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France Returns To Hijab Controversy
By Muhammad Al-Ghamgui
PARIS (IslamOnline) – A group of French legislators want to re-open the hijab controversy by introducing a bill in parliament to ban female Muslim adolescents from wearing the headcovering.
Hijab is mandatory in Islam for all females after puberty. For the past decade, the issue of whether it will be allowed or not in French public schools has been debated.
Recently, George Sarre, a former minister, current mayor of a suburb of Paris, and a member of parliament submitted Bill 2096 – along with four other legislators – targeted against hijab. The law affirms that French schools would respect freedom of religion, but force them to respect “the neutrality and secularity of the state by not showing any political or religious affiliation in education institutions.”
Sarre belongs to the Citizens Movement, a party led by Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement. Sarre said the reasons for his new proposal were “to stop the conflict between the supporters of modernity and those of closed-mindedness.”
“Hijab is a type of religious proselytism, which is prohibited in educational institutions and a violation of the principle of equality between men and women,” the legislator said in his message to the parliament defending his bill.
The Hijab issue rekindled after the recent conversion of two French girls to Islam. The girls insisted that they be allowed to wear their hijab in school.
The French Constitutional Council, the highest constitutional authority in the land, already ruled that there was no contradiction between hijab-wearing and the laws of the French Republic, but that has not quelled the debate among politicians, public opinion and intellectuals.
French secularists are uncomfortable with hijab, as Muslim analysts say, because it reminds them of the growing Islamic presence in the country and in the European continent in general.
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