Chirac seeks law to ban headscarves
Says school plan needed to protect France's secularism
PARIS -- President Jacques Chirac, warning that growing ethnic and religious divisions threatened to erode France's tradition of equality, called yesterday for a new law that would ban Muslim girls' headscarves and all other overt religious symbols from the country's public schools.
"Secularism is not negotiable," Chirac said in a somber, half-hour, nationally televised speech. "The schools will remain secular."
"The Muslim veil, whatever name it is given, the kippa [the Jewish skullcap, also known as a yarmulke], or the cross, if of manifestly excessive dimensions, don't have a place in the walls of public schools," Chirac said. He said small, discreet signs, like tiny crosses or Stars of David should be allowed.
By taking a firm line against headscarves and growing "communitarianism," Chirac was following the advice of a government-appointed panel, which last week recommended the ban on veils.
But Chirac yesterday went further than the commission, saying private businesses should be allowed to ban their Muslim employees from wearing headscarves "for reasons of security or client contact," and patients at public hospitals should not be allowed to refuse treatment from doctors of the opposite sex. Some French Muslim men reportedly have refused to allow male doctors to treat their wives.
He also rejected the panel's recommendation that a Jewish and Muslim holiday be added to the school calendar, now laden with Christian holidays that few here celebrate for religious reasons.
By proposing a new nationwide ban on headscarves and other religious items, Chirac was hoping to settle a debate between diversity and equality that has raged here on and off for the last 15 years, as immigration from Muslim countries has soared, making Islam now the country's second-largest religion.
Since 1989, French authorities have let individual schools decide whether Muslim girls could cover their heads. The result has been a patchwork of regulations, and expulsions have accelerated recently, as more young girls from Muslim immigrant families appear to be turning toward the veil.
The debate has taken place amid fears that Islamic extremism is growing among France's Muslim population, estimated at from 5 million to 7 million people. In his speech yesterday, Chirac warned that "fanaticism is gaining ground."
The headscarf controversy is being played out in classrooms and government offices across Europe. Depending on the location, the veil, or "hijab," is viewed as a backward symbol of women's oppression, an insidious attack on European secular institutions, a religious obligation for the strictly observant, and as a symbol of ethnic identity for many alienated young Muslim women in their adopted homelands.
But few countries cherish their secularity as much as France, which broke from the Roman Catholic Church after the French Revolution and enshrined the separation of church and state into its Constitution in 1905.
While France has long been a country of immigration, with the streets of Paris and Marseilles and the other large cities showing an increasing Arab and African mix, the French tradition has been one of aggressive assimilation: Newcomers were welcome as long as they adopted French language, tradition, and culture, and essentially became French.
Chirac has broad support for his proposed new law from across the political spectrum; only the Communists, Greens, and extreme left are openly opposed.
A poll published yesterday showed 69 percent of those surveyed in favor of such a ban. But the president's attempts to settle the debate over religious symbols in schools seems set to fuel the controversy. Many critics -- including Muslim leaders, religious organizations, academics, and others -- argue that a ban goes too far and can further antagonize France's Muslims at a time when the country needs to be talking about coexistence and diversity.
Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith and director of Paris Mosque, France's main mosque, warned that a ban on headscarves in school could well lead to stigmatizing the Muslim community in France. But after the speech, he urged young Muslims to remain calm.
Valerie Offenberg, the French representative of the American Jewish Committee in France, said the ban was likely to rile all the major religious organizations, while ignoring the root problem, which was the difficulty of Muslim integration into French society.
"It's more a problem of integration than a religious problem," she said. "Chirac didn't talk enough about the real problem . . . ."
In his speech, Chirac did speak of the problem of integrating France's Muslims. He also called for "equality of opportunity" and spoke of a renewed "fight against xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism."
