Islam in France: All over an inch of flesh

Date: 25/10/03

The headscarf, a Muslim symbol turned to political dynamite

THEY giggle; they blush; they talk very fast. One wears Nike trainers. The other chats incessantly on her mobile phone. In short, Lila and Alma Levy-Omari, are just a pair of ordinary teenagers - except that their decision to wear a Muslim headscarf at school has exploded into an affair of state, and plunged official France into panic.

The two schoolgirls are from Aubervilliers, an industrial suburb of Paris. They were kicked out of school earlier this month for wearing the scarf. According to a 1989 court ruling, based on the secular principle at the heart of the French state, it is not illegal to wear religious symbols in schools. But the law does forbid “ostentatious” religious signs that “constitute an act of pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda”. The girls chose to wear a full headscarf, covering their ears, hairline and neck. The school considered this provocative, and banned them.

Since then, the girls have rarely been out of the newspapers or off the television screens. The row has touched a nerve in France, which is struggling to reconcile its secular tradition (and its history of turning foreigners into good Frenchmen) with the growing desire of young French Muslims to find an identity for themselves. Since the September 11th attacks, this tension has been heightened by fears that such people could become recruits for Islamic extremism. France has about 5m Muslims, and Islam is the country's second religion.

In their neat little flat, with its net curtains and potted plants, in a ten-storey block just up the road from the “Crik Crok Grec-Pizza-Grillades-Couscous” fast-food joint, the two teenagers seethe with a quiet anger. “Wearing the veil and secularism are not incompatible,” argues Lila, who considers it a personal expression of religious liberty that should in no way impinge on her right to a state education.

But in France, secondary education, a responsibility of the central state, is meant also to have the job of forming French citizens. That is why schools are expected to apply the principle of secularism. The girls see this as an excuse. “France is hiding behind the principle of secularism because Islam is new, and frightening,” says Lila. “I am French, I was born in France. But what are the criteria for being French? Catholicism? It's as if, as soon as we're Muslims, we don't belong here.”

Two separate issues are entangled in this affair. The first is one of identity: what it means to be French. The second is security, and specifically the fear of where a radicalised French Islam might lead. Plainly, the two can be linked. But in the vast majority of cases where they are not, the popular perception of such a connection ends up stigmatising French Muslims.

Muslims are hardly new to France. The country has a history of migration from North Africa going back to the early 20th century. What is new, says Nacira Guenif-Souilamas, a sociologist at the University of Paris XIII, is that girls are choosing to wear the headscarf young, and continuing to do so into adulthood. The trend is most marked among educated teenagers, whose exasperated mothers either never wore the veil, or actively fought to be liberated from it. These are the “affected young girls with their brand-new veils”, as Chahdortt Djavann, author of a recent book, “Down with the Veils!”, scornfully calls them. The Aubervilliers schoolgirls began covering their heads only this year. Their Algerian-born mother does not wear a headscarf; their father is Jewish.

For some young Muslim girls, living in rough suburbs where rape and violence are on the increase, the headscarf sends a protective message to ward off harassers. For others, it is a classic second-generation phenomenon, in which ethnic identity is more marked in the children of immigrants than among their parents who first stepped off the boat. The trouble is that in France, with its assimilationist tradition and its fierce rejection of multiculturalism, each generation is supposed to blend in more, not less. What other country has a “High Council for Integration”?

Because it recognises that young French Muslims are bumping against the limits of the integrationist model, the French government frets that they will fall prey to extremists. Hence efforts earlier this year by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, to bring Islam out of “the cellars and garages” by giving the religion an institutional voice through a French Council of the Muslim Faith. The plan appeared to backfire when elections to the new body's regional councils returned a majority of extremists. But Mr Sarkozy insists that he would prefer to deal with such groups openly than have them hide in the shadows.

Hence, too, the decision by President Jacques Chirac to set up a commission on secularism. The commission is considering such issues as demands for separate hours for Muslim women in swimming pools. But the most contentious subject before it is whether to ban the veil completely, not only in schools but in all public offices. The issue divides France, and cuts across left and right. Mr Sarkozy is against a ban; but the schools minister, Xavier Darcos, favours one. Mr Chirac is torn, fearful of the manipulation of young girls by Islamic radicals, but anxious also not to hand them a propaganda coup by banning the veil outright. “Secularism is non-negotiable,” said Mr Chirac in a robust speech in Valenciennes this week. He added that he would resort to a law if necessary, after considering the commission's conclusions, due by the end of the year.

With regional elections looming next March, the issue has acquired added political resonance. A total ban on the veil would appeal to far-right supporters who might otherwise vote for the National Front. And it would probably divide the Muslim vote. Mr Sarkozy's latest compromise is to suggest that French Muslims should wear a bandana, an accessory more often seen on the heads of hip-hop artists. This would allow for that critical visible hairline, neck and earlobes.

Back in Aubervilliers, it is the end of school on a cold autumn day. Teenagers at the Lycee Henri Wallon, from which Lila and Alma were expelled, stream out of the gate. Every ostentatious symbol of teenagehood is on display: Puma, Adidas, Nike, Quiksilver, baggy jeans, hooded tops. Everything except the veil? Not exactly. A clutch of girls emerge with headscarves on, but hairline dutifully exposed. No sooner are they out of the school grounds, though, than they pull the scarves down on to the forehead and up around the neck. “It would be funny,” comments Lila wryly, “if it weren't so serious.”

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