I never thought I’d see the day I find myself agreeing with France’s National Front, but today it happened: Jean Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine, vice president of the FN, said Jaques Chirac’s speech today calling for the banning of “ostentatious” (ostensible) religious symbols (i.e. Muslim headscarves) from schools and workplaces was “a sort of apology for immigration.”
That’s exactly what it came across as. I am quite simply aghast at this turn of events. It’s enough to make an atheist like myself wear a headscarf out of solidarity, so imagine how reasonable French Muslims are going to react.
Why ban just religious ostentatious symbols? I can think of far more annoying ostentatious symbols that are not religious: Why not ban the ostentatious use of nationalist symbols at school or the workplace, like overlarge flags? Why not ban driving ostentatious cars to work, so as not to offend your poorer coworkers? What about ostentatious homes?
The actual speech [French] is full of paeans to France’s invention of human rights, and how freedom is a cornerstone of French society. You can just feel the “but” coming on. And here it is:
Pour autant, ce mouvement doit trouver ses limites dans le respect des valeurs communes.
But who decides what are the common values that determine what constitutes ostentatious religious speech? (And wearing a headscarf is speech, clearly.) Most Muslim women do not wear the headscarf to annoy Chirac, or at least did not do so until today. They do not consider it ostentatious; on the contrary, they consider it a sign of modesty. It might be ostentatious by Christian standards, granted, and there’s the rub. Chirac, his sober Christian sensibilities offended by the colorful enthusiasms of devout Muslim faith, has used a Christian benchmark to determine what constitutes an excessive display of religious affinity.
But didn’t Chirac just say he wanted to defend the secular character of French institutions? Doing so by favoring the norms of one religion over another is a terrible start, not just because it can be seen to be discriminatory, but because it is. It’s especially in the matter of religion that you must not limit speech according to the norms of the religious majority. This is the whole point of tolerance: you grin and bear religious behaviour you’d rather not seeIf secularism is so important, why not use a “zero-tolerance” benchmark for ostentatious religious symbolism and outlaw all kinds, including all sizes of crosses? Because too many people currently wear crosses?.
This so exasperating that you almost want to shake Chirac and ask him what part of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” he doesn’t understand, though I now know the answer.
He’s not even aware he is applying a double standard. Elsewhere, he says:
Notre objectif, c’est d’ouvrir les esprits et les c˙urs. C’est de faire comprendre aux jeunes concernés les enjeux de la situation et de les protéger contre les influences et les passions qui, loin de les libérer ou de leur permettre d’affirmer leur libre arbitre, les contraignent ou les menacent.
and
Au moment o˘ s’affaissent les grandes idéologies, l’obscurantisme et le fanatisme gagnent du terrain dans le monde.
Muslims youth now knows: As far as Chirac is concerned, wanting to wear a headscarf to school means you have succumbed to obscurantism and fanaticism, and a law will be put into place to save you from your silly self. Luckily, a law is all it takes — as soon as you are prohibited from wearing a headscarf to school or work, you will be liberated, magically, from your desire to do so.
Finally, this law is a disgrace for the way in which it will influence behavior in situations outside of work and school. For while it is still legal to wear a headscarf on the bus or while shopping, women who do so have been put on notice that they are pursuing an activity that has been officially deprecated by the state, and that it jars with the will of the moral majority. By wearing a headscarf, they are now bad Frenchwomen. Some liberté.
The arguments they make assert a “Christianity of culture,” sure, but just ask the Poles or even the Irish about how Christian France is; it’s not. This is more a symptom of a pervasive disrespect for organised religion in the governmental establishment. This is the country that ended all religious education in the 19th century and with which the Vatican broke off diplomatic relations early in the 20th.
Post-war it eased off, de Gaulle being a haute-bourgeois Catholic. But, de Gaulle is long dead. Now, myself, I agree that organised religion does not deserve much respect. That’s not a very politically adept position to take, though, given how strongly many people feel attached to them. Banning the foulard in school is stupid, and can be justifiably taken as an insult to Islam.
This is about Secularism, not Christianity. At the end of the 19C the French fought a very nasty fight to rid public
education of any traces of Catholicism. They didn’t do it in order to replace it with Islamism.
Secularism is one of the core values of the French Republic. These core values are subject to change, but only with the
consent of the majority of French people. You can’t just barge into a nation of 60 million people with a proud and
distinctive tradition and demand that they abandon it, just to suit your fancy. If you want to live where ostentatious
public displays of Islam are allowed, and even encouraged, there are many countries for you to choose from. France is not
one of them.
Who determines what is ostentatious and what isn’t? The French people do, through their elected representatives. The French
people struggled hard to achieve these rights, and they are not going to give them up in favour of any random king, imam or
blogger.
Oblomov, we are obviously miles apart. I cannot fathom what it is about a scarf that can possibly annoy you. I don’t care how other people lead their lives as long as they keep their don’t invade others’ personal spaces. But merely looking a certain way must never pass as offensive in my book. That, if anything, should be the lesson you learn in a secular society. For me, a seculatr society is a free market of religious ideas.
Your expressed opinions even go beyond the mandate of this law, and hence you betray an unarticulated prejudice: That you cannot be religious and French, or rather, Muslim and French with the same fervour that you can be Jewish and French or Christian and French.
Surely you must hold a more nuanced view than “if you don’t like their kind here they are free to leave?” Many of “these people” are French, whether you like it or not.
And human rights are not something an electorate decides: France has already signed on to the UN Human rights declaration. But if we are going to trample over human rights for the sake of secularity, then please be consistent and prohibit all displays of religious affinity. I include ostentatious cathedrals, small crosses on pendants, and definitely religious tattoos. Force them to remove these items, and then I will concede that the law is merely anti-religious, not anti-Muslim.
I’m with Stefan on this one. Well said, decrees as the one made by Chirac always make me nervous about being the thin edge of the wedge.
I understand what you meen when you say that a freedom has been taken but think about it, can a country be completly free with no rules or law, sometimes the interdiction might be the way to access to freedom. I don’t say that it is the case here but maybe we should think about that. Otherwise, I agree with you to say that the behaviour of the French politicians during all this have been more than shocking. It seemed to be more mediatic than anything else…
Despite this having been debated many months ago, the ban on headscarves etc in France is not entirely unreasonable. It states nowhere, i repeat NOWHERE in the Qu’ran that muslim women have to wear headscarves, it is more of a desire from imams of certain branches of Islam, which some women choose to waive when applying for a job, if they feel it may impede their chances of getting a job.
Despite this having been debated many months ago, the ban on headscarves etc in France is not entirely unreasonable. It states nowhere, i repeat NOWHERE in the Qu’ran that muslim women have to wear headscarves, it is more of a desire from imams of certain branches of Islam, which some women choose to waive when applying for a job, if they feel it may impede their chances of getting a job.
Bertrand, the godly call for women to wear modest dress — i.e. for women to wear a headscarf or nuns to wear their garb — originates from the same traditional 1st testament place, I believe, and is not a Koranic teaching, per se. Whether or not it is a reasonable belief is entirely besides the point, however. The question is whether people should be allowed to express their religiosity, however misinformed you might feel it to be.The answer to that question, as far as I am concerned, is a resounding yes. And I am an atheist.
Why? Because tolerance of each other’s beliefs is my best guarantee of others’ tolerance of my beliefs.