By ELAINE GANLEY
PARIS (AP) - Shouting "The veil is my choice," hundreds of people marched in Paris on Saturday as part of global protests against the French government's plan to ban Muslim headscarves in schools.
Muslims from all over France took part in the Paris rally, expected to draw at least 10,000. Many of the protesters were women in headscarves and bearded men in robes.
"We're here for our liberty," said Fatiha Hossol, from the southeastern city of Lyon. "It's our religious obligation to honor our God."
Algerian-born Kawtar Fawzy, 30, also traveled from Lyon. "When I came here, they told me France was the land of human rights. I found out it's the opposite," she said, amid protesters waving French flags.
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The government, worried about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, intends to enact the law for the start of the 2004-2005 school year in September. It says Muslim scarves and other obvious religious symbols must be barred from schools to keep them secular and avoid religious strife.
But, many Islamic leaders say the law will stigmatize France's estimated 5 million Muslims, who make up 8 percent of the population.
In London, several hundred people demonstrated across from the French Embassy in the upscale Knightsbridge area, waving signs and chanting: "If this is democracy, we say: 'No, merci!'"
"The (French) government is isolating Muslims and setting a dangerous precedent," said Ihtisham Hibatullah," spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain. "Muslims see it as an aggravation."
Dozens of women, veiled in black scarves, marched through the main city of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, to express their solidarity with Muslims in France.
"Why should anyone interfere with what I want to wear. If I revolt against this transgression I will be called an extremist. Is it fair?" said Asiya Andrabi, whose Dukhtaran-e-Millat, or Daughters of Faith, is a radical separatist group that demands Kashmir's merger with Pakistan.
Other protests were expected in the United States and Canada in what would be the biggest coordinated demonstration against a law that would also ban Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in French public schools.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said such protests are not a positive contribution to the debate.
"If there is a protest one day, there will be a counter-protest the next," he said Friday.
Saturday's march through northeastern Paris to the Place de la Nation was called by the Party of French Muslims. Before the rally began, a small group of men pulled out a prayer rug and said prayers at the Place de la Republique.
Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Mosque of Paris and president of the French council of the Muslim religion, discouraged Muslims from attending, saying the protest would only exacerbate the anti-Muslim climate and create tensions for them in Europe.
He has called for calm among France's Muslims "because we absolutely do not want confrontation." Boubakeur's French Council of the Muslim Faith serves as a link to the government.
Protests also were expected in other French cities and outside French consulates and embassies in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto in Canada, organizers said.
About 3,000 people took part in a similar protest in Paris on Dec. 21. More than half were women, girls and even young children wearing the "hijab," or headscarf. Protests have taken place elsewhere, too. Earlier this month, 700 Muslims marched through the Danish capital of Copenhagen.
In Iraq, an Islamic group distributed an open letter to Chirac in mosques calling for the government to reverse its position. A demonstration drew fewer than 100 students Saturday at Baghdad's Al Mustansiriya University.
Shaheen Kazi, national office manager at the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada, said protests were expected to draw a few thousand people.
"The hijab is so central to the Muslim woman's identity," Kazi said. "If we don't stand up for this issue when it happens in a European country or anywhere else, then it could be like a wave that could carry on throughout Europe and then we don't know how far it would spread."
In London, Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien said the British government supported the right of all people to display religious symbols.
"Whilst it is for individual countries to decide, in Britain we are comfortable with the expression of religion, seen in the searing of the hijab, crucifixes or the kippa," O'Brien said in a statement. "Integration does not require assimilation."
