France votes to ban head scarves

Paris — France took a decisive step Tuesday toward banning Islamic head scarves from public schools, with legislators overwhelmingly backing the government's drive to preserve French secularism from Islamic fundamentalism.

Legislators voted by a massive 494-36 margin to approve the controversial ban on head scarves and other religious apparel — despite protests and criticism from around the world that the measure infringes on religious freedom.

The legislation goes to the Senate, where little opposition is anticipated, in early March. It is expected to be implemented for the 2004-2005 school year that starts in September.

The bill got far more than the 288 votes needed to pass in the 577-seat National Assembly, a measure of its popularity within France, demonstrated repeatedly in public opinion polls.

"The Republic and secularism are strengthened," said Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, hailing "the magnitude of this vote."

French leaders hope the legislation will quell the debate over head scarves that has divided France since 1989, when two young girls were expelled from their school in Creil, outside Paris, for wearing head scarves. Scores more have been expelled since then.

The bill stipulates that "in schools, junior high schools and high schools, signs and dress that conspicuously show the religious affiliation of students are forbidden." It would not apply to students in private schools or to French schools in other countries.

The legislation does not spell out what apparel would be banned, but it targets Islamic head scarves, as well as Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses.

Sanctions for refusing to remove conspicuous religious symbols and clothing would range from a warning to temporary suspension from school to expulsion.

The government argues that a law is needed to protect France's secular traditions and to ward off rising Islamic fundamentalism.

"This law is for us indispensable," said Martine David, a Socialist legislator. Teachers "need a clear judicial framework."

Parliament's majority party, President Jacques Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement, agreed Thursday to a last-minute amendment by the Socialists that calls for an evaluation of the law a year after it takes effect.

Legislators want the option, if necessary, of being able to alter language banning "conspicuous" symbols to "visible" ones — in order to eliminate vagueness or ambiguity.

The governing UPM party also added an amendment to ensure that mediation takes place before any sanctions are imposed, another Socialist suggestion.

France has been widely condemned in the Arab and Muslim world, where thousands of protesters from Beirut to Baghdad and London to Ottawa have made known their indignation and opposition to a head scarf ban.

Even non-Muslims entered the debate — many on the side of opponents. Lord Greville Janner, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, said Tuesday's parliamentary vote was "a sad decision."

"In a multicultural society, citizens should be free to wear whatever appropriate religious symbols they wish," he said in a statement.

The issue also has proven to be sharply divisive among France's Muslims — at five million, Western Europe's largest Islamic community. Many believe banning head scarves is a way to exclude Muslim girls from public schools and further ostracize their community.

"This is not a good idea," said Abdelhak Cherid, 24, smoking a cigarette in the street with his friends outside a Muslim grocery store in Paris. "It's going to cause problems — serious problems.

"This law is going to create anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-French sentiment. No good will come of it," he said.

But other Muslims here believe the key to successful integration is to live the values of their adopted land.

"I arrived in France and adapted to this country," said Telly Naar, 65, who came from Morocco 40 years ago. "Each should be able to practise religion at home. If one wants to wear the head scarf outside, fine, but not inside a school that is secular."

Some said the debate helped expose the danger of Islamic fundamentalism and will help roll back radicalism.

"Until now, families were alone in fighting fundamentalists, often in the shadows, and at danger to their safety," said Hanifa Cherifi, mediator for the national education system on the head scarf issue in schools.

The debate "lifted the veil on fundamentalist thinking, which is taking a population hostage," she said on French parliamentary TV.

Meanwhile in London, Mayor Ken Livingstone said a head scarf ban risks increasing anti-Muslim feeling and that Mr. Chirac "is playing a terribly, terribly dangerous game."

Mr. Livingstone was joined by religious leaders and human rights campaigners at a news conference Tuesday to oppose the French ban. The British government has said it would not consider similar legislation.

vélemények ?

Velemeny;
egyetertek.

Volt szerencsem Franciaorszagban kicsit, megertem a dontesuket.

Spanky, tobbszor irtad:
""nem kotelezo....... Franciaorszagban!
latod, igazad van!

(csak nehogy a falra masszunk, mert ahhoz igazan kinek is van koze?)

France could learn from us


HARVEY SIMMONS

Canadians may find it hard to understand why a new French law will prevent students from wearing religious symbols in school. After all, why not let Muslim girls wear headscarves, Jewish students their yarmulkes, Sikhs their turbans or Christians their crucifixes?

If schools are supposed to help integrate people of all faiths and educate them in the democratic principles of tolerance and understanding, why in the world force religious students to choose between their religion and public school?

Moreover, because the new law bans only "conspicuous" religious symbols, schools will be forced into the ridiculous position of having to decide whether a Muslim schoolgirl who decides to wear, say, a bandana instead of a headscarf, or a Jewish student who wears a tiny Star of David, or a Christian student who dons a miniature crucifix, is flaunting a religious symbol.

Astonishingly, a majority of the French population, including teachers, support a law that will surely create a pack of trouble for the French. But why?

One reason has to do with France's long history of conflict between religious and secular authorities. For nearly a century and a half after the 1789 French Revolution, the Catholic Church did everything it could to bring down the Republic and restore a monarchy. This bred a fierce strain of anti-church sentiment among those who supported democracy and the Republic.

Over the years the battle went back and forth, satirized in countless French novels, plays and stories about the conflict between the village priest, representing the forces of religion, and the town schoolteacher who represented the forces of secularism.

Although the Catholic Church lost out when a 1905 law separated church and state, the revival of religion today, especially among Muslims, but also among Jews and Christians, has rekindled anti-clerical sentiment among those who fear the secular and democratic values represented by the public school system will be undermined as religion encroaches on the school system.

In the debate before the French National Assembly, some deputies fulminated against the idea that schools might ban pork from their menus in deference to Muslim and Jewish students and raged against examples of Muslim girls refusing, on religious grounds, to participate with boys in athletic activities.

After all, the French argue, the school should be a neutral meeting ground where children learn the basic principles of the French Republic, not an arena where the values of this or that religious community breeds hostility and distrust between children of different religions and between religious and secular children.

But, there is more to the debate than defending the secular nature of the French state and its school system.

Above all, the conflict revolves around the question of Muslim schoolgirls who insist on wearing headscarves to class.

Although debates in the National Assembly and in government commissions always mention Jewish yarmulkes, Christian crucifixes and Sikh turbans among the symbols to be banned, the fact is that it is the headscarves that provoked the controversy in the first place and continue to inflame passions.

For supporters of the law, the headscarves symbolize oppression.

The French government commission that recommended the new law recounts cases of young Muslim women forced by family or male relatives to wear the scarf or threatened with reprisals if they refused.

The commission also raised the issue of Muslim women teachers who, on religious grounds, resisted accepting the authority of women supervisors and asked for male supervisors instead.

On one side, then, a majority of the French believe that Muslim schoolgirls who wear headscarves do so not because of free choice, but because it has been imposed on them by the male members of their families or their community.

According to one government report, "Wearing religions signs, and most notably the headscarf, appears as a form of pressure and a source of conflict incompatible with the educative mission of the school and especially inconsistent with educating critical judgment." And in his speech to the nation on the new law, French President Jacques Chirac referred time and again to defending the "equality of the sexes."

On the other side, however, the opponents of the new law, who, remarkably, come from all sides of the political spectrum, argue that the law will throw religious students into the arms of fundamentalists, that it will be unenforceable and that to make absolutely no concession to religious students is to make of secularism itself a form of fundamentalism.

Surely, they say, French schools should adopt a more open style of secularism, one that would accept differences and would treat people equally, regardless of difference of race, sex or religion.

After all, if one object of the school system is to help young people develop into good citizens, then would it not be better to do everything possible to integrate children into the values of the Republic by bringing them into school rather than rejecting them because of closely held religious beliefs?

The government commission that prepared the new law took a cursory look at how the English, Germans, Italians and Dutch handled the question of students wearing religious symbols in schools.

It's too bad they didn't come to Canada. Whatever our continuing problems of trying to integrate religious students into a secular school system, we have at least avoided steaming full speed ahead toward the conflict and chaos the French now seem certain to have created for themselves.



tovabbi velemenyek?

en egyebkent meg mindig nem tudom mi a helyes dontes. Franciaorszag nem hirdeti multikulturalizmusat. habar nem vagyok franciabarat, sot..., de ebben lehet, hogy igazuk van. nem elek ott, nem tudom-erzem, hogy mi az igazsag.

Sokat birkoztam magamba, evvel a kérdésel kapcsolatban.
Valahogy a Franciák oldalán állok.
Szerintem nagyon fontos az állam és az egyházak szétválasztása.

Nehéz...ebben az esetben igazat adok a francia parlamentnek...ezzel, a mai terrorista hisztériában csak a gyerekeket védik.

Szerintem nem jó ha az iskolában a gyerekek tojásszerüen egyformák, de a vallási jelek méretét csökkenteni lehetne.
Pl.-ul egyforma nagyságú jelvényeket, minden nagyobb valláshoz és nincs belőle sértődés.

Az arcot eltakaró csadornak, nem csak vallási, hanem "fizikai" szerepe is volt pl.-ul a homok és nap szűrésében, de Franciaországban ez már értelmét vesztette. Ha mondjuk lenne egy falloszimádó vallás (úgy tudom van) és a gyerekek faloszokkal járnának kötelezően iskolába, az üde színfoltot leszámítva az is kényelmetlen lenne...

Ha ezzel sok csadort/fejpántot viselő nem tud együttélni, még mindig van egy csomó más ország ahol hódolhat ebbéli szokásának.

Ez ügyben francia párti vagyok. Minden normális demokrácia alapja, hogy a vallás és az állam kettéváljon. Csak nézzétek meg a világban, hogy a politika milyen undorítóan használja a vallást a saját érdekében.

Those franks are dam right.

People should be free to wear what they want. No one has the right to tell them what to wear.

Non democratic