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.

To Americans and Britons used to a more laissez-faire approach to multiculturalism, the French Parliament's recent vote (by 494 to 36) to ban the wearing of "conspicuous" religious symbols in public schools may seem perverse. (The ban will apply to yarmulkes and large crucifixes as well as the hijab, but no one is taken in by this apparent evenhandedness.) Yet similar laws are being discussed in Belgium and the Netherlands; Germany's highest court has ruled that states can ban teachers from wearing the hijab; and in Luton, near London, a 15-year-old Muslim girl is hiring lawyers because she can't go to school in her jilbab, a long robe she feels expresses her spiritual commitment. Europe's anxieties about immigration and a spreading Islamic revival have found a rich metaphor in this polymorphous piece of cloth, which can be read at once as a cover for inaccessible mysteries, an assertion of Islamic identity or an instrument of women's oppression.

The French law is meant to protect the republican principle of laïcité, a strict form of secularism established after bitter struggles at the beginning of the last century to keep the Catholic Church out of politics. Nearly everyone agrees that laïcité must be preserved--including most of the far right, who take the Catholic jihadi Joan of Arc as figurehead for their anti-immigrant campaign. At a moment of perceived crisis, it is a powerful rallying cry. Exactly what the crisis is depends on whom you ask.

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