Posted on 03/08/2004 4:31:26 PM PST by MegaSilver
French identity threatened, law's supporters insist Muslim opponents say discrimination is the real problem
PARIS—Jacques Myard does battle against schoolgirls in Islamic headscarves with the self-professed fervour of his revolutionary ancestors.
"Let's not forget that France was forged by the sword," he says, suddenly rising from his chair as though swept by the urge to defend "la République."
Myard, a National Assembly member of President Jacques Chirac's governing party, speaks with the conviction of seeing the thrust of a bill he proposed waiting only for the president's final proclamation to become law in September.
It bans the wearing of all "conspicuous" religious symbols in public classrooms, including Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps. But there's no doubt in anyone's mind, certainly not Myard's, that the main target of the law is Islamic headscarves.
For Myard, 56, they're a threat to the principles of secularism and equality, raised as defining pillars of the French state during the blood-soaked revolution of 1789.
In this view, he is solidly part of mainstream thinking among France's 60 million people.
The country's Muslim community of about 5 million, the largest in Europe, has suddenly become too big to ignore.
Long relegated to the social margins of urban housing projects, where unemployment and crime are rife, the Muslims' presence is being advertised like never before by a small but growing number of schoolgirls with headscarves.
The convulsions suggest a country on the verge of a national identity crisis.
There seems a general fear that France's model of assimilation, in which people become French by adhering to common values of citizenship, has failed.
The spectre of multiculturalism — what the French call communautarisme — has Chirac warning of violence as social cohesion becomes unglued and the country loses its "soul."
The essence of French identity, Chirac argues, is secularism. The values it nourishes — liberty, equality and fraternity — must be protected by banning public schoolgirls' headscarves.
French fears are generally reflected throughout Europe, where anti-immigration populist parties are on the rise and the headscarf is also an object of heated debate.
With French regional elections days away, some partly interpret Chirac's headscarf ban as a way of fighting off the far-right National Front party.
Muslim groups opposed to the ban argue that the real barrier to integration is discrimination, especially in the job market.
Parents wonder how integration is served by expelling girls from public schools, the prime dispensers of French values, and pushing them into private, religious ones.
Philosophers, of course, have also weighed in.
If a law that obliges people to dress according to religious dictates is considered outrageous, asks Bruno Latour, how can one that obliges people not to do so be considered admirable?
Why should religious symbols be banned and brand-labelled clothing tolerated?
And why should citizens from ethnically diverse backgrounds accept old values that haven't eased social and racial inequality?
Myard insists this is no time to indulge in '60s-style relativism or recoil from the prospect of expelling a few girls from school.
He says principals who balk at doing so must be replaced.
To indicate his resolve, he alludes to the single-mindedness of Jacobin revolutionary leaders who enforced the new order by putting tens of thousands under the guillotine.
"As a Republican — a Jacobin, my dear friend — I apply the law. We have to be firm, and that's all," says Myard, also the mayor of Maisons-Laffitte, a bedroom community near Paris.
"Some people have to realize that they're in France and not in Mecca. And I tell you something, that kind of people only respect people who are firm."
The people Myard has in mind are militants who push the brand of fundamentalist Islam associated with members of Osama bin Laden's extremist network. Myard sees their radical beliefs lurking under every headscarf.
He says countries such as Canada and Britain, where headscarves are allowed in public schools, are dangerously naïve.
"They're playing with fire in London because they're giving complete liberty to people who one day will kill them."
It surely didn't help calm the debate when one of Al Qaeda's top leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri, recently described the French ban as a "grudge the Western crusaders have against Islam."
Last month, the National Assembly voted 494-36 in favour of the law, which will replace a 1989 court ruling that banned religious symbols deemed provocative but left it to individual schools to decide what that meant.
The ministry of education deals with 150 annual cases of girls who refuse to remove their headscarves.
Many students accept a compromise and enter class with bandannas that are tied behind their heads. But last year, the issue resulted in about 10 girls being expelled from public schools.
Says sociologist Edgar Morin, denouncing the law as a gross overreaction: "We used a sledge hammer to break an egg."
But its defenders say the headscarves are part of a bigger trend that has some Muslim women refusing to be touched by male doctors in hospitals.
Lawyer Laurent Levy believes the law will backfire.
By further stigmatizing a whole minority group, he says, more youths will be pushed toward Islam's radical streams.
"Politicians who pushed for this law have laid time bombs that will explode when we least expect it."
Levy, 48, is the father of two headscarf-wearing teenagers, Lila and Alma, both of whom were expelled last September from Henri Wallon high school in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers.
Since then, they've been taking courses at home and slowly withdrawing from mainstream society.
"When they went to a public school, they had friends of all ethnic origins and all religions — that's what national unity is all about," says Levy. "Today, they exclusively meet with friends who come to visit at home, and the large majority of those are practising Muslims.
"In other words, they're being forced into a ghetto."
Levy is a self-proclaimed atheist whose family background is Jewish. His wife is a non-practising Muslim whose parents are from Algeria.
Their daughters were brought up in a secular household but eventually adopted the religion of their Muslim grandparents.
When they first spoke of wearing veils, Levy advised them against it.
Now, he tells them they should adhere to the law and bare their heads in school. But he accepts that it would "feel like a form of violence" for them to do so.
"Politicians don't want to hear this. They act as if they're banning lip-piercing or some whim of fashion."
Levy notes that he and his wife were born in France, as were their daughters. But when their case became public, one minister suggested the girls should go elsewhere if they didn't like the French Republic.
Says Lila, 19: "It's quite simply a rejection of Islam. They start by banning the scarf in school, and then it will be in hospitals and banks and everywhere else."
Levy believes his daughters and others have become the scapegoats for politicians unwilling to reform a school system in which 31 per cent of students from immigrant backgrounds drop out, compared with 14 per cent of those from "native" French families.
The issue has divided those in the Muslim community.
Yesterday, a group called Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive), demonstrated for secular values and women's rights in the streets of Paris.
The group was founded by young Muslim women who banded together after Sohane Benziane, a 17-year-old resident of a housing project in Vitry Sur Seine, was dragged into a basement by young men and burned alive in October, 2002.
Samira Cadasse, one of its founders, says the group takes its name from a saying that comes easy to boys in suburban ghettos: "All women are whores except my mother."
Cadasse, 29, says many young women are being pressured to wear headscarves by older brothers who've turned to Islam after years of being unemployed and marginalized.
"These girls are waiting for strong action from the state to protect them."
Noura Jaballah, past president of the French League of Muslim Women, argues instead that the headscarf liberates women by helping them avoid sexual harassment outside the home.
"These people are afraid of Islam — that's the problem. They're saying that for us to integrate into French society, we have to stop practising our religion," she says, dismissing arguments that headscarves are not obliged by the Qur'an.
Dalil Boubaker, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, is advising young women to go to school in September without headscarves.
"The French don't like the veil?" he asks rhetorically.
"Well, we have to respect that. We're in France, not elsewhere."
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy set up the council last year as a body that would represent France's Muslims in dealings with the government.
He appointed the moderate Boubaker as its president, but when elections were held across the country to the council's regional posts, hard-line groups won 11 of 25 regions.
Boubaker, an Algerian by birth and doctor by training, says most of France's Muslims are attached to the country, despite being treated as "social pariahs."
Fundamentalist groups control many of the country's mosques, he adds, but they make up less than 10 per cent of the Muslim community.
Still, if France fails to end job discrimination and fundamentalists "amuse themselves at playing the little terrorists," Boubaker sees anger increasing on both sides.
"It will be a clash of civilizations," he says. "The veil is already a small clash. If Muslims aren't prudent today, tomorrow there will be fights in the street, the revolt of the youth. There will be shooting — all of it."
Asked if it is too late to avoid violence, Boubaker says: "I don't see what can put the brakes on it."
I hate to say it, but I suspect that a significant amount of the the French leaders want this. It'd provide a convenient excuse for... nevermind. I don't even want to say it.
While France isn't much of a model for social conduct, we can learn from this one. We should have one language--English--in the school systems and for government business. If people want to speak their own language at home, or even on the radio, that's ok, but let's not promote Balkanization. Look where it is getting the French.
In fact, we're heading for worse trouble than the French. At least the French hijabis have to complain in French. In the US, we give them a school in their own language, whatever it might be.
Ahhhhhh! That explains it!
Surrendering?
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