Secularity Law, France

Separation of Church and State

Transcript

• In France, it’s a rare sight, but lately the full Islamic veil or niqab has been the subject of fierce debate. On Tuesday a parliamentary committee issued a report calling for a ban on the garment, denouncing it as an unacceptable challenge to the country’s values.
• The wearing of the full veil is the tip of the iceberg: there are scandalous practices hidden behind this veil.
• The simple veil, or hijab, is already banned in French public institutions. Critics, though, fear that this latest move to restrict Islamic dress will further marginalize French Muslims and put some on the road to radical Islam.
• We mustn’t forget that the day after the parliamentary committee was put in place there were messages from Al Qaeda calling on French Muslims to rise up against it; that this would stigmatize them yet again.
• In a country with Europe’s largest Muslim minority, religious dress remains a sensitive issue. But on a practical level, some doubt whether a ban on the niqab can be truly applied.
• They can’t impose this law on French women and on foreigners, I mean tourists, because a lot of people come here from the Gulf wring the niqab. Are they going to stop them at the airport? It’s impossible.
• The authors of this week’s report, though, insist a ban is not only workable but also essential to protect France’s secular values.

By transforming the headscarf into a symbol of difference, the headscarf ban has enlarged a cultural and political divide.

The headscarf debate has its origins in the French republican ideal of secularity, or laicite, which mandates the strict separation of church and state. This ideal was first tested at the national level in 1989, when three Muslim girls were suspended from a public middle school for refusing to remove their headscarves, and culminated in 2004 with the adoption of a law on secularity that bans the wearing of “conspicuous” signs of religious affiliation in public schools. Although the law prohibits Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, and large crosses in addition to the Muslim headscarf, it [Page 1288]disproportionately targets girls who wear the hijab. The law distinguishes between “conspicuous” and “discreet” religious symbols, including small crosses, stars of David, or small Qur'ans. French Muslim girls have devised several tactics to circumvent the ban, including shaving their heads and wearing bandanas instead of headscarves. Similar bans are under consideration or in effect in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

By transforming the headscarf into a symbol of radical or inassimilable difference, the headscarf ban has enlarged the cultural and political divide between the mainstream French state and its increasingly visible Islamic immigrant population. The ban reflects an understanding of certain religious practices as incompatible with the ideals of French republicanism and modernity. It also incorporates prevalent Western understandings of the headscarf or, more broadly, the veil as a monolithic symbol of patriarchal oppression, cultural tradition, and Islamic fundamentalism.

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