Unveiling France
The French president rules out the veil, leaving France's Muslim women in a quandary, writes Jeremy Landor from Paris
French President Jacques Chirac has come out in favour of a commission report on secularism in the public domain which favours legislation outlawing any religious symbol which is large or highly noticeable. The skull cap (kippa) worn by some Jewish males, any kind of head covering for Muslim females and large crosses would be banned. It could pave the way for more school exclusions of Muslim girls and sacking of some Muslim women from public sector employment in France.
Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister who lost to the Gaullist right, took a firm position in the late 1990s: "Schools cannot exclude because they are there to include." The fear is that the law will be perceived as anti-Islamic and aimed at France's population of Arab descent, possibly driving some towards radical Islam. The Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l'Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP), an anti-racism organisation, spoke for many of them when it reacted to the commission's conclusions. "It is one religion which is being targeted." The MRAP fears that whereas most cases of girls wearing headscarves to school were previously solved through negotiation, schools will now feel free to cut out the time-consuming process by simply excluding students.
When two sisters aged 15 and 18, Lila and Alma, arrived at a school in the Aubervilliers suburb of Paris wearing Islamic headscarves in September, a teacher sent one of them home, declaring herself "upset" by how much of the student's head was covered. The head teacher brought her back to class. In October, both girls, known as good students, were excluded from the school. Their father, with whom they live, is a "Jewish atheist" who has tried everything to dissuade his daughters from wearing headscarves. This was not, as some supporters of a legal ban like to think, a case of Muslim males demanding a sign of submission from their womenfolk. It was a form of teenage rebellion. "We would never wear it in a country where it was compulsory," the girls said. A school mediator told the press: "The tension that exists concerning Islam is inflaming the situation, leading to all sorts of unfortunate assumptions."
When Natifa Bergeron, mother of a four-year- old attending a nursery school near Paris, turned up to help take children on a school outing in October, the teacher told her that because she was wearing an Islamic headscarf she would not be allowed to come. "It is the law. It is the rule of secularism," the head of the nursery school said. Fatima Senousi, a Paris social worker, wore her headscarf to work for three years before she was sent home by her employer in September because she was "showing her religious beliefs in an inappropriate way", according to the mayor of Paris. Decisions which blight women's lives are excusable, it seems, if they are taken in the name of secularism.
At its core, the public controversy over the veil is about the failure to understand and accept the growing Arab-Berber-Muslim population in France and the political manoeuvring around the issue. The Front National (FN) was the only party to take a clear position when the veil broke onto the public scene in 1989 after the first two school expulsions. "Islamic culture has arrived on French soil. Now it is taking root symbolically through the wearing of the chador [the head-to- ankle covering] in schools." Since the scare last May when FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen won the first round of the presidential elections, there has been concern among the two largest political parties -- Chirac's Gaullist Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) and the Parti Socialist (PS) -- that voters would continue to drift to the extreme right. They want to occupy some sort of "anti-immigration" ground themselves.
Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, followed by growing support for political Islam in Arab countries -- especially Algeria -- through the 1980s, discrimination and intolerance of the presence of North African workers and their children in France has been laced with Islamophobia. By the 1990s, "the headscarf was becoming, in French society, an opportunity to demonise not only radical Islam, but Islam in general," wrote the sociologist Francoise Gaspard.
The commission took account of the background of the offensive against people of North African origin -- particularly adolescents -- who feel stuck in the housing estates to which they have been confined by years of discriminatory housing, employment and education policies. Le Monde summarised the commission's view of France as a country where "the basis of social consensus is undermined, particularly by the formation of urban and educational ghettos, attacks on the rights of women and discrimination, hostility towards Muslims and the rise of a 'new anti- Semitism'." Feeling under siege in the housing projects and with their origins in the Arab world, many identify with the Palestinians' state of siege, and in some cases they have given in to a simplistic blaming of Jews.
In May this year a group of intellectuals and activists published an open letter opposing exclusion. Their view is that secular schools aim to emancipate rather than exclude. Secularism as defined in laws at the end of the 19th century governs educational institutions and what they do, not their students. Wearing a veil does not "prevent teachers from teaching, nor pupils or students from studying", the letter stated. It is by excluding a pupil that she is "condemned to repression". The punitive approach of some schools can only "accentuate the injustices which working class youth suffer in the districts where they live, especially those who are children of post-colonial immigration",
Veiled pupils, they wrote, are a scapegoat for the problems in French schools: bad behaviour, a high level of truancy and sexist and racist insults and graffiti. It is false to say that the problem is one of a clash of identities -- between France and immigrants, between the Republic and Islam or even between religions. "The main problems are socio-economic and political: liberalisation of the economy, mass unemployment, instability of employment, growing social control and security- driven policies, racial discrimination and social inequality between men and women," the letter claimed.
