Go back to News pagePARIS -- Liberty and equality were founding principles of French democracy, joined in what for 200 years seemed a perfect union. But a 24-inch piece of fabric is pitting them bitterly against each other today. The fabric in question is the hijab, a head scarf worn by Muslim women to demonstrate allegiance to fundamentalist Islam. Since August, nearly two dozen high school students here, mostly children of immigrants from North Africa, have been expelled for wearing the hijab to classes.
The expelled students, along with Islamic fundamentalist leaders -- and most French leftists -- say the issue is liberty, the inalienable right to religious freedom.
But feminists and leftists from North Africa itself, in an unusual alliance with the conservative French government, want the scarf banned from public schools. The issue is not liberty, they say, but equality -- the flaunting of an item of dress that symbolizes sexual oppression.
"It is a terribly complex question, and for people like me, a matter of deep anguish," said Algeria-born Wassyla Tamzali, a lawyer who coordinates women's programs at the Paris-based United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
A September poll by the French Public Opinion Institute found that 22 percent of the nation's 5 million Muslims support the right to wear the hijab to school, while 44 percent were against it and 34 percent refused to take sides.
Like many educated Arabs here and in Algeria, Tamzali is adamantly opposed to allowing the hijab in secular schools, even as she recognizes that the debate is tearing her community apart.
"The controversy has nothing to do with religion," she flatly asserts. "When these girls put on the veil, it is to make a political point -- their acceptance of a fundamentalist political agenda whose major aims are the antithesis of freedom, and particularly the repression of women."
Muslim extremists say that a woman's role is exclusively in the home, and call for a radical scaling back of female participation in the workplace and public life.
The battle over the hijab has been building in France since 1989, when young women first began wearing it to schools in heavily immigrant districts of Paris and other large cities. But it reached the crisis point this September, when French minister of culture Francois Bayrou issued a decree calling for the scarf to be forbidden as "an ostentatious religious symbol."
Such symbols are discouraged in French public schools, which have been rigorously secular since the early 19th century, when control of the educational system was wrested away from the Catholic Church.
Catholic youngsters are not allowed to attend Mass during school hours. Jewish students are not given time off during Yom Kippur or on the Saturday Sabbath, when French schools are in session for half-a-day.
Silent in the hijab debate are the scarved girls themselves, who have been instructed by community leaders and civil rights attorneys to withhold comment until the resolution of several court cases on the Bayrou decree. Elsewhere, however, the controversy is engendering furious, high-decibel shouting matches.
When the outspoken Tamzali appears at public gatherings, such as a recent meeting of French political activists and expatriate Americans sponsored by the Paris chapter of the Democratic Party, her angriest opponents are often non-Muslim westerners, rather than devout Arabs.
"Who are we to tell Algerians what they can or cannot wear?" said one Frenchwoman in her mid-forties at the meeting. "First we seized their country as a colony, then we killed a million of its people in the Algerian civil war. France has no right to impose conditions of any kind on its Muslim residents." Countered Tamzali: "Your problem on the French left is that you are afraid to forbid anything at all. This fight against the fundamentalists isn't some abstract quarrel for us. It is a matter of life or death." The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria over the past five years has touched off a second civil war there, almost as bloody as the one that won the country's independence from France in 1962. Thousands have died in an escalating confrontation between the current military government in Algiers and the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front -- which appeared to have won national elections in 1991, and was prevented from taking power by a French- supported army coup d'etat. Modern Algerian women have been among the fundamentalists' most frequent targets, assaulted by gangs of young men on Algeria's streets for refusing to wear the hijab. The anti-hijab fervor of Algerian women in France cannot be separated from the context of their homeland's war, and its direct threat to hard-won women's rights in North Africa, notes Connie Warren, an American feminist who has closely followed the debate. "But the problem is that there is another context for French women to contend with -- anti-immigrant sentiment in France, directed against Arabs and Muslims." The hijab ban is strongly supported by arch-conservative interior minister Charles Pasqua, who regularly delivers speeches warning of an Islamic conspiracy to flood France with illegal immigrants. Pasqua and education minister Bayrou make no bones about the fact that the ban is intended not simply to enforce secularism in the schools, but also to keep the lid on Islamic fundamentalist activities. On Tuesday (Nov. 8), French police arrested 95 people in dawn raids, claiming that they were members of the fanatical Armed Islamic Group. A large catch of explosives and weapons were found in the raids, said Pasqua, demonstrating what he called "the installation (in France) of Muslim fundamentalists strongly determined to pursue and develop terrorist or clandestine actions launched from our territory."
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