Headscarf Issue has Europe Tied up in Knots

TO BAN or not to ban the headscarf? From France to Russia, this question confounds secular Europe as it grapples with a growing Muslim population within its borders and the challenge of integrating Muslim immigrants into European society.

With headscarf controversies erupting like a rash across Europe this year, governments and supreme courts are being asked to decide when and where the headgear can be worn. Is it an innocent expression of faith, or some insidious political gesture?

France, with a Muslim population of five million, the largest in Western Europe, announced on Nov 28 plans to ban headscarves from schools. It came after half-Muslim sisters Lila, 18, and Alma Levy, 16, were permanently expelled from a school in the northern Paris suburbs for refusing to remove their headscarves before lessons.

While current legislation permits the wearing of headscarves in schools if it is not 'aggressive or proselytising', individual schools are left to decide how this should be enforced. In this instance, the school's teachers took offence. And they are not the first to do so.

For the past decade, teachers and feminists in France have regarded veiling as a form of gender apartheid. The country's staunch secularists have also taken umbrage, worried that the donning of religious garb in civic spaces undermines the 1905 law that separates the state from religion, a cornerstone of French civil society.

'Secularism is non-negotiable,' says Mr Richard Serero of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, 'because secularism is about equality. We don't care if you're Jew or Christian or Muslim or gay or lesbian in your private life. You don't have to make an exhibition of it. We are all human beings with the same rights and the same duties.'

While secularists like him are convinced that Muslims, like all religious minorities in France, can be integrated only if they behave like French first and Muslims second, French Muslims do not see the contradiction. 'I am both. I am Muslim and I am French. And I'm French with a headscarf,' says Ms Aicha Souldi, a third-generation French Muslim.

Her view is typical of many Muslim women in France who feel these headscarf tensions are a form of religious discrimination, stemming from post-Sept 11 Islamophobia. She adds: 'If someone wears a skullcap to school, I have no problem with it. So banning the headscarf is discrimination. They don't respect us.'

LEGAL WRANGLING

AND so the debate goes virtually everywhere in Europe. In Germany however, where there are about 3.2 million Muslims, women seem to have won the latest headscarf battle. In September, its Supreme Court ruled that Stuttgart school authorities had no legal right to deny a teacher her job because she insisted on wearing a headscarf to school. The school said the teacher had violated the state's religious neutrality. Ms Fereshta Ludin, the Afghan-born teacher, argued that it was her constitutional right to practise her religion. The courts concurred.

Still, the ruling far from settles the issue in any definitive way. Unlike France, which plans to impose a blanket ban on headscarves in schools, Germany seems to be side-stepping a legislative showdown with its Muslim minority by leaving it up to individual states to make sound legal cases for banning the contentious clothing. That is, if they so desire.

Russia hasn't escaped the legal wrangling either. Earlier this year, 10 Muslim women from Tatarstan managed to win a court appeal against an Interior Ministry rule that Muslim women had to go bare-headed when posing for official documents.

The ministry, in charge of passports and visas, said women could not be properly identified if their heads and necks were covered up in photos. The women countered that the ministry rule was a violation of their constitutional right to freedom of conscience. The ministry is now appealing that court decision.

A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

IT CAN be tempting to believe, given the increasing list of Muslim run-ins with the state, that Muslims are getting a hard time in Europe for their faith. But there is evidence to show the secular sword does cut both ways.

In Italy, where there are an estimated one million Muslims, it was Catholicism, not Islam, that came under secularist fire recently when courts ordered a primary school to remove crucifixes from its classrooms. The order came after Italian Muslim leader Adel Smith suggested that a symbol of the Quran be displayed alongside the crucifix. When the school refused, he went to the courts, which toed the secularist line.

The Roman Catholic Church was outraged, even though Catholicism as a state religion ended in 1984. Until then, Catholic law required crucifixes to be hung in schools.

Like Muslims in France, the Catholic Church's reaction to the strong hand of the state illustrates the age-old minefield of separating church and state. Literally.

But, as history has shown, secular intolerance is not the sole prerogative of Western governments. As far back as the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, banned the fez and the veil in the name of progress.

Even today, when half the women in Turkey wear the headscarf, including the wife of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the clothing is still viewed suspiciously by the country's ardent secularists and is banned in schools and government establishments.

That said, the realities of the post-Sept 11 world cannot be denied. As religious conflicts rise in a world where cultural interface cannot be stopped, many are upholding secularism as the safest option.

As Mr Serero says: 'We've seen what's happened in Ireland or Yugoslavia or Lebanon. Catholics versus Protestants. Christians versus Muslims. We don't want that. We have a civil way of life and the civil way of life is a peaceful way of life.'