France to Announce Ruling on Head Scarves

As an impassioned debate neared a climax, French officials prepared the way for a possible law banning Islamic head scarves in public schools despite warnings the move could alienate France’s large Muslim community.

French President Jacques Chirac was expected Wednesday to recommend a law forbidding conspicuous religious symbols such as Muslim head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in public schools.

A presidential commission said last week that it favored such a law to preserve the principles of France’s separation of church and state, while integrating the Muslim community. Although directed at all three religions, the recommendation was clearly aimed at countering Islamic fundamentalism.

France’s main Muslim group has said such a law would “stigmatize” the country’s estimated 5 million Muslims – 8 percent of the population – erode religious freedom and amount to an “injustice.” Christian and Jewish religious leaders also have voiced opposition.

France’s Muslim community is the largest in Western Europe. France’s Jewish community, about 1 percent of the population, is also Western Europe’s largest.

The topic took on new life after dozens of girls were expelled from school in the past two years for refusing to remove head scarves.

Politicians on the left and on the governing right want such a law as does a parliamentary commission. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said in an interview published Tuesday in the daily Le Parisien that “it is clear that a judicial vacuum must be filled.”

For many French, the Islamic head scarf symbolizes Muslim militancy and fears that fundamentalists are making dangerous inroads in France. A law is a way for the country to grapple with what the presidential panel described last week as fast-growing militancy.

“The question is no longer freedom of conscience but public order,” said the report by the 20-member commission, issued after six months of interviews with experts, religious leaders, teachers and school pupils.

France has grappled with the scarf issue for nearly 15 years. It began in 1989 when two 14-year-old school girls refused to remove their head-coverings. Over the years, scores of Muslim girls have been expelled for keeping their scarves on.

The French Council of the Muslim Faith, set up this spring to serve as a link between France’s Muslim and the government, expressed deep concern over the commission’s report. It is headed by Dalil Boubakeur, who is also rector of the Mosque of Paris.

“The proposed terms … seem most discriminatory toward Islam,” the council wrote Monday in a letter to Chirac. It criticized “this new vision of secularism which minimizes guarantees of religious freedom.”

Fouad Alaoui, the council’s vice-president and head of a powerful fundamentalist organization, said a law “would be an injustice.”

A handful of labor unions as well as the League for Human Rights jointly voiced disapproval Tuesday of a law, saying they “refuse all stigmatization of a part of the population.”

However, the presidential panel said public services other than schools also have been affected by militancy, with hospital corridors used as prayer rooms, men refusing to let male doctors treat their wives, and women fulfilling national defense duties refusing any rescue operations with men.

Head scarves already are forbidden for people working in the public sector, but that rule – which is not a law – is occasionally broken. A Muslim employee of the city of Paris was recently suspended for refusing to take off her scarf or shake men’s hands.

The panel linked rising anti-Semitism with the new militancy, and said another victim was women’s equality, demeaned by the head scarf.

“If you take the veil from Islamists, nothing is left. They are unmasked,” said Mohamed Abdi, who heads an association that fights for sexual equality within the Muslim community.

“The head scarf is the sign of humiliation, the mark of submission of the woman,” he said in a telephone interview.

Commission members said the law they proposed would protect rather than exclude. However, there are fears of a backlash.

“A law will displace the problem. It will turn the head scarf problem into a war on Islam,” said Mohamed Ennacer Latreche, president of the small but vocal Party of Muslims of France.

A “parallel community” could develop, and “detach itself completely from French society,” he said by telephone.

“This isn’t a defense of secularism. It’s an effort to domesticate Islam,” Latreche said.