HARVEST OF HATE

France's Headscarf Problem (Theodore Dalrymple, 23 April 2003, City Journal)

The French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the first man for a long time to hold that post who has shown the courage and determination to confront France's growing social problems. He has put policemen back on the beat; he is testing drivers of crashed cars for the presence of cannabis in their urine. But he made a rod with which to beat his own back in creating the Union of French Islamic Organizations as an intermediary between French Muslims and the French government. He hoped that moderates would control the new group, but instead it has given extremists a platform from which to voice their demands. Last weekend, he brought down the extremists' ire by re-opening the question of the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim girls and women in a speech to the new Islamic union.

The fundamentalists booed Sarkozy, though a smattering of the women in the audience applauded when he remarked that the law required that photographs for the compulsory identity card should be taken bareheaded: that is to say, without a headscarf. He was implicitly asserting the supremacy of the law of the state over any religious custom.

The Conseil d'Etat had not long before ruled that the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls at school was legal (it had previously been banned), provided that it gave rise to no conflict. This, of course, was asking for the circle to be squared: and conflict over headscarves duly started up again in several schools almost at once. But, in a spirit completely contrary to the Conseil d'Etat's ruling, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced his intention of prohibiting by law the wearing of the headscarf in the exercise of any public function. He did so in name of the difference between the public and the private sphere, and of the secularism of the state.

The wearing of the headscarf has clearly become a matter of the deepest symbolic significance in France, a matter over which it is not impossible to see hundreds or even thousands eventually being killed. What might appear to an outsider as a trivial disagreement is actually one of great philosophical importance-a fact that both parties to the disagreement instinctively understand.

While asking the women to remove the scarf for an identification photo seems entirely reasonable, banning the veil entirely would not be mere secularism but genuine religious hostility. Given that the French won't be in control there much longer, they might want to be careful about sowing such hostility, because they may not like what they reap. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 23, 2003 10:08 PM