Chiraq bans Muslim head scarves in State Schools

i would generally agree with frank; religion and anything that goes with it should best be practised in a personal setting. however, i find that the more i think about it, the more my opinion starts to wander (MUST STOP THINKING !). when religion is practiced in a way that does not set out to purposely offend others, i feel i don't have much of a problem with it (it's not what i would do, but if others want to do it and it makes them feel better, why not). i've been to a bar mitzvah, to the vatican, to the ordination of a catholic priest(a fellow i had worked with for many years and whom i would call afriend), had lunch and dinner with muslims and hindus, and have never really felt uncomfortable in any of these situations. as i said before, I WOULD NOT WANT DO IT (become a catholic/muslim/hindu etc ), but i can get along with others who feel a need for it. when it comes to head scarfes, crosses ... , again, it does not bother me as long as no one tries to dress me up with it. perhaps i am not very consistent/rigid in the way i live my life, but that's the way i am. the wearing of the "burqua" perhaps is a step over the line. i understand that the wearing of the burqua is quite often imposed by males upon females (even though some muslim women say that they have chosen to wear the burqua). in canada quite a few sikhs have settled, and if they are true believers i understand that the men must wear the special headcovering. (of course not every sikh wears the headcover). there was some discussion as to whether sikh police officers should be allowed to wear the headcover. it now seems to have been accepted and even in the RCMP sikhs may wear their headcover(as a former british soldier wrote in a letter to the editor at our local paper : "they were good enough to fight for the empire during the war and no one objected to their wearing their headcover then, so what's the problem now ? ... good point in my opinion). so where do i stand on this ? as long as "believers" don't attempt to force other fellow citizens to adopt their practices/gowns/scarfes ... ; let them go in peace ! LIVE AND LET LIVE ! hbg

Nice post, Hamburger.

I would find it difficult to argue against Hamburger's point of view; i also find it ridiculous to object to a move by the French government, meant to resolve a growing controversy, consistent with a policy of the republic for more than a century, and, apparently at least, supported by a majority of the populace.

Which is why one probably ought not to meddle in business not strictly their own.

once you let a bunch of foreigners into the country, they'll start getting uppity(look who is talking). look at what the europeans did to the native indians. i doubt very much, that edicts and laws will prevent the muslims from wielding greater influence in the western european countries in the future. eventually the "foreigners" will become part of the establishment and start using their voting power to exert their will. from what little i know, japan has probably remained as the only developed country that has managed to remain unaffected by this direct kind of influence of foreign cultures by making it difficult, if not impossible for foreigners to become japanese citizens. even germany had it's first muslim(turkish parents) member of parliament (he is currently studying in the states on a scholarship !). hbg

Well, it's exactly the same in Germany - sorry to correct you, nimh.

Polls only know this by exactly a) asking people, b) just guessing it.

Well, of course - hello! ;-) Thats what pollsters do - they ask people stuff. As in, 1) what ethnic group do you belong to, 2), what did you vote?

Thing is, question #1 is a lot more taboo, in general, in France than in Germany or Holland. Thats all I was saying there.

Sorry, just re-reading some dozen threads and hundred of responses - so I missed that :wink:

I only wanted to explain that no-one here really can't count voters by "ethnity": we are Germans (although police reports sometimes speak of "Russian Germans" and "Polish Germans").

Is it just possible that the edict has more to do with prejudice than head covering? Although France is in the lead they are not the only nation to ban head covering.

Well, the French are living with this prejudice since 1789, when they seperated state and church.

Is that true? The only other country I can think of that had a ban on headscarves in schools was, paradoxically, Turkey - where, ever since Ataturk, the state has been extremely vigilant about keeping Islam strictly in to the private realm.

There has been controversy in Germany concerning the wearing of scarfs.

Commentary > The Monitor's View
from the December 19, 2003 edition

Head Scarf Isn't Haute Couture?

To visit the 12th-century Gothic cathedral in St. Denis, near Paris, is to see a paradox of France today. Inside are the glories of medieval Christianity and the tombs of monarchs, while on the square outside is a huge market frequented almost entirely by Muslims.
This immigrant minority has long posed a challenge for France, one that came to a boil this week when President Jacques Chirac decided to support a proposed ban on Muslim girls wearing head scarves in public schools.
Perhaps as many as 5 million Muslims, mostly from France's former North African colonies, now live in the country - the largest Muslim population in the European Union. Their difficulty in assimilating into traditional French society has led to deep social tensions. Recently some radical Muslims have even taken to attacking French Jews. The blame for this anger lies partly with Islamists who hate French secularism and modernity. But French bigotry also drives young Muslims into the Islamists' camp.
This prejudice stems not only from lingering Gallic tribalism but the republic's difficult relations with religion. Much of French history after the 1789 Revolution saw a struggle between secular republicans and Roman Catholic conservatives. The result is a state "secularism" hostile not only to the church but to religious minorities. Few among the French attend mass but they faithfully observe Sunday store closings and Catholic holidays.
Their worry is that Muslim religious demands threaten secularism - which is reinforced through public education - and progress in women's equality. Others share a dislike of Islam dating back to Charles Martel's defeat of the Moors at Tours in 732. For both groups, head scarves in schools are an affront.
Mr. Chirac's popular decision comes in response to a recent commission report recommending a ban on Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, and "large" Christian crosses from schools. It also proposed school holidays for Muslim Eid el-Kabir (which marks the end of the pilgrimage season) and Jewish Yom Kippur - an idea Chirac rejected.
The president's decision, just three months before regional elections, is an attempt to placate the right and tamp down a big threat to French democracy - the extreme-right National Front. But it will only further alienate Muslims - stuffed in overcrowded suburbs like St. Denis and afflicted by prejudice, crime, and unemployment - while doing nothing to resolve the real issues separating that community from the rest of France. It may also drive Muslim girls out of state schools into Islamic classrooms, further hindering integration.
Other Western democracies allow the display of religious headgear and jewelry, yet survive. Bigotry and lack of opportunity, not head scarves, are the threat to France.

OK, talk is cheap, I went to try it out.

As for Germany - a google search on <wahl* tuerkische deutsch* umfrage> (= <election* turkish german poll>), immediately yields the following citations among the first ten results:


http://www.tgd.de/tgd/de/presse/pressemitteilungen/2002.html


http://www.gruene.de/immigruen/texte/wahlen.htm

But on the other hand, when it comes to France, I've tried some two dozen combinations of words like <sondage> (poll) and <elections>, names of french political parties <ps pcf ump> and names of minority groups <magreb*. maroc*, alger*, etranger*> - and found zilch - nothing. With the same words I did find stuff about Luxemburg, Belgium and even Quebec, but not about France.

Which is frustrating, cause I am getting quite curious about how minority groups vote in France! That I can't find it can of course be due to my lack of Googling skills in French - it's not exactly my first language - or it can be due to polling according by ethnicity being more or less taboo according to French standards.

Proponents of such a taboo will say that France is a nation of greater equality for not making such differentiations between ethnic groups in day-to-day business. Kinda the same argument the Californian Republicans were making about their referendum drive to make registration by ethnicity illegal. And one might say that they have a point, somewhere: the more you differentiate and specify difference, the more you can discriminate, too, after all.

But acknowledgement as a separate group also allows you to claim arrangements more specifically focused on your community's needs and features. Plus, it can gain you a strategic foothold, for example by being recognized - and then courted - by the political parties as a specific electoral market. I know that in Holland and the UK, political parties have started to incorporate ever more candidates from minority groups in order to 'woo' these ethnic electoral markets. How is that in France?

This is what the Moroccan newspaper Liberation noted about it:

In 2002, not a single politician of North-African or sub-Saharan African origin was elected to the parliament. The only black politician who was elected in 1997 was not re-elected. In the regional assemblies, there are a total of 4 deputies from these groups, or 0,24% of the total.

"France, in this question, is very much behind other European countries. There are four deputies of Turkish origin in the [German] Bundestag, nine deputies of Pakistani, Antillean or African origin in the United Kingdom."
"Paul Oriol [..] has calculated that in 2001, in the French parties, one found a average of [only] 2% of officials of whom the names had a North-African or African appearance".

It would seem - my conclusion - that in nations that insist on being "colourblind", people of colour end up being invisible.

No.

The only "contraversy" has been in how to read existing laws.
Therefor, the Fedral Constitutional Court had decided that this is genarraly allowed in schools, if it isn't forbidden by state law.
Thus, two states are going to introduce such a law - besides them Bavaria, where 'crosses' are to shown in classrooms by state law as well (the only German where such happens).

Today's newspaper featured comments from German Chancellor Schroeder. He told Bild that he thought teachers should not wear headscarves - but also that a ban on school students wearing headscarves, like the one issued in France, would not be possible according to German law.

The headscarf debate has also emerged elsewhere in Europe along with Muslim immigration.

Germany's 16 states are split over whether to introduce bans on head scarfs. Some argue it's not necessary, but Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg this year introduced legislation that would prohibit the wearing of headscarves in schools.

In 1999, thousands of Muslims in Turin, Italy, marched to demand that women be allowed to wear veils in photos for official identity documents. While such headscarves aren't banned, a woman's face must be visible in official photos.

Ref http://www.helenair.com/articles/2003/12/12/national/a02121203_01.txt

au

As nimh said that only refers to TEACHERS.
That's, what the laws and especially our basic law says - we don't rely on newspapers.

No, apparently not (looked it up). The only thing they register in the census, it seems, is whether someone .. a) was born in France, b) became a Frenchman by naturalisation or choice or c) is a foreigner. No further specification. This is in strong contrast to the Anglosaxon tradition of specifying one's ethnic group identity to some detail. (See here for specimens of census forms).

European standards vary greatly. In Germany, too, a "decision of the Federal Constitutional Court bann[ed] the collection of ethnic data". But nationality is counted in the census, and since Germany has a very strict citizenship law, most immigrants and even many of their children still have a foreign nationality. And thus the Federal Statistical Office has a wealth of data available, anyway, about the number of Turks, Yugoslavs, Poles etc in Germany.

In France, however, the very liberal citizenship laws mean that most immigrants and their children are of nationality French. And ethnicity is not asked about or counted. As a result the census cant say much, whatsoever, about their numbers. An interesting OSI article about European standards on collecting ethnic data has this to say about it:



As a related OSI article summarises: "France presents another extreme: the proclaimed unitary character of the Republic does not accommodate the notion of a “minority,” and accordingly no ethnic data collection is authorised."

The Dutch, meanwhile, work more according to Anglosaxon standards. For example, on this Central Bureau of Statistics page you can see that for both the actual immigrants and their children who were born here, their "group of origin" is specified as Moroccan, Surinamese, etc.

The OSI articles again specify why this is done:

- "The approach adopted in the UK (and the Netherlands) has been strongly influenced by the North American tradi­tion of race relations and ethnic relations, with the aim of combating racial dis­crimination and ethnic inequality. [..] Nowadays, most official statistical surveys in the UK make a distinction based on ethnic groups whose integration is the key focus of interest."
- "The UK has an advanced anti-discrimination framework in place, providing for gathering data on the basis of ethnicity and race."

Without collecting data on ethnic groups in society, its hard to measure to what extent discrimination takes place, too. The risk is that, by shaping the statistical practice on the basis of the unitary ideal, like France does (each citizen is equal, and thus we should not discriminate between them by applying labels or categories) - one becomes unable to measure to what extent the day-to-day reality does not match that ideal of equality and non-discrimination. Instead of tackling the actual problems of discrimination and unequality and the challenges of cultural difference, you end up trying to make them invisible - superimposing the ideal of the unitary nation of equal citizens over them as if just reasserting that ideal will make the divergences from it in real life go away.

I dont speak Portuguese myself, but just going on the words that I can recognize, I think the website that has the specimens of census forms concludes the same thing:


Again - in nations that insist on being "colourblind", people of colour tend to end up just being invisible - with no recourse for having their specific, "Other" needs, requirements and experiences met and acted on.

Yes, we did have some of the discussion here, too, recently. For years we kind of laughed about that strange obsession of the French about headscarves (the debate there has gone on for over a decade now), but Fortuyn did eventually bring it up here, too.

Because of the strong, historic role of state-funded, religious (Catholic, Protestant etc) schools in our country, the discussion isn't going much anywhere towards any kind of general ban, to be sure. The Christians will defend the right of the Muslims to wear headscarves, out of fear that the secular nationalists of the List Fortuyn etc will turn on their schools next.

But a first exception was made when it came to the niqab and the burqa, which some Afghan students started wearing to school. These are the veils that cover the entire face, and leave only holes for the eyes. An Amsterdam vocational training institute where they educate primary school teachers-to-be, for example, prohibited students from wearing the naqib and burqa.

The reason that was given was wholly practical, though - i.e., that one can never be a good teacher for small children if you wear these all-covering face veils. No question of principle against headscarves as such was brought.

Commentary > Opinion
from the January 05, 2004 edition

French tussle over Muslim head scarf is positive push for women's rights

By Cheryl Benard

ARLINGTON, VA. – French President Jacques Chirac has been sharply criticized by Muslim clerics around the world for his recent call for a ban on the Islamic head scarf, or hijab, in French public schools. Mr. Chirac's move has been attacked as a curtailment of personal freedom and an assault on Islam.
But the proposed ban has also kicked loose a debate among Muslims everywhere. Indeed, a growing number of Muslims worldwide are coming forward to say the hijab is not a valid symbol either of freedom or Islam.
"Neither the Koran, nor the hadith [the sayings of the prophet Muhammad] require women to wear a head scarf," says Gammal Banna, the Egyptian author of several works on the rights of Muslim women and brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential radical Islamic movement with offshoots worldwide. While telling Agence France-Presse that he did not support the French president's interference in the personal choice to wear a head scarf, Mr. Banna noted, "The head scarf is not an obligation, but derives from an erroneous reading of the Koran."

Nor is the hijab a good symbol for freedom. Throughout the Islamic world the hijab is often something girls and women wear because they're forced to - a symbol of restriction and intimidation, not freedom. Millions of women worldwide are daily threatened - and substantial numbers even assaulted, maimed, or killed - for refusing to wear whatever the local male authorities decide they should be wearing.

In countries such as Saudi Arabia, special religious patrols beat, insult, and arrest women who aren't covered according to their stringent specifications. In Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, hundreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed. In post-Taliban Afghanistan, women have been raped for daring to think they could now go without theburqa.

In March 2002, 15 Saudi girls ran for their lives when their school caught fire, without wasting precious time to first wrap themselves in their abayas (black robes that are mandatory female attire). Better dead than bare-headed, the religious police decided, and forced the girls back into the burning building and fiery deaths.

For most Muslim women, a head scarf is just a small part of oppressive attire that includes large, bulky garments that impair vision, impede movement, stifle breathing, and are unbearably hot in the summer. This, too, is un-Islamic. "God desires ease for you; he does not desire hardship for you," the Koran states.

As a "symbol," the hijab says that women's bodies are sinful, that women really shouldn't be out in public, that there can be no innocent interaction between women and men, and that the obligation for guaranteeing public morality rests on women alone.

Increasingly, Muslim women and their supporters - even in arch- conservative Saudi Arabia, where some of the most severe restrictions on women have the force of law - argue that extreme dress codes for women are not just un-Islamic, but anti- Islamic. The Koran supports their position. "There is no compulsion in religion," it states. A woman who wears the hijab out of fear acquires no merit, and the person exercising the compulsion is committing a sin.

When the reformist Afghan King Amanullah decided to liberate his country's women from their stifling burqas in the 1920s, he called together an assembly of the country's most conservative religious leaders, handed them a Koran, and asked them to point to the passage requiring women to veil. The religious leaders couldn't do it, because no such passage exists.

There are three sections in the Koran that deal with the issue of dress. The first instructs men and women to dress modestly. All people are to cover "that which is customarily concealed," in other words, what we think of as "private parts."

A second passage advises the prophet Muhammad to "enjoin the believing women to draw their covering over their bosom. That is more proper, so that they will be respected and not molested."

A third passage deals only with Muhammad's wives. Muhammad didn't like his younger wives to be chatted up by young men who didn't recognize them as members of his household. When fundamentalists argue that Muslim women should conceal themselves, remain secluded, and not interact freely with men, they refer to this passage, which was never intended to apply to average Muslim women: "Wives of the Prophet, you are not like other women. If you fear Allah, do not be careless in your speech, lest the lecherous should lust after you. Show discretion in what you say. Stay in your homes and do not display your beauty."

Fundamentalists contend that unveiled women inspire lewd thoughts in men, leading them into sin. Islam, however, holds that no one is responsible for the sins of another. The Koran even tells Muslims how to deal with temptation: "Tell the believing men to lower their gaze, and tell the believing women to lower their gaze."

Muhammad was no proponent of sexual segregation. He enjoyed the company of women, sought their advice, nominated them to significant posts in the community such as market supervisor and mosque custodian, and named several of them as authoritative experts to be consulted after his death on the interpretation of Islam. Men and women prayed together in his mosque and attended "co-ed" entertainment there. The prudish apartheid of today's fundamentalists cannot be laid at his feet.

Ironically, France's new secular dress code may end up taking Islamic society a step forward by sending Muslims back to their own religious texts for review. They'll then discover that Islamic orthodoxy never truly required the restrictions on women that conservatives and fundamentalists demand.