29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Matters come to a head
An Alexandria court has ruled in favour of a student dismissed from a French school for wearing a head scarf.
On 3 March, the Alexandria court of first instance brought down the curtain on the "first-of-its-kind anti-discrimination case" of 12-year-old Azza Amr Zaki. The court ruled that Azza and her three brothers, who were all dismissed from Alexandria's Champollion School after Azza's decision to wear the veil, be immediately reintegrated into their classes, ordering the school to pay their family a total of LE600,000 in compensation for pain and suffering.
Azza and her brothers, however, returned to school for only a day, "just to feel redeemed," said their mother. "We just cannot -- and will never -- forget the pain and harm the Champollion School inflicted on our family," she added.
Azza's "personal decision" to wear a head scarf this year seems to have aroused a sharp reaction on the part of her school's administrative board. A first-year preparatory student, Azza was forbidden from attending classes, and was forced to spend the first two weeks of school alone in the library. She was also asked not to socialise with the other children.
Having resisted the school's attempts to make her remove the veil, Azza was stopped at the gate two weeks later when she went to collect her younger brothers and was prohibited from entering the school.
On 3 October, Azza's parents received an official letter informing them that Azza and her three brothers (Seif, 11; Youssef, nine; and Yassin, four) had been dismissed. The decision to dismiss the four students was taken by the school's council of parents, which found Azza and her brothers to "have been a threat to the security of the school and a source of disturbance to its administrative board."
No other school would accept the children until last December, when officials intervened. "They told us that the French system is different from the Egyptian one and that it was already too late to enrol newcomers that late in the year," the mother recalled.
The Champollion School's syllabus, teachers, certificate and administration are purely French. Arabic and religion are not included in the curriculum, while children learn French, instead of Arab, history.
The school made it clear that it follows a secular system and that students, accordingly, are not allowed to manifest any sign of religiosity. That, however, stands in sharp contradiction with the fact that the school has a church and that students are allowed to wear crosses.
"For the school, the headcover is a hostile Islamic sign that affects its safety and its academic philosophy," Adel El-Nabli, the family's lawyer, explains. The school would not talk to the press, so its official position on the controversy and the ruling is not known. Ironically, however, no French law issued between 1989 and 1999 prohibits students from wearing Islamic headdress inside French schools. Students are thus legally allowed to wear whatever they like inside educational facilities, as long as their outfits do not affect the regularity of their attendance or pose a threat to the safety and health of other students.
The head scarf is thus legally allowed in French schools as a matter of personal freedom. No school administration has the legal capacity to dismiss girls or young women who decide to veil, according to El- Nabli, who argued Azza's case on the basis of general principles of freedom of expression, religion, international treaties that prohibit discrimination and the Egyptian Constitution.
More importantly, perhaps, the case has raised many questions about the legal status of the Champollion School. Parents have long perceived the school as an affiliate of the French embassy in Egypt, and the sign on the school's front gate bears the words "French Embassy." In fact, the school was established in 1978 according to an agreement between the Association des Parents d'Elèves de l'Ecole Française (APEEF), a non-governmental association based in Alexandria, and the French Ministry of Education. "The school is, in fact, exercising a commercial activity not covered by the Vienna Convention on matters relating to diplomatic immunity," according to El-Nabli.
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