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The
rally brought together droves of French Muslims from different
cross-sections
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By
Hadi Yahmid, IOL Correspondent
PARIS,
January 18 (IslamOnline.net) – Some 30,000 French Muslim women, many
of them wearing hijab, and men took to the streets of Paris Saturday,
January 17, to mark the world hijab day and protest a planned French
law against the Muslim headscarf.
Protestors
chanted slogans denouncing French President Jacque Chirac and former
minister Bernard Stasi, who headed a government commission on
secularism and religion, which recommended
a law banning hijab and conspicuous religious insignia in state
schools.
Unlike
the December protest
organized by schoolgirls and attended by around six thousand women,
the Saturday protest brought together a myriad of Muslims and
non-Muslims from different cross-sections in society.
Protestors
chanted the French national anthem "La Marseillaise" and
traditional Islamic songs, yelling Allahu Akbar (God is the Greatest)
and performed prayers in the crowded Nation square.
Chanting
"hijab is my choice", and uttering "freedom" in
different languages, the female marchers, wearing hijabs of various
styles and colors, waved flags and banners urging the six million
Muslims in the country to vote down the French left in the coming
presidential and legislative elections "because they stabbed the
Muslims in their backs".
One
of the protesters was cast as Chirac who distanced himself from the
three mottos of the French revolution: Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity.
The
Party of French Muslims (PFM), the rally's organizer, the proposed law
falls under the Islamophobia campaign in France.
"There
is no need for official bodies to be represented here where thousands
of French Muslims spontaneously went out heedless of any political
considerations just to voice their opposition to the this unfair
law," PFM Chairman Mohammed Al-Nasser told IslamOnline.net.
Showing
their solidarity with their Muslim neighbors, some 200 Belgian Muslims
took part in the rally, coming all the way by buses.
The
protest was also attended by prominent French Shiite authority
Sadrudin Fadlallah, the Imam of Al-Ghadeer mosque, who said that
the draft law was designed to infringe upon the religious freedoms.
Elsewhere
in France, 3,500 marched in Lille, 1,800 in Marseille, 1,500 in
Mulhouse and hundreds in other cities, police and organizers said.
World
capitals also witnessed seas
of demonstrators Saturday outside the French embassies and
diplomatic missions to protest at the discriminatory planned law.
