Old article, from International Herald Tribune / New York Times, but back then I'd circled part of the text, thinking about this thread. Some interesting stuff.
First, the article starts out with the now well-known intro on why France is a special case, and why it would thus stand out by pioneering such legislation. (This, obviously, was before the German state of Baden-Wurtemburg also adopted a law outlawing the headscarf in schools - though
not Christian symbols.)
Quote: Guarding secularism, religiously, in France
Scarf ban is seen as guarantee of unity
Monday, February 9, 2004
PARIS Who would have thought a piece of cloth could threaten the stability of the French state?
For several days last week, the National Assembly in France debated the wisdom of a draft law that would ban most religious symbols from public schools. Although the move is aimed at preventing Muslim girls from showing up in the schoolyard with various degrees of swathing on their heads, President Jacques Chirac and his ministers, in a bow to egalitarianism, also have declared that items like Christian crosses deemed too large and Jewish skullcaps will be prohibited.
The debate has little to do with the usual reasons for school dress codes and everything to do with the French state's historical impulse to impose its republican value system on an increasingly diverse population that includes 5 million Muslims, about 8 percent of the population.
The practices of these new arrivals are often cast as a challenge to Christianity, but in many ways they challenge another religion entirely - the unofficial creed of secularism, which underlies the French conception of government and dates to 1789 and the French Revolution itself. In contrast to pluralist societies that try to accept, or even celebrate, cultural differences among their citizens, the French ideal envisions a uniform, secularized French identity as the best guarantee of national unity and the separation of church and state.
This part of the article concludes that "it is natural that France's government would pick the Islamic veil as a symbol of everything un-French and potentially dangerous about its Muslim population", contrasting the image of a Muslim woman with headscarf with that of "the engraving of the 1790's titled "Republican France Giving Its Bosom to All of France"'.
But then it notes that, though "In 1905, a law codified the separation of church and state", the "struggle for a perfect fit between a powerful central republican state and religious practice has never been completely resolved":
Quote:Nor has official France erased symbols of Roman Catholicism, a pillar of its pre-revolutionary identity. The majority of the 11 national holidays, including the feast of the Virgin Mary's assumption into heaven and the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus Christ's disciples, celebrate Catholic events. The Catholic catechism is taught, and the crucifix is hung in public schools in Alsace-Lorraine, which is exempt from the 1905 law because the area was in German hands when it was adopted.
At the same time, Chirac has rejected a proposal that France move toward treating its faiths equally by creating one school holiday apiece for Jews and Muslims. Underscoring the inconsistencies, private Catholic, Jewish and Protestant schools, which would be exempt from the law banning religious symbols, receive state financing. The administrators of France's first Muslim high school, which opened in Lille last autumn, are hoping it, too, will qualify. Some leaders have pledged to create Muslim schools throughout France, meaning the state could find itself financing schools where the head scarf is the norm.
Even some members of the president's own commission have criticized the recent focus on Muslim head scarves, saying it betrays the spirit of their report, which they had hoped would help unify the country.
"The political response is absurd and laughable," the historian René Rémond told Le Monde. "It feeds the illusion that all we have to do to solve the problem of integration is to vote through a law."
Alain Touraine, a sociologist on the commission, told France Inter radio on Friday: "I used to always say to my foreign friends, 'France doesn't have ghettos.' Well, yes, we have ghettos."
Both men criticized Chirac for acting on only one of the commission's 26 recommendations, ignoring proposals for eradicating "urban ghettos" and creating Arabic language programs in schools. That means the huge problem of integrating Muslims into French society is being argued on a much smaller scale, over issues like whether bandannas and beards are religious symbols and when a cross is too big.
