PARIS, May 24 (Islamonline.net) - As debate in France pertaining Hijab (Islamic head cover) is still on, a hundred French secular personalities have issued a petition Saturday May 24, to assure the right of Muslim women and girls to wear Hijab, standing on the fact that secularism opposes segregation.

“Issuing a law that prohibits Hijab represents a punishment that will deprive thousands of Muslim French girls the right of education, as it is considered an exposed call for segregation”, the petition stated.

Academics, philosophers, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations stressed that this petition is not for Hijab, but “for the secularism values which guarantee the right of education for all French people.

“According to education laws issued 1881, 1882 and 1886, the secular schools should permit students wearing Hijab to attend classes providing they don’t absent for religious reasons or cause a mess”, the signatories said.

The petition stressed that “the French experiment proved that Muslim female students wearing Hijab caused no halt before, and it didn’t happen that teachers or students stopped practicing their roles for Hijab.

“We refuse concentrating on Hijab issue in the this context as a symbol for a specific political attitude. We refuse to mix up issues in the running debate on Hijab, emigration, Islam or the French Republic, while the real problem is represented in the social policy, racialism and the absence of social justice in the way immigrants are being treated,” they added.

Petitioners called the educational syndicates, women organizations and secular elites to move against all laws that glorify segregation. They signed a “No” for depriving girls wearing Hijab from entering schools stating that the secular school must be opened for all people.

Debate on Hijab has escalated widely last weeks after the establishment of the first French Islamic Council and the declaration of the French prime minister that Hijab might be prohibited by law in the French schools.