Just when the Western world was making an effort to convince Muslims of its new, more enlightened understanding of Islam, French President Jacques Chirac issued a fatwa of his own: Head scarves will soon be banned in public schools.
In the interest of protecting France’s historical commitment to secularism, Chirac said other religious symbols, including Jewish yarmulkes and overt Christian crosses, should also be prohibited, pending legislation by the French parliament.
During the three weeks since the announcement, the loudest outcries have come primarily from among France’s 4 million Muslims, backed by Muslims around the world. America’s Muslims fear the French edict could be a signal of what their future here, where their Muslim identity is rapidly emerging in public, just as it has in Europe over the last decade.An increasing number of American Muslim women and schoolgirls are deciding to wear the head scarf, called a hijab, in schools, government offices, shopping malls, universities and restaurants. And the frequency of hijab sightings could spark a similar public debate here over the issue of the separation of church and state, as it has in Europe.
For many Muslims, the head scarf is not simply a matter of religious symbolism; it is a religious obligation. While there is intense debate among Muslims worldwide over whether veiling is prescribed in Islam and, therefore, whether it should be mandatory or voluntary, those who do wear the hijab cite verses in the Koran and the hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, for reasons to veil.
The Koranic debate largely centers on the following verse, which remains open to interpretation:
“And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty or ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or their slaves whom their hands possess or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex.”
The head of a national Islamic organization posted his response to Chirac’s call, a response apparently issued in the spirit of the French revolutionary motto “Liberty, equality and fraternity” on the group’s Web site.
“A nation cannot claim to uphold the principles of liberty and equality while denying the religious rights of its citizens,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, an organization founded in 1928 that has inspired Islamic groups ever since, had this to say last week: “The secular philosophy on which the French president based his decision to support this proposal, considering the hijab a religious symbol, is not correct. The Islamic hijab is a religious duty.”
Divine edict
In other words, for many in the Muslim world women are required to wear the head scarf in obedience to God.
Doctrine aside, there is another factor fueling Muslim outrage over the French ban that touches the heart of the East-West schism: Once again, the West, threatened by a sense that Islam is becoming too powerful, is defining the rights of its Muslim citizens based on its notions of liberal secularism and modernity.
“Secularism is not negotiable,” Chirac declared, when calling for the head scarf ban.
But is French secularism so fragile that it is threatened by the sight of a schoolgirl wearing a head scarf? One recent news report said French schools had experienced only a handful of disputes over the hijab; all were apparently resolved quietly between parents and school officials.
Some French commentators wrote that Chirac is championing the issue to increase his popularity among resurgent right-wing nationalists. France’s commitment to secularism traces its roots to the 1789 revolution and the struggle by civil society to suppress the powerful hold of the religious establishment.
French schools were used to transform Catholic peasants into upstanding French citizens.
Perhaps herein lies Chirac’s concern over religious influence in public schools: Could a historical reversal occur? Could the effect of a schoolgirl wearing a veil be so powerful that others will follow in her footsteps, giving momentum to an Islamic revival that is already making the staunchly secular French feel uncomfortable?
This was certainly the rationale when some Arab governments, including Egypt, tried to ban veiling in public schools in the 1990s. At the time, the Egyptian education minister, who tried to make the argument that women wore head scarves to avoid visiting the hairdresser, believed that one veiled schoolgirl would eventually produce hundreds of others, giving credibility to the Islamic opposition.
The hijab, often little more than a small piece of cloth but sometimes encompassing a full-length veil, has become a measuring stick the West uses to determine the degree of modernity and the potential for political pluralism in Islamic countries. In those places where the veil is less common, such as officially secular Turkey, there is an assumption that democracy and modernity can flourish.
The Western view
But in countries where a majority of women cover their heads voluntarily, such as Egypt, and where it is mandatory, in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the West assumes women are captives of their male-dominated, medieval societies.
But many Muslim women, whether they are doctors, lawyers or housekeepers in the United States or abroad, say they prefer to wear a head scarf for many reasons, including a belief that maintaining modest dress offers more equality in sexually obsessed societies.
The Nobel Peace Prize provides the latest example of the head scarf’s being used as a geopolitical weapon. The prize was awarded to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human-rights activist. Ebadi, who was appointed as a judge by the shah of Iran and removed from her post by the clerics who toppled the shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has been an advocate for women’s rights.
In particular, Ebadi has criticized the Iranian government for its insistence that all women wear head scarves in Iran and long overcoats or chadors to conceal their bodies.
There is little doubt that Ebadi’s role as a champion for women’s rights was a major reason the Nobel committee chose her over other human-rights activists in Iran, many of whom have endured long prison sentences and torture for their beliefs.
When Ebadi accepted her prize in Oslo, some astute Iranian experts criticized her for failing to use her time on the world stage to bring attention to Iran’s poor human-rights record.
Iranian criticized
“Listeners had no way of knowing that Ebadi was speaking as a representative of a human-rights movement in a nation where tens of thousands were executed after grossly unfair political trials two decades ago, where arbitrary detention is commonplace and religious persecution is institutionalized,” wrote Elahe Hicks, a long-time Iran expert at the New-York-based Human Rights Watch, in a column in the Los Angeles Times.
But for many pious Muslims, the head scarf is neither a religious symbol nor a political tool. To deny them this right, in their view, is to stand in the way of their religious salvation.
