Abstract

Letter From Paris

The author discusses the controversy surrounding the French government's move to ban the wearing of Islamic head scarves in public schools. For several months now France has been obsessed with an item of women's clothing. The garment in question is not the skimpy lingerie modeled in a Paris Metro ad by a pubescent girl (paedophilie publicitaire, scolds the graffiti) but the Islamic hijab, increasingly in vogue among French Muslim women. The French law is meant to protect the republican principle of laï cité, a strict form of secularism established after bitter struggles at the beginning of the last century to keep the Catholic Church out of politics. A second-generation Algerian is three to four times more likely to be unemployed than, a "native" French person; schools in the banlieues are bleak and badly funded, experienced by teachers and students as the front line of confrontation. The rise of the far right's Jean-Marie Le Pen is one consequence of this: President Jacques Chirac, who was re-elected in 2002 on the back of Le Pen's success against the Socialists, is mindful both of his debt to his onetime ally and of the threat he represents. Outside the Lycée Suger in the suburb of St. Denis, Samia, Rania and their friend--all 17--clearly don't want to be a battlefield. They say no one is for the law; they don't see why there's such a fuss about a piece of cloth. Banning the hijab at school won't rescue girls from fundamentalist fathers or weaken the Islamists, who will exploit it as another instance of anti-Muslim prejudice. Instead, it weakens liberalism.