Chirac backs ban on veil
French President Jacques Chirac last week announced his support for a ban on the wearing of the Muslim veil in French public institutions, including schools, writes David Tresilian from Paris
In a move designed to reinforce the separation of religion and state in France and the country's tradition of secularism, French President Jacques Chirac last week announced his support for the banning of "conspicuous" religious symbols in French state schools, including the wearing of large crosses for Christians, veils for Muslim girls, or skullcaps for Jewish boys.
In the course of a 35-minute speech at the Elysée Palace in Paris before an invited audience of the French establishment Chirac announced his support for the recommendations of a 60-page report on secularism in France that had also called for the banning of conspicuous political symbols in schools and the creation of official holidays on the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur and the Muslim festival of Al-Eid Al-Kebir.
In his speech Chirac did not support the banning of conspicuous political symbols or the creation of new religious holidays, instead using the occasion to review "the values of tolerance and respect for others...which make up the greatness of France" before announcing his support for a ban on the Muslim veil or head scarf in French state schools.
Growing inequalities in France and the existence of urban ghettos were threatening the social contract and cohesion on which the republic rested, Chirac said. US-style identity politics "could not be the choice of France", since the danger came from "division, discrimination and confrontation". Therefore, it was now more than ever necessary to insist upon the French tradition of secularism by banning the wearing of symbols indicating religious affiliations in state schools.
Legislation will now be drawn up making the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French state schools an offence, a ban coming into law in September 2004.
Chirac's announcement came following the submission of a report two weeks ago that had led to headlines in the French press and heated debate over recommendations widely considered to target France's Muslim community.
A debate over whether young Muslim women should be allowed to wear veils or head scarves to class, or whether this is a challenge to the secular traditions of the French state and should not be allowed, has rumbled on in France for over a decade.
In 1989, the Conseil d'État, the highest French constitutional authority, ruled that "students should be allowed to express their religious beliefs in educational establishments, as long as this respects the principle of pluralism and the liberty of others."
However, following cases where young women have been excluded from school in France for wearing veils or head scarves, a Commission on the Application of the Principle of Secularism was set up earlier this year to decide the matter, and it was this commission that recommended that conspicuous religious and political symbols be banned.
In order to halt "confrontations over religious questions" in French state schools, the report said that "conspicuous symbols.... indicating religious or political affiliation" should be banned, such as "large crosses, veils or skullcaps". However, "discrete symbols, such as medals, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Qur'ans" were exempted from the report's recommendation of a ban.
In his speech last week, Chirac indicated that while a law was "obviously necessary" to ban the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in state schools, carrying smaller, discrete signs "naturally remained possible".
Before Chirac announced his support for a ban commentators in the French press had stressed that a law incorporating the recommendations of the report could lead to difficulties in deciding when a religious symbol was "conspicuous" enough to lead to sanctions.
Elsewhere, the report had recommended that legislation should be passed making it an offence for patients in hospital to refuse to be treated by doctors or nurses of the opposite sex, and that companies should have the right to regulate the dress of employees.
In his speech last week, Chirac indicated his support for legislation making it an offence for patients to refuse the care they were offered on religious grounds. In addition, he said that French labour law would be revised to allow employers to regulate the wearing of religious signs if these were thought undesirable for security reasons or for reasons of customer relations.
In recent years, there have been many widely reported cases in France of Muslim women being sacked or suspended from their jobs for wearing veils or head scarves to work, as well as cases where Muslim patients have refused medical attention from personnel who are not themselves Muslim or are of the opposite sex.
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, which had earlier carried the complete text of the report and last week published extracts from Chirac's speech, the testimonies of teachers, head teachers, hospital staff and others regarding "increasing communitarian tensions" in French public institutions had "strongly impressed the Parisian intellectuals who made up the ranks of 'the wise' sitting on the committee", leading it to make the recommendations on which Chirac acted.
According to the report, the French tradition of secularism and the strict separation of religion from the state was the best way to protect individual freedom of conscience and individual rights, as well as the neutrality of the state and the equality of all French citizens.
"No group, no community, should be allowed to impose its confessional identity on anyone else," the report wrote. However, there were "extremist groups at work in our country trying to test the resistance of the Republic and push some young people into rejecting France and its values".
Chirac's speech in support of the report's recommendations immediately gave fresh impetus to the heated debate in the French media caused by the publication of the original report.
For the French newspaper Le Monde, it was unfortunate that at a time "when so many vital questions should be at the centre of public debate -- persistent mass unemployment, still- awaited economic growth, a divided Europe, stalled reforms -- the only one that attracts people's attention and passions....is secularism," according to a front-page column signed by the paper's editor Jean-Marie Colombani.
In its editorial last Friday, the paper said that a law against the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools would "inevitably lead to stigmatising, marginalising and excluding a part of the population when the country needs integration more than ever".
"What kind of strange country is this," the paper asked, in which "the president mobilises all his political energy around the question of the 'conspicuous' affirmation of a religion that is practised, at most, by one million people" out of a total of 60 million. "Behind this strange proclamation that schools are 'republican sanctuaries' is there not at work a move to stigmatise and exclude a tiny minority, using that minority's difference, religion and origins as a pretext?"
Commentators have also pointed out that religious symbols can be worn for different reasons, and that young women who wear them cannot necessarily be considered religious fundamentalists or as terrorised by the demands of male authority figures, as the report had suggested.
Nevertheless, an open letter addressed to President Chirac that appeared in the French fashion magazine Elle this month and signed by dozens or prominent French women, including Fadela Amara, founder of the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), a group with a strong following among French women of North African origin, said that "the Islamic veil sends us all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, back to a situation of discrimination against women that is intolerable."
The letter repeated the widely shared perception in France that the wearing of the veil or head scarf by women is a sign of female submission, forced on young women of immigrant origin by their fathers or brothers.
According to another open letter that appeared in the left-of centre magazine Le Nouvel Observateur some years ago, signed by the distinguished historian Elisabeth Badinter and the Trotskyite Régis Debray, among others, "to tolerate the Islamic head scarf [in French state schools] would be to open the door to those who have decided, once and for all and without discussion, to give in without a fight... By giving de facto authorisation to the Islamic headscarf, symbol of feminine submission, you give carte blanche to fathers and brothers, that is to say to the hardest patriarchy of the planet."
