Chirac's determination to ban Muslim headscarves from schools will cause years of confrontation

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Secularism gone mad

A 13-year-old girl is an exemplary pupil in every way; she listens carefully to her teachers, does her homework and is a cheerful member of the class. But in one respect, according to President Jacques Chirac yesterday, her behaviour threatens nothing less than the social peace and national cohesion of the French nation - she insists on wearing a headscarf. All around her, pupils are wearing the kind of outlandish clothes and hairstyles one would expect of teenagers anywhere in Europe. But there is one garment that, the president has declared, challenges the secularity of republican France: the square metre or so of material that covers this girl's hair. It seems preposterous: how can the clothing of schoolgirls become an issue of such enormous symbolic weight that for 14 years it has been the touchstone of a debate about the French constitution, about what it is to be French and how France should "integrate" its 3.7 million Muslims - the largest Muslim minority in Europe? (Significantly, France talks of integration, not multi-culturalism.) It is not just schoolgirls who will be affected but also public servants; a juror was even dismissed during a trial because she was wearing a headscarf. The French state must be seen to be entirely neutral in all its dealings, and Chirac yesterday endorsed the findings of an official commission and asked parliament to pass a law banning all "ostentatious religious symbols".

From this side of the Channel, one can easily pour scorn on Gallic arrogance. What lies ahead is many more years of confrontation between the French state and Muslims, and a dangerous reinforcement in the Muslim community of the perception of Islamophobia, of exclusion and persecution. One can reasonably ask, as David Drake at Middlesex University does after studying this issue, why so much political, intellectual and emotional energy has been spent on this subject rather than on far more pressing issues of integration such as the high rates of unemployment and deprivation in the Muslim community.

But any smug sense of British superiority is misplaced. The themes that underlie this vexed issue in France are as evident here: this is the latest chapter in a long and troubled history of how liberalism interacts with religion in Europe. Liberalism, with its cherished principles of rationality, individual rights and the rule of law, wanted religion to be a purely private matter, but such a concept makes no sense to a profoundly social faith such as Islam. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is over questions of belonging and identity: are you French or Muslim, or can you be both? We haven't resolved these questions here - note, for example, the questioning of the loyalty of the Muslim community by Denis MacShane, the Foreign Office minister. The difference is that while France has had an intense debate that has split every political allegiance, Britain has managed to dodge such a showdown.

The roots of France's secularism lie in the struggle against the overweening power of the Catholic church: how to cut it down to size and assert the primacy - and neutrality - of the state. France's schools were the vehicle to turn Catholic peasants into French republican citizens, points out Drake, and state education was how you built an integrated, cohesive nation. The French secularist tradition has its own coherent logic, but it was conceived in one set of historical circumstances, and is now being applied in another, vastly different set. The end result of this logic - a generation of angry Muslims - could be, quite literally, catastrophic.

The approach of British liberalism has been to "liberalise" religion over the past 200 years; trimming it into a "system of ethics, propped up by God", as the political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh puts it. From John Locke onwards, Britain wanted its religion reasonable; in effect, it turned religion into a pale form of itself. The miracles and extraordinary events of the gospels were reduced to allegory and one was left with that very English type of faith: tolerant, accommodating Anglicanism.

At the heart of liberalism is a profound certainty of itself and of its own superiority, argues Parekh. That kind of certainty cannot but lead to some closure of the imagination, a limit to its understanding of whatever is profoundly different from it - such as Islam. He believes that the fear and certainty are born out of fear that liberalism is a "rare and delicate way of living that is out of accord with normal human behaviour", and thus always in danger from the forces of barbarianism. The two-sided tragedy of liberalism is that it doesn't know its own limits, and neither does it know its own strength. If it knew both of these, it would find the self-confidence and humility to understand and learn from those who challenge it.

Liberalism's impoverished imaginative resources are self-evident. It has no vocabulary for, or understanding of, a range of human experiences, and ends up borrowing the religious language of an earlier time. We talk of the "evil" of a murderer or the "vision" of a leader. Words such as "miracle", "mystery" and "reverence" are still used because they convey human experiences, even if the religious beliefs that once attempted to explain them no longer exist.

Take the celebrations of Christmas. They may have lost their theological underpinning, but they have not lost their narrative force. We still respond to this tale of wonder, innocence, reverence for the mystery of new life and the annual cycles of rebirth. Liberalism has nothing to say about any of this; it has no way of appealing to these intense, vivid emotions. It has, if you like, tidied up human nature by ignoring large chunks of its make-up - that way, it's more explicable and easier to organise.

Liberalism has always regarded religious faith as irrational and emotional, and as something that must be corralled into safe irrelevance. By the latter half of the 20th century, it was within sight of achieving its goal, as European Christianity crumbled. Nowhere was this more true than in France. That victory only reinforced the French liberal tradition's sense of its own superiority and historical inevitability; the assumption was that wealth and time would between them kill off the last vestiges of religious faith. But this has not proved true of France's Muslims, and now, disastrously, liberalism has resorted to the full force of the law to buttress its supremacy. France is providing an example par excellence of what the French would call a "dialogue de sourds " - a dialogue of the deaf.

From Afghanistan to the American south, religion is resurgent in more violent and assertive manifestations than at any time in history. Liberalism appears blind to its own forms of self-assertion and aggression (economic, military or cultural), and hence to its own part in the generation of this ghastly phenomenon.

Been there and done that in Albania.

Albania: Pioneers Path Leads Through Church-State Minefield By Alban Bala/Don Hill

Three schoolgirls in Albania have been barred from attending their public school for insisting upon wearing headscarves as badges of Muslim modesty. The school's director says it is a simple matter of enforcing school rules. But RFE/RL correspondents Alban Bala in Tirana and Don Hill in Prague say the issue is a symptom of deep cross-currents in Albanian culture.

Tirana, 12 February 2001 (RFE/RL) -- Albania is searching for the proper role of religion in the nation's culture in 2001.

For nearly a quarter of a century until the fall of communism in 1992, Albania was a self-declared atheist state, where religious practice in all forms was banned. In recent weeks, three determined teenage school girls have drawn new attention to a revival of religion in Albanian life.

Against their high school's explicit regulations, they began last month to wear headscarves as symbols of Muslim modesty. The school's director, a Roman Catholic, barred them from classes.

The Albanian Constitution is clear: "Nobody may be forced or forbidden to take part in a religious community or in its practices, or to make public its ideas or beliefs."

The young women say they do not consider themselves part of any political movement. They decided to follow Islam on their own initiative, standing up to the opposition of their parents.

This is Ermira Dani, a 17-year-old student in the northeast Dibra region:

"To be a teenager with status as a minor, making such a decision for your life and then running up against many people, first against your own family and then against your school -- which is very important to me -- represents a huge difficulty, and I feel morally very hurt."

Since the days of the prophet Muhammad in the Western calendar's 7th century, there has been a powerful strain of community-building and accommodation in Islam that avoids religious-governmental confrontation. But in modern Islam, there also are states like Pakistan and Afghanistan -- often called "fundamentalist" -- that seek to base their governments on Sha'ria, or Islamic law. And then there is Turkey, where governments from Kemal Ataturk's in 1924 have fought to preserve a secular character.

Since it was founded almost a century ago, Albania has above all consistently been a country that chooses its own path. During World War Two, the Albanians, with a long tradition of religious tolerance, defied the Nazis and refused to allow persecution of Jews in their country. Under communism, they broke with the Soviet Union in 1960 over de-Stalinization. Albania became the most isolated state in Europe.

Now in post-communist times, the government of Prime Minister Ilir Meta wants to move his country westward.

The nation is guided by its traditional tolerance among its Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic religions. This tradition prescribes that as long as one is Albanian, one's religious preference is one's own business. With this goes a wariness toward any religious attitude -- fundamentalist Islam, for example -- that might be imposed from outside the country,

The director of the public school where Dani and her friends insist on covering their heads says: "They are free to attend a religious school if they want, but if they are to attend this one, they have to obey the rules."

Deputy Minister of Education Andrea Marto, a member of the ethnic Greek minority, told our correspondent that he agrees:

"There is no reason to be concerned. We are not violating human rights. Education Ministry norms, our constitution and law all require students to obey rules, including about how they may dress in school."

Albania has adopted the custom of many European nations of appointing an independent official to serve as an ombudsman, an advocate for the public. People's Attorney Ermir Dobjani is considering a defense of the headscarf students. But he says:

"This is a difficult problem to solve. The decision taken by the people's attorney's office will attract the interest of the domestic public and also of the international public."

Dobjani says he is not overly concerned by the public scrutiny. He plans to consult other, experienced, European ombudsman in deciding on his position.

Nearly 70 percent of the population is nominally Muslim. The resurgence in religion so far has been predominantly a movement among the country's young people.

For many months, Muslim students throughout Albania donned scarves without eliciting comment. But since the news reports about Ermira Dani and her schoolmates, the issue has become a public one.

In the latest development, the Directorate of Education in the capital Tirana has ordered public high schools to prescribe a school uniform for all students. The uniform will exclude any religious identification.

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