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In France, secularism is as enshrined in culture as any faith. But when the state bans headscarves and skullcaps from schools, is religion under attack … or simply put in its rightful place? Home Affairs Editor Neil Mackay investigates

IT may be the first battleground in a war that will run throughout most of the 21st century. What it is not is a war on Islam or on Judaism or on Christianity or on Sikhism. It is, perhaps, a war on religion – all organised religion – waged by Western secularists who see God, in whatever form or persuasion he or she may come, as a dangerous, dictatorial and divisive anachronism.
The French have not just banned the wearing of the hijab – a headscarf worn by Muslim women – in schools. They’ve banned the Jewish skullcap, or yarmulke, the Christian cross and the Sikh turban as well. They have banned children from wearing all obvious religious symbols while in state school. The result: thousands of Muslims taking to the streets, in France, England, Scotland and across the Middle East, yesterday to march in protest against the French ban.

In truth, they have little chance of success. Secularism is the closest thing France has to a state religion. It fought a revolution and killed a king to separate the church and state. It will guard its traditions fiercely – just as fiercely as the Vatican City and Mecca will guard theirs . In France, secularism has been enshrined in the constitution since 1905. From that point onwards, all religious effects were meant to be kept out of the classroom. The proposed French legislation can be seen as merely a reminder and reinforcement of this basic tenet of republican France.

A commission charged with investigating the matter in France says all “conspicuous” religious symbols should go and President Jacques Chirac backed the recommendation. The law, applauded by a number of women’s rights groups in France, will be drafted and may be on the statute books in time for the beginning of the next school year. The law is backed both by Chirac’s conservative UMP party and the opposition socialists.

To the thousands of Muslims who gathered in Paris, London and Edinburgh and throughout the Middle East yesterday, the ban is an attack on their faith. They see it as part of a greater vilification of their religion which has gathered pace since September 11, 2001 – part of a pattern that includes the controversial column which cost former BBC daytime TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk his job.

Khadija Maghrour, who took a break from running her Edinburgh B&B to attend the protest , regards the French plans to ban the scarf as a direct attack on her religion.

“I just think the policy the French are introducing is racist and fascist.

“I could easily see it happening here . This is the most Islamophobic government we have ever had, and that’s saying something.”

Humza Yousaf, who travelled to the capital from Glasgow to “support our Muslim sisters” said: “ We feel we have to do something. All we want is the freedom to express our religious right .”

Shazia Mirza, a British Muslim and a comedian, is one of those who can’t see how it will help or hinder or affect anyone if a girl wears the hijab in a French state school. “We are not going to suddenly turn everyone into an Islamic fundamentalist,” says Mirza. “It is personal choice. I went to France recently and I performed in my hijab and the women got very upset as they couldn’t believe I was performing in my hijab but they couldn’t wear it. They couldn’t believe that and they felt really oppressed by not being able to wear it – rather than oppressed for wearing it. ”

In the UK, Mohammed Sarwar, the Govan Labour MP, has introduced a motion in Westminster calling on the government to criticise the French ban. The motion has received the backing of 22 MPs.

“I believe that this is an attack on religion,” Sarwar said. “The headscarf is just like the cross or the skullcap – people should be able to express their religion in their own way. ”

Hizb ut-Tahrir, the so-called global Islamic political party, said it was one of the main organisations orchestrating protests of around 3000 people in London yesterday. Hizb ut-Tahrir wants to establish an “Islamic caliphate”: an Islamic state operating under strict Shari’ah law. The organisation was banned in Egypt following an attempted coup in 1974.

One of its UK leaders, Dr Imran Waheed, says: “The banning of the Islamic headscarf in France has opened up a new front in the war on Islam. The aim is to ban the public expression of Islam in Europe in the name of secularism.”

Omar Khudabakhsh, a Glasgow activist, said: “Glasgow has a large Muslim population and we want to stand shoulder to shoulder with our sisters in France in the face of this secular crusade.”

The French government claim the rallies, organised in Paris by a small group known as the Party of French Muslims, are an attempt to stir up racial tensions. Spokesman Jean- Francois Cope says the ban safeguards France’s secular tradition and provides people with the freedom to exercise their faith while also respecting the faiths or non-faith of others.

“As for the demonstration,” he said, “we see very clearly that some can and are being tempted to radicalise things, to twist reality.”

Is there really a darker side to what France is doing? Could it be a political tactic to nullify the rising tide of the French National Front? A sop to the extreme racist right wing that has taken a dangerous foothold on French civic life? Or is it an attempt to sap the power that organised religion has to create hatred and schisms within civic society? A noble attempt to put modernity front and centre in European life? Chirac says secularism is one of France’s greatest achievements and it ensures “social peace and national cohesion”.

The left-wing newspaper Libération believes Chirac “wants to prevent the far right from exploiting the increasing problems of identity problems, which worsen as the failure of the policy of integration fuels the trend for minorities to turn inward”. The centrist paper Le Monde points out that Chirac said Islam “has its full place among all the great religions” practised in France.

The French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter says: “If we allow women to wear headscarves in state schools, then the republic and French democracy have made clear their religious tolerance but they have given up any equality of the sexes in our country.” But France isn’t the only country caught up in this divisive row. In Germany, two states have proposed legislation outlawing religious symbols from educational institutions. Many Germans see the scarf as a symbol of the oppression of women which has no place in a democratic society – least of all in a school.

But many Muslim women say they are not oppressed and make the choice to wear the scarf. Sylvie Taleb is director of the first Muslim private school in France, the Lycée Averroes in Lille, set up after 20 pupils were expelled from school in 1997 for refusing to remove their hijabs. Taleb said the move to ban headscarves “seems like an effort to make us colourless”. She dismissed the view that the hijab is a sign of discrimination against women, saying: “Nobody wants to hear what Muslim women are actually saying – I think they wear the headscarf by choice. Isn’t it discrimination to have advertisements showing semi-naked women?”

Yet not all Muslims disagree with the ban. Algerian-born French writer Samira Bellil, 30, has joined the campaign against allowing headscarves in schools. She says the last thing young Muslim women need is to be disempowered more. “I am fighting for personal choice,” she said. “Whatever your identity, all of us deserve equality under the law in a state like France which values its secularity.”

France may have the largest Muslim community in Europe, but it has the largest Jewish population too. Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk also opposes the ban on religious symbols but says he is satisfied with the way Chirac has explained the reasons for the proposed legislation to the French people.

Christians are also uneasy with the ban, however Father Stanislas Lalanne, head of the French bishops’ conference, said the president had assuaged his fears that the proposals were anti-religious. The major French teachers’ union has attacked the plan saying it is counter-productive.

In Britain, Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris, the honourable secretary of the National Secular Society, sees the ban on scarves, yarmulkes, crucifixes and turbans as “in keeping with centuries of secularism as far as state institutions are concerned in France”.

He’s angered by the continual claim that it is all women who are to be forbidden from wearing the hijab. It is, he reiterates, a ban where “girls – not women – in school – not out of school – will be asked not to wear the hijab. That is already the convention and this [law] is just codifying the proposal and the same will apply to Jews with skullcaps in school and Christians with large and visible crosses. There is a tradition that education in France is secular and that there shouldn’t be overt symbols of religion.”

He adds: “The commission in France that looked into this found that in many cases girls were being forced to wear [the hijab], to cover their hair, by the men in their community, and I think that France recognises that in school, at least, girls should be free from that sort of cultural persuasion.

“In the UK, the position is very clear. Some children want to express themselves culturally by wearing some items of fashion that we don’t allow in schools – it is the same with facial jewellery. In fact, I suspect many more children feel more strongly about fashion and identifying themselves with a fashion than they do with religion. So it is not an unheard-of step for schools to say, ‘We draw the line at this sort of thing.’

“I think it’s a reasonable thing to do and certainly not something that we in this country are in a position to criticise, when we sanction discrimination against children by saying, ‘You can’t come to this school because you are of the wrong religion or of no religion.’ That’s what happens with faith schools in our country.”

Harris pointed out that it “ill behoves us in this country to criticise France”, given that one of the world’s most prestigious centres of Islamic learning upheld the right of France to ban religious symbolism in state schools.

The Grand Sheikh of the al-Azhar mosque in Egypt, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, has said the “divine obligation” on women to wear a headscarf did not apply if the women lived in a non-Muslim country like France. After talks with the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, he said Muslim women had to obey the rules of the country in which they live.

Ironically, while Western Europe ties itself into knots over whether it’s bad (racist) or good (secularist and democratic) to ban religious symbols, another country not far from France has done exactly the same thing with little or no international clamour. Turkey has banned headscarves from all public institutions. Racist? Islamophobic? Intolerant? Or merely a secular, but religiously diverse country, albeit strongly Islamic, making a statement about how it wants its society to work and to be seen by the rest of the world in the 21st century?

18 January 2004