Spilling out of their school in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris, they are so keen to get a word in that, on a bitter afternoon, they are queuing up on the pavement to march. Most are against the law banning Muslim headscarves from schools. A few are in favour, and happy to say so.
“For years we’ve been warning about the fundamentalists, the radical imams, the huge step backwards that they represent for women and Muslims in general in France,” says Lydia (16). “This law is really necessary. You’ve got no idea what pressures some girls come under.”
Ratiba (17) interrupts. “Nobody has ordered me to wear one. If I do it’s because I want to. Our religion tells us to, it’s part of our identity. France calls itself the cradle of human rights. Here of all places we should be able to show who and what we are.”
Lillia (16) agrees. “The veil should be for us to choose. This law discriminates against us.” After weeks of heated and at times harmful debate on the street and in the national media, France’s National Assembly this week began debating a Bill to ban religious symbols, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses, from schools.
France is not the only Western state to face the demands of an increasingly radical Islam, although its unique attachment to the principles of its secular republic means it is the only one so far to have proposed a legal ban on overt signs of religious faith.
But despite fierce criticism of the Bill in the Arab world, there appears to be a growing feeling among several of France’s continental European neighbours that similar measures may, eventually, become necessary. A Bill modelled on the planned French legislation has been tabled in Belgium’s Senate.
“In all Muslim countries, women are fighting to free themselves from the veil and affirm their identity,” says Anne-Marie Lizin, a socialist backing a ban. “It’s not normal that in certain parts of Brussels there are more women in veils than in the streets of Algiers.”
Belgian politicians are divided on the initiative, which has won the backing of the foreign and interior ministers. Generally, the appetite for a ban seems greater in the French-speaking south of the country than the Dutch-speaking north, where relations between the authorities and the Muslim population are already strained. Race riots flared briefly in Antwerp in December 2002 after a mentally ill white Belgian shot his Islamic neighbour.
The port city remains a powder keg: one in three voters supports the anti-immigration Vlaams Blok party, while many young Muslims appear attracted to a radical organisation called the Arab European League, whose leader has demanded that Arabic be recognised as the country’s fourth official language.
Public distrust of the Muslim community has also been fuelled by the arrest, detention and conviction of a number of Islamist extremists on terror-related charges.
In the traditionally tolerant Netherlands, attitudes towards the one million-strong Muslim community remain influenced by Pim Fortuyn, the maverick politician shot dead in 2002 by an animal rights activist after calling Islam “backwards” and demanding that Muslim conservatism must not be allowed to dilute Dutch liberalism.
Many Dutch politicians seem to be quietly edging towards some of Fortuyn’s views.
New imams are being given compulsory lessons on freedom of speech and religion, euthanasia and non-discrimination, and a debate about banning veils is also under way. Some schools already ban them.
As in France, an official report declared recently that the Dutch policy of integration had been a 30-year failure. Alarmed by rising Islamist fundamentalism, the Dutch lower house of Parliament last year demanded an investigation into the activities of the Muslim population, particularly radical mosques.
In Germany, the headscarf debate blew up last September when a Muslim teacher, Fereshta Ludin, won the right to wear a headscarf in class from Germany’s highest court.
In 1998 Ludin, originally from Afghanistan, was refused a teaching job in the conservative state of Baden-Wurttemberg. Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled by five votes to three that she could wear a headscarf — although it also said German states had the right to pass laws banning headscarves.
A balance had to be found between religious freedoms — to include Germany’s 3,5-million mainly Turkish Muslims — on the one hand, and neutrality in schools on the other, the judges added.
Ludin’s victory turned out to be largely Pyrrhic: Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria rushed to introduce legislation that made wearing headscarves in schools illegal.
Bavaria’s right-wing Education Minister, Monika Hohlmeier, claimed the headscarf was increasingly used as a political symbol. Wearing Christian crosses or Jewish symbols was acceptable, she added — an assertion that invited accusations of double standards.
While most teachers’ unions and human rights groups are strongly opposed to a headscarf ban, it has found favour with many on the right and the left of Germany’s political spectrum.
Spain has only just begun to address how it should behave towards its growing Muslim population as it becomes, proportionally, Europe’s biggest receiver of immigrants. It is unlikely to follow France’s path — the conservative People’s Party government recently introduced obligatory teaching of religion in secular state schools.
The country had its own veil debate last year, when 13-year-old Fatima Elidrisi, the daughter of a Moroccan immigrant, was told by the Catholic nuns running a state-funded private school near Madrid that she was not allowed to wear a hijab.
The problem was solved by sending her to a state school, which said it saw no reason to prevent her wearing the veil, and she was welcomed by a clapping crowd of teachers and students. The conservative Social Affairs Minister, Juan Carlos Aparicio, said the garment was “not a religious sign but a form of discrimination against women” and compared it to genital mutilation.
Italy has a Muslim minority numbering about 800 000, but many are immigrants and the country is just beginning to come to terms with the implications of becoming a multi-ethnic society.
If France’s national identity is inseparably tied to secularism, then Italy’s is linked to religion. That seemed at least the message to emerge from a heated row over whether crucifixes should hang in the classrooms of Italy’s nominally non-confessional state schools.
It began in October when an Italian-Egyptian convert to Islam, Adel Smith, won a court judgement ordering the removal of crosses from his children’s village school in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. In a country where the use of Muslim headscarves has never been an issue, the decision prompted an outcry.
Crucifixes are ubiquitous in Italy. The decision ordering the withdrawal of crucifixes from the school was revoked and the case sent to be reheard by a special tribunal. — Â