Banning Headscarves

I was in two minds about the French ban on headscarves in schools, but if this report is to be believed, they got it right:

Fathima stood outside her lycée chatting and joking with friends. She paused briefly to lift a long, beige scarf off her head and then walked into the playground — an excited teenager back in class after the two-month French summer holidays.

Yet a year ago here, at the Lycée Henri Wallon in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, the mood was very different.

France’s centre-Right Government had passed a law banning religious symbols from schools and girls such as Fathima were at the centre of a fierce national controversy.

The law applies to all visible symbols, including kippas, turbans and large Christian crosses. But no one ever had any doubt about its main target — the Muslim headscarf that was the focus of a long and bitter struggle between Islamic extremists and the secular state.

At the Lycée Henri Wallon, where Alma and Lila Levy were expelled for refusing to remove their scarves, the debate was heated. Most teachers backed the law on the ground, hoping that it would end a drift towards multiculturalism that was separating pupils along ethnic and religious lines.

But leaders of France’s five million Muslims denounced it as an attack on religious freedom and parents expressed fears that children would be driven out of school because of “a bit of cloth on their heads”.

Twelve months on, the row has subsided and the law is being hailed by the Government as a success that has stemmed the Islamic fundamentalist tide and brought calm to the nation’s lycées.

Fathima, who is 16, agrees. “In the end I really don’t think it was a bad law at all. I wear my voile until I get to the school gates and then I take it off. School is not a place for religion. It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again. There’s no difficulty.”

Meanwhile in Britain the PM’s wife successfully argued Shabina Begum’s case that she be allowed to wear a full-length jilbab to school – a case instigated by Hizb ut-Tahrir. And the PM himself is keen to support faith schools….