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MATERIAL FACTS
By John Thornhill

Financial Times (UK)
November 18, 2006

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4b5933f2-76aa-11db-8284-0000779e2340.html

[Review of Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space by John R. Bowen (Princeton University Press, 2006) £17.95, 328 pages]

It is curious, to say the least, how two supposedly mature Western democracies, Britain and France, have worked themselves up into such a lather about the desire of some of their female Muslim citizens to wear headscarves and veils in public.

What is it about wearing a seemingly harmless piece of cloth that so incites the passions of politicians, head teachers, and media pundits?

Why the French Don't Like Headscarves examines this furious debate from different political, religious, cultural, and social angles, and explains why in 2003 the French government adopted a law banning all "ostentatious religious signs" in schools. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given that the author is an American anthropologist, the book argues that the row over headscarves symbolises a far broader debate about France's fragmenting society and national identity, and the rising fear of Islamism.

John Bowen is at his most interesting in describing the centrality of laïcité in the French republican tradition. This concept, which is perhaps best -- if still inadequately -- translated as secularism, stems from France's history of religious wars, along with adherence to the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is alien to the British practice of multiculturalism.

In the republican way of thinking, a society can live together only if it agrees a basic set of common values, or a "social contract," as Jean Jacques Rousseau insisted. It is the responsibility of the state -- rather than individual churches, communities, or associations -- to mould those shared values, primarily through the education system. In this way a neutral public space can be created in which every citizen can participate on equal terms, irrespective of religion, background, or ethnicity. Freedom must be attained through the state, rather than against the state, as John Locke and the English liberal tradition, argued. And a school should be, at least according to President Jacques Chirac, a "republican sanctuary."

The insistence of two Muslim girls from Creil on wearing headscarves in school therefore challenged the neutrality of this space. In so conspicuously signalling their allegiance to an external authority they were questioning the universality of French values, with potentially divisive consequences. As the Muslim Brotherhood proclaims: "The Koran is our constitution."

Militant teachers insisted on the sanctity of the Republic's secular values and refused to teach girls wearing headscarves. This led Chirac to set up a commission under former minister Bernard Stasi. Its recommendation to ban all overt signs of religious faith in schools formed the basis of the 2004 law.

However, Bowen notes that although the French pride themselves on their rationality they are not always the most faithful adherents of reason. The French response was disproportionate to the "problem," as the issue became entangled in other debates about communalism, Islamism, and sexism. No one had previously objected to Sikh boys wearing turbans in school. Besides, the universality of French values has never been as universal as proclaimed. For example, the 1905 law separating church and state has never applied to the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine, which were under German occupation at the time the law was adopted.

The 2004 law might have made sense in theory, but how was it to be interpreted in practice? The complexities of determining "religious affiliation" were exposed in a parody of the administrative order "clarifying" application of the law. "A scarf worn by a Christian girl will be accepted, as long as she is not a nun, and the same for a turban worn by a Jewish pupil and a Sikh's large cross," the parody noted. "A registry will be kept of each pupil's religion to make clear which signs each may not wear."

Chirac argued that wearing a headscarf in school signalled a rejection of French values. It is "a kind of aggression that it is difficult for the French to accept," he said. But as Bowen writes, this would seem to deny the very possibility that someone could be French and wear an Islamic headscarf.

Robert Putnam, the Harvard academic, has argued that successful integration not only depends on immigrants adapting to their new environment; it also relies on host societies adapting to immigrants. "What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us," he said in a recent interview with the Financial Times.

That is a view shared by Bowen. "Some Muslim immigrants find that the one-way direction of 'integration' requires too little of those who drink red wine and wear berets, and too much of those who prefer tea and headscarves," he writes. "Calls for newcomers to integrate are not accompanied by calls for long-term residents to broaden their notions of what is acceptably French."

The debate is far from over.

--John Thornhill is editor of the FT's European edition.