FRANCE: The French National Assembly will this afternoon approve by a large majority a law banning the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools. Lara Marlowe reports from Paris.
The vote marks the culmination of 10 months of debate about the Islamic headscarf. Last July, President Jacques Chirac established the Stasi Commission to study the desirability of a law. On December 17th, he announced that he would seek legislation.
The question has so impassioned France that 120 politicians - more than a fifth of the National Assembly's 577 deputies - read speeches during the 21 and a half hours of debate that preceded the vote. Many of the speakers said they initially had reservations about the short, three-article law, but came to understand its "necessity".
The law is widely seen as a way of braking Islamic fundamentalism. "It's important to show that the Republic. . .cannot accept being eaten away at from the inside," the Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said last month.
An estimated eight to ten per cent of France's population are Muslim.
French fears of militant Islam were expressed by the former Prime Minister Mr Alain Juppé, who addressed the Assembly in his first public speech since he was convicted of corrupt party financing on January 30th.
"It's not being paranoid to say that we're confronted with the rise of political-religious fanaticism that wants to turn religious law into civil law and make faith the basis of political power," Mr Juppé said.
Public debate has encompassed far more than the wearing of headscarves, with language often verging on racist. "The debate. . .revealed the amplitude of the threat of Islamist contagion," the right-wing Le Figaro said. Much publicity has been given to reports that educators are threatened for teaching biology, the history of religion or the Holocaust. Advocates of the law denounce instances of forced marriage, polygamy and repudiation in France. Incidents where Muslim women refused to be cared for by male doctors led Mr Raffarin to envisage a second law on secularism in hospitals.
In defending the law, French officials stress that the headscarf will be banned from next September in public primary and secondary schools only. But there is talk of a similar law for the civil service, which employs 30 per cent of salaried workers, and a mechanism to enable private companies to exclude religious symbols too.
Of the 150 witnesses called by the Stasi Commission, only one was a woman wearing a headscarf. She is Ms Saida Kada, a Frenchwoman of Algerian origin and the co-author of the book, One is Veiled; the Other Isn't.
"The French debate has grafted itself on to discussion within the Muslim community," Ms Kada said yesterday. "The establishment concluded that Muslims who believe the covering is God's will are fundamentalists, and those who say it's not are moderate and good. I believe it is divine law, so my camp is chosen for me."
Ms Kada, who co-founded a computer company in Lyons with her husband, is alarmed by growing antagonism against Muslims. "A few days ago I was in the National Assembly for its 'political book day'," she says. "I heard a politician say, 'This law is great. It will liberate immigrant women'. That's colonial rhetoric. A woman came up to me and said, 'Why don't you go back to Saudi Arabia where they stone women'?"
In a show of unity not seen since the Iraq war, both Mr Chirac's majority UMP and the opposition Socialists officially support the text. Two amendments were added.
One specifies that no schoolgirl will be punished without prior dialogue. The other, adopted at the insistence of the socialists, requires an "evaluation" of the law one year after it takes effect.
The Socialists wanted the law to ban "visible" rather than "conspicuous" religious symbols. The word "visible" was also preferred by Mr Jean-Louis Debré, the right-wing President of the National Assembly.
The Education Minister, Mr Luc Ferry, wanted to retain the word "ostentatious", which was used in a 1989 ruling by the Council of State. But Mr Chirac preferred "conspicuous".
Interpretation of the law already involves hair-splitting. When he defended the text before the Assembly's legal commission, Mr Ferry said that large crosses, worn by France's tiny Chaldean Catholic community, would fall under its purview.
To prevent turbans worn by Sikhs from offending secular French people, Mr Ferry suggested "invisible turbans" or hair-nets.
Beards ("pilosity" in Mr Ferry's vocabulary) could be banned if worn "conspicuously".