Debate on Islamic veils inflames passions

Gursel Kervanci left his native Turkey 20 years ago to work in France. Until last autumn, when he took his 12-year-old daughter Esmanur to annual school registration, he and his family lived peacefully in the north-western French town of Flers where he works as an industrial meat-packer.

The College Jean-Monnet refused to accept the girl because she began wearing a Muslim headscarf at puberty. "She sat at the window and watched her friends walking to school and she cried," Mr Kervanci said.

The case is not unusual in France, but this one has revived a bitter, decade-old dispute about secular public education, tolerance and Islam. There are four million Muslims in France, making them the country's second religion.

"My daughter is a student like any other," Mr Kervanci told me plaintively on the telephone. "She's not a monster. She wears the scarf out of faith - not for political reasons."

The Ministry of Education has employed a full-time mediator to deal with disputes involving the foulard Islamique for the past five years. The mediator, an Algerian-born former teacher named Hanifa Cherifi, says there are now 400 young women wearing veils in French schools. About 100 of them have become embroiled in legal battles, and a November 1998 report drawn up by Ms Cherifi noted with alarm that many schools now refuse to accept veiled girls. The reason most often cited for excluding them is "the risk of contaminating other Muslim students".

But Mr Kervanci was determined to defend his daughter, and filed a lawsuit with the Caen tribunal. Although the court has not yet made a final decision, the local education department reminded Eric Geffroy, principal of the College Jean-Monnet, that a 1996 decree by the conseil d'etat, the highest advisory body in France, ruled that the Muslim veil is not an ostentatious sign of religious belief and does not constitute grounds for expulsion.

Grudgingly, the College Jean-Monnet let Esmanur Kervanci return just before Christmas. But when courses resumed after the holidays, a second Muslim girl was also wearing a headscarf, and the school's personnel went on strike in protest. Rather than support the Kervancis, the local Turkish residents' association - which is seeking authorisation to build a prayer meeting place - sided with the teachers.

The conflict was temporarily defused on Monday night, when Segolene Royal, the junior Minister for Education, negotiated a compromise with the teachers under which the Flers girls will be "under observation" for two weeks, during which they must attend all courses and remove their scarves for certain science courses and physical education. Ms Royal told the teachers there was "no question of giving in to those who want to impose fundamentalism".

Absurdly, neither Ms Royal nor the teachers have realised that for a Muslim woman, wearing the veil is an all or nothing commitment. "It's as if they don't want to understand," Esmanur told French television. Her father sees no reason why she cannot play sports with her head covered. "I have confidence in justice," he said. "If they tell me I am wrong, I will accept it. A democratic, secular state guarantees freedom of religion and equality."

But Mr Geffroy, the school principal, sees things differently. Esmanur's scarf, he told me, "offends the personal convictions of the teachers, who believe the presence of a veil - which is a sign of sexual discrimination and a religious symbol - is opposed to the neutrality and secularism of our public education service".

Esmanur's fellow students, many of whom support her, pointed out that there is a chaplain's office - this week, the crucifix disappeared from its door - inside the College Jean-Monnet. Mr Geffroy claimed the chaplain's room was "totally different" from Esmanur's scarf. Mr Kervanci, he noted, has said that wearing the veil is a sort of permanent prayer, a way of living one's religion at every moment of the day - whereas students meet in the chaplain's office only after school hours.

At the College Leo Larguier in Grand-Combe in southern France, two veiled sisters, Romina and Diana Page, aged 13 and 12, have been confined to a study room since last October, when the staff of the school went on strike to protest at their headscarves.

The Page sisters are French-born and have been influenced by their eldest brother, who converted to Islam five years ago. Jean Kiszel, their principal, is even more adamant than his colleague in Normandy. "This is an attack by an Islam that wants to destabilise the values of the Republic," he said.

Amid the passionate arguments about headscarves that are again filling French newspapers and broadcasts, only Ms Cherifi, the mediator, and a lone teacher in Flers have put the girls' well-being above other considerations. "The future of the child is the only thing that matters," Georgette Hamonou, a French teacher at Jean-Monnet said. "It is better to accept her and give her a chance of having a normal education, to allow her to open herself to the world."