By Hany Ramadan, IOL Staff

CAIRO, January 6 (IslamOnline.net) – At least a thousand Egyptian women, including university students and young housewives, flocked to the Journalists Syndicate premises in downtown Cairo Tuesday, January 6, to protest a mooted French law to ban hijab in public schools and institutions.

The angry demonstrators carried banners lamenting "discrimination" against Muslim women in secular France.

French President Jacques Chirac had argued that to reserve the "long established" secular traditions it was necessary to pass a legislation banning hijab in state schools.

The protest coincided with a conference organized by the Syndicate to show solidarity with French Muslims.

"This conference is a message to France which is now opposed by Muslims all over the world who once valued its brave stands (in support of Arab-Islamic causes)," Mohammed Abdul Quddus, Chairman of the Syndicate Freedoms Committee, told IslamOnline.net.

The conference pressed for using all peaceful means to show popular opposition to the French move and speak out for the Muslim minority in France.

It also drummed up support for a world day against hijab ban, to be observed on January 17.

"To my sisters in France, you must know that you are not alone, and will never be alone," said Amira Fuda, one of the female participants in the conference.

The proposed law had drawn a barrage of Muslim criticism worldwide, with British Muslims saying such laws are only issued by "authoritarian governments and not liberal democracies".

The European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) said Sunday, January 4, that forcing a Muslim woman to remove her hijab is one of the most discriminatory measures that runs in sharp contrast to true French values.

"The planned French law to ban hijab and religious symbols in state-run schools is totally against the principles of the French Revolution, which came to entrench freedom and human rights, which distinguished France as the mother of liberties," it said.

Prominent scholar Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradawi, the ECFR president, had sent a letter to Chirac, asking him to reverse his position on hijab.

On December 22, more than six thousand French Muslim women, many of them wearing hijab, gathered in la place de la République, central Paris, to protest the proposed law.

The multiracial crowd of women, girls and even men chanted the French anthem with French tricolor flags hovering over their heads, asserting their loyalty to France and that their religious values did not run counter to their patriotism.