Headscarves

I saw it too, and agree with you. I found it highly interesting for the range of different perspectives it expressed in support of the ban, from the extraordinary typecasting by the history teacher–“she’s articulate and assertive therefore the fundamentalists must have gotten to her” to the genuine if wrongheaded sentiment that if others had died to free themselves of the veil in Algeria or somewhere else, it was imperative that this freedom be forced onto muslim girls. The bizarreness of having teachers individually decide, according to no apparent criteria whether or not a pupil’s attire (veil or no veil) was expressive of religion was striking. On the other hand, it brought back the sense of massive discretion and capriciousness that teachers everywhere seem to have.

I wish I could believe your first assertion but given the consistent ghettoisation of French Muslims, I find it unconvincing. You’ve also missed the point of the comments related to the film which is that regardless of the pros and cons of such a law, its implementation is highly problematic in the way that it gives power to some people over others. Indeed, people should be free not to wear the veil (and I don’t see why those who don’t want to shouldn’t deveil while in school, or anywhere else) but people should also be free to wear it if they want.

But many “people” (girls, actually) aren’t free not to wear the hijab, and for many of them, the law creates freedom rather than removing it. Does the documentary show that aspect at all, I wonder? It doesn’t sound as if it does.

I don’t think the law was to give freedom to muslim girls, though the politicians may have sold it as such. Which is more free: Having no choice but to wear a habib or no choice but to not wear a habib? I can’t appreciate the difference. I think the law was an attempt to force the muslims and other minority religions to act or at least dress like the rest of the population. Chris said “the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France.” I think that’s the point of the whole thing.

Their choice I guess, though it seems like a bad one.

The notion that you increase freedom by banning certain kinds of symbolic clothing is just bizarre; I’m also struck by the assumptions (a) that one cannot simultaneously be an observant Muslim and fully French and (b) that the only reason you might wear a scarf is because you were forced to. Is it not possible that some people are genuninely and thoughtfully religious, including young women?

One of my friends told me once that me that her (single-sex girls) high school used to have “pantie checks”, where teachers made sure that girls were wearing appropriate underwear.

I don’t know of she was pulling my leg or not, though!

One can’t be an observant Sikh and fully French either. The Sikhs in Paris (5000 of them) are cutting their hair; the devout are probably going to leave, as it is now not possible to even get a driver’s license while wearing the turban that observant Sikh men are required to wear.

Francois, your reply to Colin misses one important distinction, and that is that religious apparel doesn’t violate someone else’s human rights. Polygamy, in contrast, violates the human rights of women, and that is why nation-states that have Muslims are justified in banning it. Wearing a scarf, turban, or Kipot in a school, government job, or professional service (such as medicine) is a form of religious expression that should be allowable in a free society.

In your version of human rights (HR) maybe: the European court of HR has case law which tells that forbidding religious signs in public services is not contrary.

Article 9 of the Eur. Conv. on HR and Article 10 of Uni. Decl. of HR were presented as contradictory with this law, because they state every individual has the right to the public expression of his religious opinion. I suppose that’s your point.

The ECHR has however stated that some patients were refusing to be under taken care by non-veiled personnel. In return, these patients left hospitals and started practising home childbirth, leading to a few disasters.

Equality is a reason, good or bad, to hide some differences between people. The whole school uniform debate was reactivated in France when the law passed.

I do admit however that my comparison did not take the elements you brought into account. It does not invalidate my point, though.

Hard to tell: republicans have stopped wearing beards to mark their political commitment since the 1890s.

More seriously, please add the implicit ‘religious’ qualificative to ‘ideology’. As I said earlier, political signs have not been forbidden: the legislator listened to Marx and not to Aron about how to define the people’s opium.

A reply to Francois.

The issue as I (a non-observant Jew) see it is that the standard of secularism being asked for is actually a default to Christian norms.

So, a discreet cross is ok, but a yarmulke or turban is considered a “blatant” symbol. The only thing a Christian could do to breach the clothing requirement is to wear a very large cross whereas observant Sikhs, Muslims and Jews all have more obvious clothing requirements (Jewish men have to leave the fringe of their under shirt showing).

Francois mentioned polygamy and that for me always rings alarm bells. You see, monogamy *is* a Christian “symbol”. Neither Islam, Judaism or Hinduism actually insist on it (although most of us practice it). It is being argued for as if it were a symbol of secularism when it is not. It is fine for a secular state to refuse to support extended families–that’s an economic decision–but I cannot see how you can argue that family structure is a secular debate when it is absolutely and utterly shaped by religious belief and prejudice (and please don’t try the “polygamous marriages are abusive” argument, our women’s shelters are full of women from stifling monogamous relationships.)

One last word: the entire debate is clouded by the word “secular”. France is not secular in the English sense (ie indifferent to religion). Like the US, it is anti-clerical (hostile to *organised* religion).

The BBC chose a school where there was discussion about that law. And the school wanted that discussion to be public, on camera. And that provides the context here.

When Lycee Eugene Delacroix opened for the new school year, it was one of the only schools in France to allow girls to wear a discreet bandanna.

vs.

Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

The school wanted that argument. It didn’t have to.

extreme secularist teachers

vs.

The headmaster, however, is under pressure from the majority of his teachers, who want a total ban on headcoverings

Maybe the law is extreme?

A very quick follow-up reply:

andrew B– ““We have a Muslim Council here….” Just to add that this is basically a tool of the French government”

In short you are right, although the argument could be slightly balanced (the coalition that was elected head of the council was not the one intended by govt).

ibid.–“This law confirms that schools should not be penetrated by any ideology.” Hardy har har! (I think you need to add “religious” in front of “ideology” if you want something which is true.)

Didn’t I do this in a further comment?

ibid.–“the law would result in only a few girls banned…” It would seem to me that anyone who would get banned, would likely avoid the ban by being sent to a private school. Francois, do you know how many children have gone from the public to private schooling because of the ban? (Honest question – I don’t know.)

AFAIK but I have limited knwoledge on the topic, there is no Muslim private schooling in France at the moment. I know a bit about private Catholic schooling and strangely enough you may think, they do *not* promote extensive religious symbols.

fjm’s comment is well-grounded, although it should be taken into account ‘laïcité’ is neither anti-clericalism or secularism.

Back to pub.->private schooling: in a vast, extremely vast majority of cases, compromise was reached by discussing the issue with parents. As the BBC broadcast apparently did not show, 99% of the Muslim living in France think you can be an observant believer and drop hijab in school. The Renseignements Généraux (ergo central intelligence) recorded only a dozen cases of school exclusion when the law was passed, and I think the figure never reached a hundred in one year.

Also, the gap betw. private and pub. schooling is quite a thin one here. Private schooling is subject to very heavy regulations (e.g. the programmes cannot differ, mixity is not an option, etc.).

“AFAIK but I have limited knwoledge on the topic, there is no Muslim private schooling in France at the moment.”

Interesting. I remember reading somewhere (sorry about the specificity!) before the summer that some parents were planning to set up schools so that they could send their children to them, but I never saw any follow-up on this, and I’ve always wondered whether it was more bark than anything.

But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned.

At my secondary school (state-funded, in the UK, 1989-94) the rule was that skirts had to be at least long enough to reach to 1 inch above the middle of the knee when we were standing. Mrs Mason used a ruler to check. This didn’t stand out as a more than usually petty enforcement of the rules. I think that young people have to put up with a lot of this nonsense, and it’s easy to forget once we’re old enough to command a little more respect.

Suffice it to say, that once a particular religious or ethnic group is singled out for this sort of treatment,

But the only group singled out here is consists of people that bring religion into school.

There’s here the implicit that the carefully religion-neutral phrasing of the law is duplicitous, as in “we found a way to get at the muslims in a very hypocritical way, yay”.

Seen the large backing this law had among lawmakers (and the nature of the opposition to it) i find this a weird belief : they can’t really be all muslim haters, can they?

So many comments! Nice! I don’t know if this has already said in the comments, but one thing interesting is that within the text of the anti-secularism law are actual mathematical requirements for the dimensions of any bandana a girl is allowed to wear.
I also think the role of immigrant and Muslim womens’ groups was essential in the passing of the law in 2004 and a good reason why a similar law wasn’t passed in 1989 when the headscarf issue first came up. Very nice article, got referred here from Indigo Jo.

I’m sure there are more thoughtful folks in France than Francois, but please notice how his antiscarf position *rests* on bigoted presumptions. Francois’ foundational assumption is that Muslim women are incapable of thinking for themselves and can *only* be understood as acting under compulsion of one kind or another, as in the extreme language about “forced” or “slaved.” The assumption that they cannot think is also evident in his response that “We have a Muslim Council here, who clearly stated you could be an observant Muslim AND drop your veil at school.” *So what?* This is only an argument if you assume that young women take orders from “Councils.” Why can’t people make up their own minds about what it means to be religiously observant?

There is a spirit of absolute dogmatic assertion tied to tendentious argument throughout: this symbol can mean only one thing, and that is a meaning against which the state must mobilize coercive power.

Re religous freedoms, obviously it is possible to summon up any number of examples, like say ritual cannibalism, in which an assertion of a particular religious right would conflict with others’ rights or with a legitimate state function. *The question is whether this particular case, wearing a scarf to school, is such a case or not.* So invoking sharply different examples like stoning hardly helps us think about wearing a scarf.

It’s jarring to see Descartes enlisted on the side of all this sloppy thinking. And even Nietzsche warned against the pillaging of the works of dead writers for convenient quotations.

To Yabonn: The fact that a large majority of lawmakers supported this repressive law is *chilling*, not reassuring. And it reminds the rest of the world of how easy it is to to assemble a culturally-Christian majority in a place like France against a religious minority.

It’s all discombulated. (Dear reader, i’m not even sure of the meaning of the word, but i am nevertheless absolutely convinced that colin’s post on the matter is absolutely discombulated. Discuss.) I would answer the other points, but i’m sure françois will find time to, hm, adress them.

The fact that a large majority of lawmakers supported this repressive law is chilling, not reassuring. And it reminds the rest of the world of how easy it is to to assemble a culturally-Christian majority in a place like France against a religious minority.

The “culturally christians” (catholics) in parliament voted *against* the law. All the others voted *for*. Which explains the score, btw, and ha, ha, ha.

Polled muslim women said they were *for* the law.

Get it?

… Besides discombulated is, by itself, a beauty to behold, well worth the repetition of these points, already mentionned upthread.

Should I use ‘obliged’ instead of ‘forced’, should I make politically correct statements instead of addressing what shares much resemblance to domestic slavery – in any case please take it as semantic ignorance from my own if you were shocked by the vocab’ I used.

You have oversimplified what you read to turn it into a unilateral view that you could then easily beat by a “let people choose” argument. The word for that was used in a previous comment: one-eyed. I think it lacks intellectual honesty to proceed so.

The “council” in question was created on request of Muslim groups, there was hence a demand for an official representation.

It is part of our own national model that schooling and religious belief should never interfere, in a way or another. Coercion was used (although reluctantly) to enforce a model which you apparently do not know, understand, nor try to understand. Which brings me to return to flip your relativist comment back to you: why can’t people make up their own minds about what it means to live in a “laïc” country?

Chris, it depends what one means by an effective tool. It doesn’t look effective in the sense of total or complete or covering all bases, no. But then to do that it would have to be extremely intrusive, so intrusive that even I (and others, of course) would have qualms or reservations or doubts. But it is an effective tool in the sense of protecting one space from that kind of bullying. So, yes, it does look like an effective tool. And one worth mentioning, at least, I would have thought. You do consistently frame this issue as if opposition to it were universal among all Muslims and people of Muslim background, you know – and by doing that you give a distorted impression, it seems to me. You just leave out Muslim and Muslim-background supporters of the ban – and there are a lot of them.

Refusing terms such as “forced” and “slaved” is a case of politically correct blindness when cases of both were reported. Please refer to the Stasi Commission report for evidence and detail. The rest of the argument sounds purely rhetorical.

Ophelia, you’re guilty of a one-sidedness that you accuse Chris of. You and others don’t seem to see that banning is not protecting space and liberty for some who freely choose to wear the veil. If Muslims don’t like the social pressure that certain other Muslims put on them to wear the veil, resorting to the state to outlaw its use in schools hardly seems the right way to tackle what you perceive to be wider social pressure and peer pressure.

A different argument that has been mooted is the secularism argument, which, in so far as its validity rests upon empirical evidence about what is necessary for shared values and cohesion, looks to me extremely weak. If this secularist argument is one of “principle” or “tradition”, then it seems to me even more groundless in the face of what most Western countries accept by way of pluralism and diversity.

Shwe, no I’m not. I realize that the ban is an encroachment on the freedom of the people who want to wear it, and I’ve said as much (though not on this thread, to be sure). I think there are competing freedoms and competing encroachments here, rather than a matter of all freedom on one side and all encroachment on the other.

But of course life in society is always a matter of competing freedoms and encroachments. There are all sorts of things we’re not allowed to do in all sorts of places and contexts, so I don’t see the fact that the ban is an encroachment on freedom as a knock-down argument by itself.

“Yabonn” (who, like “Francois”, apparently lacks courage to post under a full name) persists in deliberate misconstrual: mine is not an accusation of specifically religious hatred, but of old-fashioned bigotry toward a minority group. Atheists, for example, are still capable of antisemitism.

Yabonn’s “separation of church and state as it is understood here, the role schools are supposed to fulfill” hinges on the weasel-words “understood here” and “supposed.” So the pro-ban position circles back, time and again, to argument by assertion and to the implication that this is a purely French matter whose subtleties can be understood only by French people.

A final word, to anyone still reading who finds me too harsh in all this: an essential presupposition of bigotry is that all members of the stigmatized group are essentially alike, so that evidence against one convicts all. A typical presupposition of antireligious bigotry is that all members of the stigmatized religion are victims of mind-control by sinister religious leaders. Both assumptions are a way of dehumanizing people by portraying them as having no minds of their own and no capacity for thoughtful independent action. The consequences of this kind of stigmatization, across history, have been ugly. As an exercise for the student, therefore, go through the pro-ban posts and see how many times you find logic that rests on either or both of these two assumptions.

Mr Danby,

I find your attacks on some thoughtful posts here unfair. You call “understood here” and “supposed” weasel words, and say that their author implied that this problem can only be understood by French people. I find this is an unfortunate misreading. I can say “cuisine as it is understood in France”, meaning that is is different from cuisine in Japan, without implying that Japanese chefs cannot understand French cooking, and indeed they sometimes understand French cuisine marvelously. I hope I am not putting words in their mouths, but the posters’ point is that France has a different conception of the place of religion in education. Much as France and the US have a different conception of free speech rights. Or consider British libel laws which have been briefly touched upon in another post on this blog. Now you may well think that one conception is better than the other, and I may well agree with you, but please state those differences and your arguments and do not accuse the posters of bigotry or guess too boldly at their intent.

Back to the subject of this post, maybe we can narrow things down a little.
i) A rather common position in France is that education should be neutral with regard to religions. Neutral here means that religion should not be visible, it does not mean letting all religions be equally apparent. The idea is to leave a space for children before their majority to be free of any religious influence. Whether this is a desirable goal is open to debate.

ii) Implementing this raises a number of problems. Banning religious symbols or imposing school uniforms are possible solutions. Once again, whether these are judicious means to attain the goal above can be argued. I would like to note in passing that I dislike the reference to “France’s Islamic headscarf law” in the original post. the law is against all religious symbols, and even if one may argue that it is targeted towards muslims, as I believe, using this qualifier makes readers think that France has passed a law specifically against one religion, and thus distorts the debate from the start.

iii) Even without arguing point i), one can still debate practical issues and solutions. In this case the pressure that women may feel to wear the headscarf. Or how to resolve the friction between religious prescriptions and the civil laws of a state.

And about your little paragraph on the symptoms of bigotry, please tell me where posters like François or Ms Benson have implied that “all members of the stigmatized religion are victims of mind-control by sinister religious leaders”.