In the past few months a controversy over Muslim women and girls wearing headscarfs has heated up again in France.
On the one hand, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy angered some Muslims in France when he insisted that women having their photographs taken for France’s national identity card would have to remove their headscarfs. Sarkozy was booed at a gathering of 10,00 Muslims at the Union of Islamic Organizations in France. On this point, Sarkozy is correct. Leaving aside problems with national identity cards themselves, requiring Muslim women not to cover their heads in scarves for such photographs seems sensible and uncontroversial enough.
On the other hand, many in France want to go much further. Specifically, they want to ban young Muslim girls from wearing head scarves to school. Educator in France are angered by this continued practice, and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he supported a ban on the wearing of headscarfs.
MP Jacque Myard told La Chine Info TV that Muslims wearing headscarfs in school was “incompatible with the neutrality of the school and the French Republic.” According to the BBC there is actually a “1994 instruction from the Education Minister [that] says the ‘ostentatious display of religious allegiance’ in state educational institutions should be prevented.”
That sounds like straightforward anti-Muslim bigotry. The BBC reports that Education Minister Luc Ferry has “pledged to introduce a new law next year that would reassert secular values in state schools.” Translation: the new law will shove secularism down the throat of the Muslim minority whether they like it or not.
Source:
Headscarf row erupts in France. Magali Faure and Philip Gouge, The BBC, April 25, 2003.