Headscarves
and the French Tricolor
Paul Silverstein
(Paul Silverstein,
an editor of Middle East Report, teaches anthropology at
Reed College.)
January 30,
2004
| Further
Info
For
more on Islam and Muslims in France, see Hisham Aidi, "Let
Us Be Moors: Islam, Race and 'Connected Histories',"
in Middle East Report 229 (Winter 2003).
Order
back issues of Middle East Report, or subscribe, via a secure
server at MERIP's website. |
France is
in the process of passing a law that would ban "signs and
dress that ostensibly denote the religious belonging of students"
in public elementary and high schools beginning in the 2004-2005
school year. Lawmakers are scheduled to vote on the bill on February
3. According to the Ministry of Education, the law would cover
all "signs and dress whose wearing leads to the immediate
recognition of the [wearer's] religious belonging, which is to
say the Islamic veil, whatever name one calls it, the [Jewish]
kippa, or a cross of massively excessive dimensions."
Despite such rhetoric of universality, the target of the interdiction
clearly seems to be the hijab -- the head covering worn
by Muslim women and girls -- whose place in French public schools
has been a source of controversy since 1989. The law appears to
call into question the legitimacy of Islam in the French public
sphere and has been interpreted by many in the Islamic world as
a direct attack on Islam. Not surprisingly, the law has elicited
huge debate and contention in the halls of government, the pages
of newspapers and in city streets from Paris and Washington to
Gaza, Baghdad and Jakarta.
LAW AND laïcité
The law was officially proposed by President Jacques
Chirac in a December 17, 2003 speech and submitted for constitutional
review by the Ministry of Education on January 5, 2004. It follows
in part the recommendations of two commissions, one headed by
president of the National Assembly Jean-Louis Debré, the
other by immigration expert and former minister Bernard Stasi,
each charged with evaluating the state of laïcité
laïcité(state secularism) in France. The latter committee
was an erudite group of 23 scholars, government officials and
professionals working in the milieus of religion and migration,
including ex-revolutionary philosopher Régis Debray, sociologist
Alain Touraine, Islamologists Mohamed Arkoun and Gilles Kepel,
and experts on immigration Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux and Patrick
Weil. Over the course of four months, it held nearly 100 public
and 40 private hearings with representatives from various religious
communities, state agencies, NGOs, schools and universities, as
well as a public discussion with over 200 students from schools
in metropolitan France and French territories abroad.
The Stasi committee's 77-page published report
subtly traced the history of and present challenges to laïcité,
and recommended a series of 26 measures to better enhance its
mission of providing freedom of belief, the legal equality of
religious groups and the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis religion.
These measures included not only proposed legislation to clarify
the state's position on religious garb in schools, but also the
incorporation of Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha as public holidays,
expanded classroom instruction on "religious facts"
in addition to the history of slavery, colonization, decolonization
and immigration, the teaching of non-state languages such as Berber
and Kurdish as opposed to simply state languages like Arabic and
Turkish, the rehabilitation of "urban ghettos" seen
as the breeding grounds for anti-secularist fundamentalisms, and
the adoption of a Charter of laïcité to be
invoked during various public rites including the naturalization
of immigrants. Although several of these suggestions (including
the teaching of Berber in schools) are being considered, only
the proposal for legislation against "ostensible" religious
signs and dress in public schools made its way into Chirac's pronouncement
and the National Assembly's deliberations.
The Stasi report and the current debates revolve
around the future of laïcité in a context marked
by the rise of Islam as the second religion of France and fears
over the growth of "communitarianism," particularly
in the "urban ghettos" where many immigrants and their
children reside. laïcité is considered by supporters
of the law proposal to be a fundamental, immutable pillar of the
French republic. Enthroned in the present constitution, it is
variously cited in the Stasi report as the "cornerstone (pierre
angulaire) of national unity," the "guarantee of
individual freedom," the "founding value of the republican
pact," and, most colorfully, the "leavening (levain)
of integration." For the authors of the report, hijabs
worn in school -- as clear markers of "communitarianism"
-- threaten laïcité, and hence the "social
pact" of "living together" (vivre-ensemble)
that maintains the republic as an integral unit.
INTERDICTION OF "OSTENTATION"
laïcité, as inscribed in the
1905 law separating church and state in education, served to protect
individual students from the proselytizing of presumably Catholic
public school teachers and administrators. Gradually, however,
the burden of responsibility for maintaining religious neutrality
shifted from the schools to the students themselves. A May 15,
1937 circular from Popular Front Education Minister Jean Zay,
fearing the utilization of schools for recruitment by fascist
groups, underlined "the necessity of maintaining public education…free
from political and religious propaganda…. No form of proselytism
will be tolerated." After 1989, when three schoolgirls were
expelled from a grammar school outside of Paris for refusing to
remove their headscarves in class, public anxiety newly coalesced
around the possibility of Islamic fundamentalist groups deploying
the dress and comportment of schoolchildren to spread their sectarian
doctrines.
Such anxiety, however, did not translate immediately
into legal interdiction. Lionel Jospin, then minister of education,
asked that children "do not come to school with any sign
affirming a religious distinction or difference," but stated
that this in itself could not be grounds for expulsion. Indeed,
when asked to examine the headscarf question constitutionally
in 1989, the French high court concluded that wearing a Muslim
headscarf was not in principle incompatible with laïcité,
and that the exclusion of such a student would only be justified
by "the risk of a threat to the establishment's order or
to the normal functioning of teaching" -- a threat posed
because the headscarf was "ostentatious" or "political"
in intent.
The court decision effectively left it to individual
schoolteachers and administrators to determine the "ostentatious"
or "political" nature of any hijab encountered.
Each subsequent school year witnessed a handful of cases of young
girls arriving at school wearing headscarves and consequently
being disciplined or dismissed. The most recent affair, in September
2003, ironically involved the dismissal of the Lévy sisters,
whose father was later reported to be an atheist Jew. (The girls'
mother is Muslim, though the daughters were apparently introduced
to more rigorous Islam by more distant relatives.) The high court
has generally upheld such expulsions when the wearing of the headscarf
disrupted the school curriculum, when it interfered with participation
in physical education or biology classes, or when the students
simply refused to attend these classes. However, in the absence
of such disruptions, the high court has consistently reinstated
the students. Moreover, it has insisted that the cases be resolved
through negotiated compromise with state-appointed mediators like
Stasi commission member Hanifa Cherifi, a self-defined "secular
Muslim" who, while not inherently hostile to the hijab,
generally sought to convince the girls in question to abandon
it for practical reasons.
Though generally resolved out of court, cases
of headscarved young women have tended to receive disproportionate
media attention. On the one hand, the media has often presented
the schoolgirls as the avant-garde of an Islamist insurgency that
threatens to undermine the French Republic. On the other hand,
the schoolgirls are portrayed as victims of violence and subjugation,
their headscarves imposed upon them by their fathers and "big
brothers." In either case, the notion is that behind the
headscarved girls lurks the Islamist "bearded man,"
an image pervading a series of political cartoons under the rubric
"Histories of the Veil" that ran in Le Monde
during the first week of 2004.
Paralleling these media portrayals, scores of
academic studies and memoirs by French Muslim women published
since 1989 have sought to unravel the extent and ramifications
of "veiling" in France. While they attest to the diversity
of the phenomenon, these works generally conclude that Islamic
"integralism" (intégrisme) is on the rise
in urban France, and explain Islamism as the direct result of
worsening "social exclusion" -- in the form of unemployment,
racism and failing schools -- faced by Muslim immigrant groups.
Depictions of "ghetto" Islamism were bolstered by the
linking of French-born Muslims to the 1995 bombings in Paris and
Lyon attributed to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the arrest
of French-Moroccan Zacarias Moussaoui as the "twentieth hijacker"
in the September 11, 2001 plot, and the detention of several French
citizens of North African descent in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Many
journalists and politicians began to worry that the French housing
projects (cités) had become nodes in a global jihadi
network stretching from Algeria to Chechnya to Afghanistan.
FRANCE'S WAR ON TERROR
Since the 1995 bombings in Paris, France has operated
under the Vigipirate anti-terrorist plan under which gendarmes
and riot police, deployed to guard schools, transportation hubs,
government buildings and centers of tourism, regularly perform
random identity checks on North African youth, resulting in countless
arrests and deportations of undocumented migrants. In recent years,
these security measures have been tightened, with former Socialist
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and later current Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy mobilizing tens of thousands of additional riot
police and gendarmes to patrol the "Islamic suburbs,"
effectively militarizing French cités. In an effort
to destroy clandestine mosques and Islamic associations, Sarkozy
likewise criminalized congregations in the entries, basements
and garages of public housing projects.
Alongside these security measures, the government
has sought to create a secular brand of "French Islam"
and sell it to the French Muslim community as a whole. In the
wake of the 1989 hijab affair, Interior Minister Pierre
Joxe created the Working Council on Islam in France, a commission
of six imams, in an effort to "republicanize" Islam
into a secular religion. Joxe's successor, Charles Pasqua, continued
this process, working with the Algerian rector of the Grand Mosque
of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, to establish an Advisory Council of
French Muslims that would fix the dates of Islamic rituals and
regulate their public practice. The resultant Charter of the Muslim
Faith in France declared the "emergence of a French Islam
and its normal insertion into the national community on an equal
basis with other religions." This Islam "strives for
the development of an expression of laïcité
that will bring religions and the state into a state of harmony."
In the words of the charter, French Muslims, "loyal to the
most authentic Muslim tradition, disassociate themselves from
all extremisms and bear witness to their attachment to the state
which…guarantees the freedom of religion and treats all religions
as equals."
Pasqua and Boubakeur's efforts were opposed by
the two major Islamic umbrella organizations in France: the National
Federation of French Muslims (FNMF), which has close ties to Morocco,
and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), which
has supposed historical links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Resentful of the Grand Mosque's influence, in 1995 they created
their own High Council of French Muslims to "assemble all
democratic Muslims in defense of the principles of laïcité."
Given this multiplication of institutions speaking in the name
of French Muslims, the process of national Islamic organization
was stillborn.
After the September 11 attacks, Sarkozy breathed
new life into the process by creating a French Council of the
Muslim Faith (CFCM). In a January 2003 radio interview, he claimed
of this council: "It's a chance to create an official Islam
of France and a way to fight the Islam of cellars and garages
(l'Islam des caves) -- an underground, clandestine Islam
that feeds fundamentalism and extremism." In opposing and
Islam des caves to an "Islam of the mosques,"
Sarkozy implicitly linked the unofficial Islamic organization
in the cités to global Islamist terrorism, at that
time preeminently pictured as al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the
caves of Afghanistan. While the CFCM was an elected body chosen
by French Muslims and supported by an estimated 80 percent of
mosques, Sarkozy worked to guarantee its secularist tendency,
pre-assigning the first presidency to Boubakeur. When the April
2003 elections gave majority representation to the FNMF and UOIF
over the Grand Mosque (which won only 6 of the 40 available seats),
Sarkozy threatened to expel imams whose views ran counter to laïcité
and close their mosques.
"NEW ANTI-SEMITISM"
The proposed law against religious "signs
and dress" builds directly on these efforts. Although the
legislation is titled "the law relating to the application
of the principle of laïcité in public grammar,
middle and high schools," debate in the French press has
mostly referred to the "law against the veil." "Massively
excessive" crosses are nearly non-existent in French public
schools, although Education Minister Luc Ferry did denounce crosses
worn by the very small Assyrian-Chaldean Christian community.
Likewise, the Jewish kippa is a rarity in public schools,
as the orthodox Jewish community has a thriving private school
network. If the Catholic Church (including the Pope and the French
archbishop) has been outspoken against the law, Jewish groups
have been noticeably reticent, if not explicitly supportive.
Indeed, the timing of the law is in no small part
due to the outrage expressed by Jewish organizations over the
supposed growth of a "new anti-Semitism" perpetrated
by French Muslims. Whereas traditional anti-Semitic violence in
France has been racially or religiously motivated and generally
enacted by far right nativist groups, recent attacks on Jewish
children and property in the French cités have been
seen as inherently political. In particular, as was expressed
in an April 2003 investigative article in Vanity Fair,
these attacks have been decried as the logical outgrowth of the
rampant anti-Zionism among North Africans in France. The French
state, with its alleged pro-Palestinian bent and refusal to participate
in the war in Iraq, is seen as directly complicit in the violence.
Statistics on anti-Semitic crimes in France are highly disputed,
though French law enforcement agencies reported no statistical
rise in attacks on Jewish targets during the 2003 calendar year.
In any case, the media frenzy around the attacks
prompted Chirac to announce in November 2003 the formation of
a special committee to fight anti-Semitism, a new ambassadorial
post to improve relations between France and world Jewry, and
extra funds for education about anti-Semitism in neighborhoods
heavily inhabited by North Africans. Chirac's proposal of the
new laïcité law followed in the ensuing month.
CITIZENSHIP AND THE SACRED STATE
Contrary to Chirac and Ferry's claims that the
proposed law only affirms the present doctrine of laïcité,
the measure would mark a significant departure from prior legislation.
If previous laws sought to protect the religious neutrality of
the state and "religious freedom," the new proposal
explicitly fights against the "communitarianism" and
"inequality" that the headscarf has come to represent
in France. Invoking the need for a "open and dynamic laïcité,"
the Stasi report approached the public school as a privileged
"closed universe" where unifying national values of
male-female equality and mutual respect are taught. The headscarf,
as a sign of female subjugation and communitarianism, is particularly
threatening to the implicit mission of the school -- the formation
of future citizens. "Religious freedom," although the
supposed root of laïcité, must be sacrificed
in the name of national unity.
The laïcité invoked in the
Stasi report and the proposed law therefore operates much like
a religion, with the nation (and its metonymy, the public school)
operating as the moral symbol of collective solidarity. It is
not because church and state in France are separated that the
headscarf remains a sticking point for French republican ideology.
Rather, it is because they are functionally one and the same;
the state is, for all practical purposes, the church of
republican France.
Although the Stasi report recommended that any
legislation accommodate local contexts, and Ferry has assured
critics that the proposed law will be applied with "discretion,"
the law as proposed seeks universal application across metropolitan
France and its overseas provinces. No special consideration has
been made for the eastern regions of Alsace-Moselle, in which,
having been part of Germany at the time of the 1905 law, religious
instruction is still an integral part of the official curriculum,
crucifixes remain affixed to classroom walls and the ranks of
teachers include cross-wearing nuns. Meanwhile, officials in the
Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mayotte, with large
local Muslim populations and a long history of formal incorporation
of religious faith into public life, fear that the proposed law
will create tensions between communities hitherto existing in
relative harmony. The fate of turban-wearing Sikhs -- a community
at least 5,000 strong neglected by the Stasi commission -- has
yet to be decided. Although Ferry has resisted efforts by members
of his own conservative party to expand the legislation to include
any "visible" or "political" symbols, he has
insisted on a flexible interpretation of banned "signs"
to include beards and bandanas if school officials interpret them
as denoting religious affiliation.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Support for and opposition to the law has brought
together strange bedfellows. Leftist intellectuals like Debray
and Touraine, true believers in the sacredness of the State, see
the law as a necessary prop for the secular French republic they
uphold as the apex of universal Enlightenment values. Law-and-order
right-wingers, including Sarkozy, view the law as an important
weapon in their ongoing "war on terror." The law has
equally strong support from feminists like Fadela Amara, president
of the association Ni Putes Ni Soumises ("Neither Whores
Nor Downtrodden") that fights for the rights and safety of
North African women in the French suburbs, and Khalida Messaoudi,
who famously referred to the headscarf as "our yellow star."
Likewise, Berber activists in France and North Africa have been
outspoken in favor of the law, as it aids their ongoing struggle
against Islamist groups, and places them in a strong position
to receive French state support in the name of their declared
laïcité. Most ironically, the law dovetails
with the ideologies of the xenophobic National Front of Jean-Marie
Le Pen, which has been arguing for years that Muslim immigrants
should assimilate or leave. Indeed, members of the above camps
who oppose the law often do so out of fear that it will abet the
National Front's campaign in upcoming elections.
In contrast, critics of the proposed law -- including,
notably, the major French teachers' unions -- generally fear that
it will stigmatize French Muslims and exacerbate already fragile
relations between religious and ethnic communities. Already on
December 26, 2003, barely a week after Chirac announced the law,
a security guard at a Paris branch of the Société
Générale bank barred a woman's entry after she refused
to follow a sign requiring customers to remove "scarves,
caps, helmets and all other head coverings and sunglasses."
Faced with such incidents, anti-racist organizations find themselves
torn between their principled support for laïcité
and their battle against discrimination. One of the founders of
SOS-Racisme quit his organization and joined its rival, the Movement
Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, after the former
came out in support of the law. Muslim organizations find themselves
in a similar predicament, with Boubakeur strongly supporting the
law, the FNMF being cautiously optimistic and the UOIF opposing
it. To a great extent, the dilemma faced by anti-racist and Muslim
groups has sprung from their hesitancy to associate with the most
vocal opponents of the law -- including Tariq Ramadan and the
French Muslims Party (PMF) -- who have been widely accused of
fundamentalism and anti-Semitism.
Since Chirac's announcement, protests against
the proposed legislation have occurred across the world, in France,
Europe, North America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The
international protests have generally denounced the law as racist
and hypocritical. Imams in places as diverse as London, Gaza and
Tehran have insisted that the hijab is an indispensable
religious obligation, and that that any law banning it is a direct
attack on Islam. To counter these claims, Sarkozy made an impromptu
trip to al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he secured a statement
of support from its grand sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, who
opined that Muslims residing in a non-Muslim country were obliged
to abide by all local laws. However, this principle was immediately
contested by clerics worldwide, including at al-Azhar itself,
who denied Tantawi's authority to speak on such matters.
TRICOLOR SCARVES
If international protests have scripted the French
law within a war of religions, French Muslim demonstrators have
opposed the law under the French state's own rubric of human rights
and citizenship. On January 17, 2004, exactly one month after
Chirac proposed the law, over 20,000 French Muslims -- mostly
women wearing various forms of hijab -- took the streets
of Paris, Lille, Marseille, Mulhouse and other cities to protest
the legislation. With their spoken, worn and carried "signs,"
the women insisted on the headscarf as a universal -- not religious
-- right. Countering the discourse linking the "veil"
to the subjugation of Muslim women, they insisted that their decision
to wear the hijab emerged from their own free will. Up
to 10,000 rallied in Lille at a gathering organized by a group
of French Muslim women called the Collective for Free Choice.
Women marching in the equally large Paris demonstration alternated
between chants of "Chirac, Sarkozy, we chose the headscarf"
(Chirac, Sarkozy, le foulard on l'a choisi) and "Not
our fathers nor our husbands, we chose the headscarf" (ni
père, ni mari, le foulard on l'a choisi). In like fashion,
protesters throughout the country parodied the anti-headscarf
positions of Neither Whores Nor Downtrodden with banners bearing
some version of "Neither Forced Nor Downtrodden" (ni
forcées ni soumises) or "Neither Duped Nor Downtrodden"
(ni dupes ni soumises).
Alongside these evocations of freedom of choice,
the protesting women embraced their simultaneous identity as Muslims
and French citizens. Demonstrators throughout France carried French
flags, marched with banners evoking "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,
laïcité," released blue-white-and-red
balloons, and even wore headscarves emblazoned with the French
tricolor. They faultlessly sang the "Marseillaise,"
including, as reporters remarked with amazement, verses seldom
heard at national celebrations. The women likewise staked out
their religious citizenship, declaring themselves to be "proud
to be French and Muslim." Protesters in Nice intoned, "We,
French Muslim women, we defend the republic, liberties and laïcité,"
while at the same time letting Chirac know that "we don't
want your law." In perhaps the most evocative display of
citizenship, demonstrators throughout the country waved their
national identity cards while chanting some version of "one
headscarf = one vote." Beyond a reminder to politicians of
the importance of the Muslim vote in the upcoming regional elections,
the gesture was a poignant illustration that citizenship -- French
and Islamic -- is always a sacred affair.
