jaures in Montreuil, a Paris suburb. What Refsi's teachers forbid is a scarf that she seeks to wear to cover her head in modesty, which she believes is an obligation of her Muslim faith.
And when she talks about the rules at her school and a proposed French law that would prohibit public school students from wearing "conspicuous" signs of religious beliefs -- not only the Muslim veil, but also large Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps -- Refsi's smile turns to a glare of indignation.
"It is shocking, and it is infuriating," she said. "These teachers say that we cannot wear the veil because it is a provocation. But there are girls who wear a thong that shows all their derriere, and that is considered acceptable.
"Let's get to the truth of it. They don't like Muslims. They are afraid of Islam."
She planned to join tens of thousands of other Muslim women and men today in a demonstration against the ban on head scarves by many schools, as well as the new law proposed last month by President Jacques Chirac that would codify the prohibition nationally. The Cabinet is expected to approve the measure next week in anticipation of a formal vote in Parliament early next month.
France is home to nearly 6 million Muslims, and Chirac intends the law to be an unshakable statement to that community that the French republic is secular to the core.
Although the proposed law institutes a "secular code," as Chirac puts it, that would apply to all faiths, the issue has riled practicing Muslims in particular. That is largely because there are no publicly funded Islamic schools open to devout Muslim students, while there are many publicly funded Catholic and Jewish schools where students are permitted to wear signs of their faith and would continue to be allowed so under the new law.
Still, many people in France, including some devout Muslims, Christians, and Jews, say they would support the law. A recent opinion poll indicated that 56 percent of Muslim women surveyed said they supported it.
France's passion for secular society flows from the country's long, tortured struggle between church and state in which religious identities and institutions have been forced to bend to the will of the secular republic.
The struggle is made more dramatic by the tension between the West and Islam after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the United States. The issue lies on a cultural fault line in the global debate over how Western societies will integrate their Muslim communities.
"It's a very heavy past that this law emerges out of," said Xavier Ternisien, religion reporter for the French daily newspaper Le Monde.
France's history is filled with conflict, including war, between religious groups and the state, according to French historian Diana Pinto. Protestants were cast out of the republic after the massacre of St. Barthelemy in 1572.
During the Enlightenment, the Roman Catholic Church was viewed as the enemy; Catholics were brutally persecuted after the French Revolution. Jews were expelled from France in the Middle Ages, and were also deported to Nazi concentration camps under the Vichy government when Germany occupied France at the beginning of World War II.
"Given this past, it is easy to understand why so many French people rally around a secular republic as the only guarantor of national peace," Pinto wrote in a Jan. 8 commentary on the proposed law for the International Herald Tribune.
France's battle for a secular state came to a head in 1905 with the formal separation of church and state under the Third Republic. But as part of the compromise on that law, the Catholic Church clung to the public financing for its vast network of schools, a blurring of the church-state line that continues today in the predominantly Catholic country.
This contradiction to secularism is not lost on France's Muslim community, which is growing in numbers and political clout. The irony is not lost on Muslims around the world, either.
Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said last week that the plan to ban Islamic head scarves from public schools was an insult to the faith and hinted that the move may harm France's ties with Iran.
"I hope the French government and Chirac himself, as well as the French Parliament, understand they have insulted 1 1/2 billion Muslims," Rafsanjani told worshipers at prayers yesterday in Tehran.
But Ternisien of Le Monde said: "For Chirac, this law is a matter of conviction. And he is doing it without regard to the political cost from a powerful Muslim community. It is too early to tell how high that cost will be."
The proposed law came on the heels of a spate of anti-Semitic incidents in France. It also landed amid a collective despair felt by many economically frustrated Muslim emigrants from North Africa, some of whom have retreated into subcultures of Islamic fundamentalism in France.
Some militant sheiks within those communities have sought to channel Muslim anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq into outrage directed at the Jewish community.
To confront the challenges those forces pose, Chirac commissioned France's leading intellectuals, politicians, and educators to assess the role of France's secular tradition and tolerance in its modern society.
Ghislaine Hudson, a member of the commission and a principal at a vocational high school in Paris, said: "The proposed law is not a decision against Muslims or their traditions. It is a decision in favor of secular traditions."
Hudson also served as principal of Lycee Francais in New York, where she says she was influenced by American ideas on the separation of church and state.
"France is struggling with this issue right now, and it is a very important struggle," she said. "You have to understand there is a very different conception of secularism in France. In France, a public person could not mention God. God is not in the equation and definitely not in the equation politically."
This secular tilt is true in many countries in Europe and has revealed itself in the bitter debate over a draft constitution for the expanding European Union, which helped lead to a breakdown in talks at an EU summit last month. France is adamant that no reference to God should be included in the wording of the EU constitution.
In the heart of Paris at the Central Mosque, the debate over Chirac's proposed law echoes as loudly as the call to prayer from a minaret. After Friday prayers last week, Muslim worshipers from all levels of French society were exiting the sprawling, ornate mosque.
Some said they favor the law, while others oppose it.
Leyla Kurt, 22, a biology student at Jussieu University in Paris, said: "I am disgusted by this law. It is a violation of not only one's freedom of religion, but a woman's right to modesty."
She said she began to wear the veil five years ago, which surprised her secular parents who were born in Turkey. When she tried to wear the veil at her high school, the principal forbade her.
Fatiha Derbil, 61, who was born in Algeria but has been a French citizen for 30 years, owns and manages a hotel. She wore a head scarf, which most Muslims refer to as a veil, although it is generally not the full-length burka worn to Friday prayers in many Islamic fundamentalist countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. But Derbil removed the scarf as she left. She said she supports Chirac's proposed law.
"We should respect the law of the country we are in; the Koran is very clear on that. This is a secular country and we should respect that, or leave," said Derbil, as she pulled the scarf from her head and let it fall on her shoulders. |
