The issues in the French debate over head scarves in school
Wieviorka, Michel
THE RECENT FRENCH debate about laibité (secularism or secularity), which was expressed revealingly in the passage of a law that bans the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools,...
...The left did POLITICS ABROAD very well in the spring 2004 regional elections and now hopes to reemerge as a credible national alternative by the next presidential and legislative elections...
...the upsurge of all kinds of communitarianism...
...It refers to a very French idea: a republic can ensure the separation of public and private only by refraining from recognizing distinctive cultural or religious identities within the public sphere...
...This law, it is said, represents Islamophobia...
...One hundred years ago the main issue in French politics was how to separate the Catholic church from the French state...
...In short, the French debate has become "global...
...A minority vocally endorses the idea that France is in fact sending a universal message that should be applauded by everyone who supports the emancipation of women and the idea of modernization...
...Finally, the third dimension is the feelings of those who are affected immediately by it— young, veiled girls...
...One finds this interpretation expressed primarily among middle-class and educated strata in the Arab and Muslim worlds...
...His The Making of Terrorism has been re-published in paperback with a new preface...
...It is discrimination in the guise of universalism...
...France's lalcité appears threatened by them...
...The political talk accompanying the Stasi Commission's deliberations pointed more to a political consensus in the mainstream...
...Here we have a political paradox because both the left and the right were in difficult straits...
...Others insist on the neocolonial, Islamophobic, or racist character of the law and denounce it on the basis of positions that stem, in some cases, from Islamic radicalism...
...It has developed both locally and well beyond France, and has considerable diplomatic and geopolitical implications...
...Discreet symbols of religious affiliation will be tolerated and only "conspicuous" symbols will be banned...
...Feminists have become reinvigorated and feel newly challenged...
...unemployment and massive job insecurity...
...A special aspect of this debate is its international implications...
...MICHEL WIEVIORKA is a professor at l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris and director of CADIS (Centre d'analyse et d'interventiion sociologiques...
...The March 2004 law was in fact supported by a majority of the French, but it simply does not settle the general crisis of French schools, which are helping to reproduce and reinforce social inequalities and racial discrimination...
...It leaves many Muslims very bitter...
...As a result, President Jacques Chirac invited Bernard Stasi, a political figure known for his moderate views, to chair a special commission...
...Activists within France's minorities seem to pose a challenge to the republic's universalist values—to law and to reason...
...Moreover, the debate is far from over...
...There have been strong but varying responses to the French law within the Arab and Muslim worlds...
...The right has been shaken both by the conviction for corruption of its former prime minister, Alain Juppe, and the difficulties it has encountered in its efforts to consolidate as one big party, the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), rather than as an alliance of right-of-center parties...
...Translated from the French...
...and the rise of racism and the revival of anti-Semitism...
...But its growing strength today reflects mainly the economic and social failing of the right and owes nothing to its own positions on lcacite or Islam...
...In September, when the school term begins, we will learn the practical lessons of the new situation...
...Many problems lie ahead...
...The idea of affirmative action, which had been rejected by most politicians and intellectuals throughout the 1990s, is now making some new inroads...
...An earlier version of this appeared in La Vanguardia, February 15, 2004...
...If the question appears so sensitive, it is because it cannot be dissociated from a number of other problems: the crisis in public schools, which have proved incapable of nurturing the French Republic's promises of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity...
...Today the challenge is different: how to invent ways of integrating a new religion, Islam, into public life...
...DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 31...
...Until the tail-end of the hearings, almost no Muslim girls testified before the Stasi Commission...
...This includes the rejection of some secular forms of instruction under the pretext that they are not in keeping with the Quran but also the refusal by some Muslim women of modern medical treatment when it is offered by a male hospital staff...
...Perhaps the law will calm things down...
...In fact, the word laïcité does not translate well into other languages...
...the creation of immigrant ghettos around French cities...
...It was even suggested, after the March 11, 2004, terrorist attack in Madrid, that similar violence might occur in France to protest the March 15 law...
...A French literary panel recently awarded its Political Book Prize to Fadela Amara, main organizer of "Neither Whores nor Doormats," a movement that demands women's rights, especially for North African women living in France...
...Others denounce a more generalized religious obscurantism that they claim accompanies the DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD scarves...
...Some argue that the scarves symbolize women's alienation and indicate that women are victims of domination...
...The challenge becomes visible when head scarves proliferate throughout classrooms...
...The memorandum specifies that a "dialogue" must begin with any student who does not respect the law, before further action is taken...
...Worse than that, their parents may sequester them, try to take them out of school altogether, or give them away at a very young age in arranged marriages (perhaps with a partner far from France...
...The left and the right voted together for the March 15 legislation...
...One consequence may be a boom in private Muslim schools, where girls will be able to wear the head scarf but will also be locked into a tight logic of communitarianism...
...They demanded that their freedom of conscience be respected and rejected claims that they are manipulated by or follow the dictates of fundamentalist fathers who want them to be covered...
...Three Dimensions The answer to the challenge of "head scarves" would have been simple, had it been unidimensional...
...On several occasions, "head scarf affairs" and an upsurge in Islamic radicalism have rattled the populace...
...Members of the Stasi Commission report that their position on the "head scarf' hardened by the discovery, during its hearings, of how widespread these problems are...
...On the basis of the Stasi Commission's report the head of state called for passage of the new Law of March 15, 2004, which will go into effect in the new school year...
...Islam—and in particular, the presence, within public schools, of young girls wearing "Islamic scarves" (the foulards)—has become a source of anxiety since the late 1980s...
...Waiting for September Chirac's new education minister, Francois Fillon, published an administrative memorandum in April to explain how the "head scarf law" will be applied...
...France opposed America's Iraq policy and could not be accused in its foreign policy of hostile intent toward the Arab or Muslim worlds, but the ban on head scarves could nonetheless be viewed as an act of insensitivity and disrespect...
...And finally, this law does not settle the question of Islam's institutionalization in France...
...The first is the most obvious one...
...The left was still suffering from its collapse in the presidential elections of 2002...
...But it entails three distinct social-political dimensions...
...Those who did said they veil themselves out of deep conviction and personal choice...
...A new climate has been created...
...It has been tailor-made against Islam and is freighted with an age-old fear of Arabs and Muslims, all while it claims to reassert republican values...
...THE RECENT FRENCH debate about laibité (secularism or secularity), which was expressed revealingly in the passage of a law that bans the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in schools, surprises many foreign observers...
...They have been forced to reconsider whether or not the underprivileged need help to overcome structural inequalities...
...Politicization The Stasi Commission and the new legislation brought into the French Parliament, and the country's political system as a whole, highly sensitive issues that had been kept out of national political institutions (at least publicly...
...Some people detect lingering French racism in the new law, and see it as a remnant of (or even sequel to) colonialism...
...Although political debate has been reinvigorated— one might say reenchanted—by the issue of secularism, this has not translated into a reinvention of the opposition between left and right...
...It gives teachers, who often become anxious if a head scarf appears, some clear guidelines about how to respond...
...Some dissidents see this law 30 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 not as a message of emancipation but a negation of the subjectivity of those women who must now remove their scarves...
...But it will also remove Islam's presence from the classroom...
...A second dimension of the laIcite argument is the problem of prejudice...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
