France Debates Religious Garb in Schools

12/23/2003

France Debates Religious Garb in Schools

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." - Italian Proverb

FRANCE DEBATES RELIGIOUS GARB IN SCHOOLS

The Wall Street Journal ("France Divided Over Ban On Religious Garb in Schools," December 12, 2003) reported that France is currently engaged in an emotional debate about the wearing of religious clothing and items in its schools. This debate erupted when school officials excluded Muslim girls who were wearing traditional head scarves. A presidential panel recently recommended a law forbidding head scarves and other religious symbols in schools, including Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses.

The head of this presidential panel, Bernard Stasi, pointed out that the law won't solve all of France's problems with its large, often poorly integrated immigrant community. But he said the nation can't allow Muslims to undermine its core values, which include a strict separation of religion and state, equality between the sexes and freedom for all.

"There are indisputably Muslims or...groups seeking to test the resistance of the Republic, that bear a grudge against the values of the Republic, that want France to no longer be France," Stasi said on France-Inter radio. "We cannot tolerate that."

His commission's report, released Thursday, painted a grim picture of a France struggling to accommodate its different races, cultures and religions and the tensions between them—all while clinging determinedly to its belief that secularism best ensures equality for all. In keeping with France's secular demands, public schools should be neutral grounds that protect pupils from the "violence and furies of society" outside, the report said. Yet, in school playgrounds, Jewish children are commonly insulted as "dirty Jew" and it "can be dangerous" for them to wear skullcaps on the street or on public transportation, said the 67-page report, the fruit of six months of study.

But a law against head scarves will likely alienate young Muslims. After Friday prayers at a Paris mosque, a simple question about the possibility of France outlawing pupils who wear Islamic head scarves provoked heated protest. "I incite all our brothers not to take their kids to school!" cried Mohammed, a devout Muslim of North African origin. The crowd, drawn in by his appeals, murmured its approval.

The danger of France's new effort to preserve its secular foundations from the rise of Islam, these angry young men said, is that it will drive Muslims even further away from the rest of the country.

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