Secularism gone mad
Chirac's determination to ban Muslim headscarves from schools will cause years of confrontation
Madeleine Bunting Thursday December 18, 2003 The Guardian
A 13-year-old girl is an exemplary pupil in every way; she listens carefully to her teachers, does her homework and is a cheerful member of the class. But in one respect, according to President Jacques Chirac yesterday, her behaviour threatens nothing less than the social peace and national cohesion of the French nation - she insists on wearing a headscarf. All around her, pupils are wearing the kind of outlandish clothes and hairstyles one would expect of teenagers anywhere in Europe. But there is one garment that, the president has declared, challenges the secularity of republican France: the square metre or so of material that covers this girl's hair. It seems preposterous: how can the clothing of schoolgirls become an issue of such enormous symbolic weight that for 14 years it has been the touchstone of a debate about the French constitution, about what it is to be French and how France should "integrate" its 3.7 million Muslims - the largest Muslim minority in Europe? (Significantly, France talks of integration, not multi-culturalism.) It is not just schoolgirls who will be affected but also public servants; a juror was even dismissed during a trial because she was wearing a headscarf. The French state must be seen to be entirely neutral in all its dealings, and Chirac yesterday endorsed the findings of an official commission and asked parliament to pass a law banning all "ostentatious religious symbols".
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But any smug sense of British superiority is misplaced. The themes that underlie this vexed issue in France are as evident here: this is the latest chapter in a long and troubled history of how liberalism interacts with religion in Europe. Liberalism, with its cherished principles of rationality, individual rights and the rule of law, wanted religion to be a purely private matter, but such a concept makes no sense to a profoundly social faith such as Islam. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is over questions of belonging and identity: are you French or Muslim, or can you be both? We haven't resolved these questions here - note, for example, the questioning of the loyalty of the Muslim community by Denis MacShane, the Foreign Office minister. The difference is that while France has had an intense debate that has split every political allegiance, Britain has managed to dodge such a showdown. The roots of France's secularism lie in the struggle against the overweening power of the Catholic church: how to cut it down to size and assert the primacy - and neutrality - of the state. France's schools were the vehicle to turn Catholic peasants into French republican citizens, points out Drake, and state education was how you built an integrated, cohesive nation. The French secularist tradition has its own coherent logic, but it was conceived in one set of historical circumstances, and is now being applied in another, vastly different set. The end result of this logic - a generation of angry Muslims - could be, quite literally, catastrophic.
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Liberalism has always regarded religious faith as irrational and emotional,
and as something that must be corralled into safe irrelevance. By the latter
half of the 20th century, it was within sight of achieving its goal, as
European Christianity crumbled. Nowhere was this more true than in France.
That victory only reinforced the French liberal tradition's sense of its own
superiority and historical inevitability; the assumption was that wealth and
time would between them kill off the last vestiges of religious faith. But
this has not proved true of France's Muslims, and now, disastrously,
liberalism has resorted to the full force of the law to buttress its
supremacy. France is providing an example par excellence of what the French
would call a "dialogue de sourds " - a dialogue of the deaf.
> From Afghanistan to the American south, religion is resurgent in more
violent and assertive manifestations than at any time in history. Liberalism
appears blind to its own forms of self-assertion and aggression (economic,
military or cultural), and hence to its own part in the generation of this
ghastly phenomenon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1109242,00.html