An Immigrant in France: trying to understand the headscarf

I have been wrestling a bit with various peculiarities of my new “homeland”. One of those peculiarities is the complex of issues that arose out of the “foulard” episode (a few hundred French schoolgirls wearing a headscarf in school, plus a few older female state employees). Although of course, like all sensitive, postmodern thinkers, I could not possibly attribute, in good conscience, the notion of “The French” to such a diverse and differentiated group of people. But I admit that I do have the tendency to do just that. Forgive me, differentiators.

This is a short summary of my attempt, as a legal, literate, white, European immigrant to learn about French racism, attitude toward rationality and the Enlightenment, the idea of laïcité , the centuries old struggle between the Catholic Church and the Republic, Islam (French and non-French of course), poverty, what they call “communautarisme”, immigration, the meaning of the French Republic, and how the French see “sects” and other religions in general.  Not forgetting capitalism and Europe, of course. All that learning has taken place in the context of where I actually live, what I managed to read and who I talked to. This is NOT a representative or learned understanding at all. I am still struggling, and still don’t know all I need to know, much less understand it. I get no real help from the left or the right, they all pretty much agree. As Sharif has shown, even the “anarchists” are pretty much toeing the “French” line. I won’t be commenting on his research as I have the intuition he is basically right about French anarchists, who of course vary more than is revealed in Le Monde Libertaire. Its hard to find anyone who is open, caring, decent and intelligent, but also critical of the dominant French line. I must also warn you that some of my technical details might be just plain wrong. Even highly educated French people, when asked to solve my technical dilemmas or fill in my ignorance, often don’t know or disagree. But as a former somewhat anarchist intellectual, I write what I write how I write it, and if the editors publish it, then so much the better. But keep your eyes open for simplifications, even though I know its all very complicated. But I am not paid to write, and have no academic constituency to serve, so I will ignore some complexities. Other times I will bring in complexity, so you know that I know that it’s a complicated set of issues or problems.

What is a foulard?

More or less suddenly, a year or so after I arrived to France, the foulard (the headscarf), sprang into the headlines. Sometimes, people called it the veil (le voile), which I discovered is really not accurate and, to some extent, is even a bit of a “loaded” way to refer to the simple headscarf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil. The foulard issue was not entirely about the headscarf as such, but clothing research becomes imperative with this issue. Early on I discovered that hijab has more than one technical meaning. It is, for example, the general tendency or rule or habit for Muslim women to dress modestly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijab It can be merely the modest dressing, not a particular bit of clothing. So…any woman can leave her hair uncovered, but the next step up is the headscarf, what my Bulgarian mum used to call a babushka. Many (most?) French Moslem women wear no headgear at all in France, except when it is cold. Confusingly, you can also wear a hijab which is a headscarf that covers up all your hair and your shoulders, but not your face. Like nuns wear. So the word hijab can be used in both ways. You can also have a proper veil (un voile), which covers some parts of your face. One could also wear an even more radical garment which covers up every part of your body, except your eyes, ankles and hands. And in the most extreme cases, even the woman’s eyes have to see through a kind of mesh. But let us remember that this actual contemporary French episode was about the foulard, the simple headscarf, as worn by a few young schoolgirls. Some of those girls wore the hijab, the extreme headscarf. That’s what started the whole thing, and however the final law was written, that’s what it was about in the smallest detail. People often called it the veil (le voile) to make it “seem” like more heavyweight or radical clothing issue. A fully “veiled” woman’s face is way more bothersome to most people in France (or the part I know about) than a woman with a headscarf. How do you take ID pictures or know who someone is? They could be anyone, even a man! Headscarves are well known in French traditions, it is unremarkable for white French Catholic women wear them. Certainly old French country women have and do wear headscarves. In fact, until recently, it was considered correct and required conduct for any woman to wear a head covering when entering a Catholic church. Men, on the other hand, had to uncover their hair, and still do. So pretty quickly, I think I got the basic clothing issues right, but the commentators often confused things. The main fashion point is that the headscarf is no big deal in terms of radical dress, but this is not how most French people I know saw it. For the French (left and right alike), the wearing of the headscarf tends to mean that the schoolgirls who wear it are “oppressed Muslim women” who are bringing “religion” into a “public space”, in which it definitely does not belong. I am forced to mention here, although it may be obvious, that nearly all of the French, and non-French, headscarf-wearing women we are concerned with are brown or black. But remember that nearly all of those young women are actually legally French as well. It gets complicated really fast.

Who wears the foulard?

The next step of my enquiry had to be finding out exactly who, in contemporary French society, wore the foulard and why they thought they wore this small cloth head garment. As an immigrant without detailed knowledge of French life, this was not completely obvious to me. At first I thought it was probably oppressed Muslim women whose menfolk or imam more or less forced them to wear a headscarf or more. On the surface, and for most left/alternative inclined people, wearing a foulard was a sign of women’s oppression. Voila! No more to be said. As usual, I found out it was more complicated than that simple “oppressed woman” analysis. Although I did get the impression that most women wearing the foulard were indeed actual oppressed older women whose menfolk did indeed force them to wear the foulard, or at least that the women had always worn a foulard, so why would they think of changing. I actually know very little about how older Muslim women see the foulard, no idea at all. Did any other women wear a foulard or start to wear a foulard? Were there any other reasons or motivations for wearing it or taking up the practice? It became evident that younger women (at least) wear them for various reasons. Some wear a foulard them because their parents force them to. That is, the young lasses see no way to disobey orders or defy tradition and practice. Confronted by this situation, some women rebel and refuse to wear the headscarf. Probably not that many, as you’d have to be very strong, and very supported from outside your family and community to actually rebel radically. So some women refuse to wear them as a rebellion against their parents and/or traditional/strong interpretations of the Muslim duties of a woman.

Digging a bit deeper I found the odd, slightly contradictory fact that some women wear them as a sign of rebellion or maybe “a quest for identity”. They find that they are not able to identify with the kind of non-religious, non-Islamic parents who had attempted to integrate themselves into the French world. They found that they preferred the community of Muslims to “not belonging” to the “French nation, even though they ARE French. In other words, put off, angered or depressed by the widely acknowledged difficulties for not-white French in France, they sought support and community “with their own kind”, that is Muslims or persons of colour or both. It is obvious to all that there is still racism and anti-Muslim feeling all over France, so it is equally obvious that a young, brown skinned, Muslim woman could feel an “outsider” in French society. We must recall that is logically impossible for a French citizen not to be “French”, and not to be treated equally by the state. All citizens of the République are, by definition and understanding of the political elite, treated equally. Even though everyone knows this is nonsense. Sometimes the first generation of immigrants (the parents of some of the young women) try very hard to be French, and give up some of the “old ways”. So there are plenty of actual immigrants who have adapted to and sworn allegiance to the French way. Many of them became French citizens. Those “integrated” immigrants” have left behind the old religious or community-based symbols of identity. The young lasses choose the “traditional community” and clothing that accompanies it for adequate support and a more satisfying identity.

Still other young French women who live in what are called “difficult or sensitive” areas, wear the scarf for protection. If they don’t wear the scarf they will be hassled by the young men that live around them. Seriously sexist behaviour has not yet vanished in France. Girls with uncovered hair can often be considered a bit “beyond the Pale”, and perhaps subject to more hassles, even injury or death, than a “good Muslim girl”. Some of the macho thugs who live in the high rise suburbs actually make distinctions as to who they rip off or hassle. Young lad thugs are the same no matter what country or colour or religion. So although wearing the foulard might have little to do with any strong cultural identification, it is good protection in a particular neighbourhood. Think of the Western women newscasters who suddenly sprout a foulard when reporting from some countries. It just makes sense as a precaution. Everyone knows that whoever you are, there are certain neighbourhoods where certain kinds of behaviour are likely to get you in trouble. Sometimes one adopts protective clothing.

This easily discovered complexity concerning who actually wears the foulard, and why, made things more difficult, and to this day continues to cause the “dance of complexity” to cloud my attempts to simplify the problems.  Partly this is because it is impossible to find out how many young lasses who have the different motivations live in France at this moment. No one has ever asked. But the variety exists. So you can understand why I often got a bit impatient with a standard simplistic left analysis that said that all women who wear the foulard are oppressed by their menfolk or by Islam. Even if I don’t have the answers and percentages myself.

Church and State

Sharif has already summed up the basic outlines of the overall problem, so I don’t have to repeat it. Because the French “people/state” had a long and bitter battle with “religion” (very specifically the Catholic church), people get really worked up about religion mixing with the “state” or public life. Usually when commentators refer to “public life or space”, they mean space that is formally controlled by some form of state. So what they mean in this context is the schools and the state bureaucracies. The clothing rules (don’t wear a foulard) do not apply to walking around the streets or going to movies or médiatheques (public libraries), or even for people who enter the state bureaucracies as customers. You can also walk around the streets wearing a yarmulke, or a huge cross, or a necklace with a Star of David. So the law only applies to a very narrow definition of “public” space. Most people I know think pavements and libraries are public space, for example. They also know that many other forms of behaviour are forbidden and state regulated in “public space”, like having a political demonstration.

Technically, and proudly, the French Republic formally allows any religion to be practiced in France, although they get a bit uptight, very quickly, about cults, which they call sects. There is no state religion. The French (I mean the white intellectual political elite who fought on the side of the State and the Enlightenment, against the Catholic Church and its deep reaching power in pre-twentieth century French society) believe they have separated the Church and the State, and done so better than any political culture in human history. The French also see themselves as the true bearers of the wisdom of the Enlightenment. I was surprised how many times “le siècle de lumière” came into fairly normal middle level political conversations. Lots more than in Britain or the USA, in my experience. As a result of this long struggle against the Catholic Church, as well as their incredible worship of the Enlightenment and Science, the French state and French intellectuals of all persuasions get really excited about “cults”, like anything New Age. In fact, the determined non-religious nature of the French political sensibility got a little tedious after a while. They beat back the Catholic Church, through a long and bitter struggle, and they are not going to let one single gram of religion creep back into “our public space”, on account of the next invasion might be even worse than Catholicism. You can imagine how traditional anarchists, with their strong objection to any form of “religion” would go along with this totally.

When confronted by a full blown religion, embodied in actual Islamic people, who are also “French”, things get complex and difficult immediately. Sometimes I get grumpy and mutter about how they picked on the young girls, but this is not a proper analysis, just an observation. I wondered what would have happened if they had picked on Muslim women in other public spaces. Especially since there are many varieties of Islam who mix the public and private space quite a bit more than the French. Like “Islamic States” where the mix is pretty much complete. It became quite clear that this politico/religious history gets tangled up in the utterly trivial problem of the schoolgirls who would not take off their headscarf at the school gate. It does mean that you have to understand French history, and especially Republic vs. Church battles during the nineteenth century. Nearly everyone I talked to implied that it was unlikely, not being French, that I would ever really understand this subject and be able to make a judgement. To some extent they are right, for me anyway. I don’t know all the details.

Laïcité

Laïcité  is the key concept in the very extreme, or in any case different, French ideas about church and state. I was always reminded that the word did not mean “secular”, it was more complicated and more French. Sometimes language and culture are like that, so I started looking around a bit. I found out that even though the French say they separate the church and the state, they don’t actually do it as one might expect. In other words, what seems “separation” to one eye, does not seem all that separate to another. For example, I was confused by the fact that all churches constructed before 1905 became the property of the state, as part of the arrangement when the State triumphed over the Church. The state took over ownership and responsibility for upkeep of the “heritage” of all France. Nearly all the churches which were the “heritage of the French People” were, as it happens Catholic. To me, if all the infrastructure of the church is taken care of by the State, this means they are intertwined political and economically. It does not mean they are separate. For the French, since all churches are treated the same, and owned by the state, then they are separate. Although the state does not own the Tibetan Buddhist monastery and Centre near where I live. And in some cases, city governments (very much the state in France) are now building mosques for Muslims. Apparently it’s the job of the state to “subsidise” some religions in some ways. I won’t go into the question of Catholic schools, which also are paid for by the state. In addition, I don’t know why at some Universities you can wear a foulard and apparently, at others, you can’t. I admit I am not fully sorted about how the state is going to fund a training for truly “French” imams. Nearly all of the imams in France are foreign-trained. The problem is that some of these imams, trained in (and funded by) the full blown ways of the Saudi Arabian Tradition, turn out to be, how shall I say it, slightly unadapted to the ways of the French state and huge majority of French people, even their flock. Some of the imams not only don’t speak French, but inhabit pre-18 th century cultures. This comment is NOT anti-Islam, it is merely a description of the complexity of French Islamic reality. The French State wants to facilitate the French training of imams so they all are “Republican Muslims” instead of Saudi Arabian Muslims. These various puzzling details led me think that the French idea of laïcité , or separating the church and the state, is not obvious to a non-French person. Although they assure me c’est logique, and perfectly clear when you understand the French people and French history. The point of this laïcité  is to create a “neutral public space” free of the influence of religion (read Catholic Church) and a place where the values of the Enlightenment can grow freely.

I won’t go into detail here, but one observation I made was that in the frantic fight against the religious (read Islamic) invasion of public space, many French people have rather neglected what to me is a far more important threat concerning invasion of public space. I speak here of global capitalism. Without a long analysis, it is clear enough to me that the purchase and privatisation of formerly public space, the commodification of space, is far more dangerous and far more pervasive than the problem of Muslims dressing differently in schools. I remember walking by an insurance agent recently and noticing that the signifying device outside the agency shone down on the pavement as well. So if you looked down, on the pavement, quite obviously public space, was the logo of the corporation. I wondered if the Mayor of the town had a policy and maybe rented the space. For me the most vital problem comes from commodification, although I don’t deny that mixing of religion of politics causes some problems too

What Kind of Religion is Islam?

To remedy my moderately colossal ignorance about Islam itself, I had to do a bit more work. Considering all the fuss, I found out that Islam was a regular, standard religion. Islamic leaders all over the world telling people what the path was, what they should do in daily and public life. Quite normal. However, Islam did not seem to have an obvious central boss or spiritual leader, like Tibetan Buddhism or Catholicism seem to have. Even in one country there might be conflicts focussed on religious influence and power, between various Muslims. One knows who the chief is in some religions, like the Bishop of Canterbury. Islam seems to have fragmented, not only in response to our fragmented times, but ever since Mohammed died. I guess, at least during the last decade, we have all learned something about Sunnis and Shiites, wahabists and Tariq Ramadan. Islam, not unlike Christianity and other religions, fragmented somewhat after the original teacher died, and the conflicts or tensions still exist and mutate. Fairly quickly, it also became clear that Islam transformed itself slightly wherever it landed. It was flexible in relation to the surrounding and evolving political culture. So you would not and should not expect “French” Muslims having to be exactly like Indonesian, Algerian, Malian or Saudi Arabian Muslims. I also discovered that, like many other religions, there had been a fair bit of Islamic violence, some of it plain vanilla imperialist violence of the conquest type. Not peaceful like Quakers or most Buddhists, but more like quite a few Christians. Peace and war in various measures. I don’t know enough to rank Islam on a world historical scale, but it seems to be at least as violent as Christianity, maybe more, maybe less. As with nearly all religions, the patriarchal style and structure seems to be very deep rooted. However, it appeared that the patriarchal tendency in Islam varied a bit, depending on the culture it encountered or in which it was imbedded. I should add here that some “Islamic rules” that apply to women are, to my sensibility, totally barbaric and unacceptable for anyone whatsoever. Some of these apparently “Islamic” practices should not be accepted in France today, or anywhere. Although what is exactly Islamic and what is rooted in other aspects of culture is always a bit tricky. One of the crucial struggles in the French State vs. Islam struggle is to force “Muslims” to treat women at least as well as the French do. My overall impression is that searching for the meaning of “liberation”, for a woman, might be particularly difficult these days in most Muslim religious/political cultures. But the women still struggle! The degree of interrelation of “church and state” in Islam seems to vary from a fair bit of influence to a whole lot of influence, almost the identity of church and state. I found some of the versions of Islam quite easy to handle, as religions go, not all that odd. Some of the Islamic thinkers I read, like Tariq Ramadan, sound very intelligent and critical and progressive to me. I have never been to his supposedly wild-eyed radical lectures, in Arabic, to young Muslims in France. Ramadan did once make a huge blunder on national TV. It was pretty awful actually, he got suckered by Nicolas (Bully Boy) Sarkozy into NOT condemning outright the stoning to death of women, for the crime of adultery. Big mistake! The men who adultered get off totally in this system of justice. What I am trying to say is that Islam turned out to be a normal standard patriarchal, quite varied religious system, fighting for market share in a globalised world of consumption and production. The details are always fascinating and different, but the story is pretty much the same.

Of course there were the nutters, really sad extremists. They were very similar to, and as dangerous as right wing, military minded, fundamentalist Christians. For example, the marriage of a particular, astoundingly patriarchal, Arab culture to a particular serious version of Islam ( wahabism) yields Saudi Arabia. This country is, in my view, one of the most downright despotic and oppressive countries people have invented. Makes Saddam Hussein look like a secular pussycat. Hitler and Pol Pot were worse, but as a regular run of the mill country, Saudi Arabia can’t be beaten for badness. And some of the contemporary Islamic religious leaders say such stupid or dangerous things about the world we all live in that you wonder if they are really inhabiting the same planet. So I don’t defend Islam as the best example of religion today, although I sometimes praise some Buddhist practices, never Islam. In fact, to be brutal, I am quite critical of nearly every “religion” I have ever met. The result of my enquiry, not deeply surprising, was that Islam was a complicated, fragmented, historically varied religious practice. People who treat is as a monolith should be told they are wrong, just plain wrong.

I don’t know if the progressive, pro-women, reformist, Europeanising tendency in Islam is winning or losing in France. If it is winning then there is hope for some kind of serious relationship between the French Republican State and French Muslim culture. If it is losing, if the nutter extremist fundamentalist Muslims are taking the lead, there is going to trouble ahead for many years. Make no mistake, at present it is Islam that has to change, the French refuse. They want to remain French, which means laïcité  and the accompanying ideology I am outlining here. They know they were in France first and that they have the power. If the “other” wants to live in France, they cannot stay “other”, they must become “French”. Some people say this is racist or xenophobic. Some people say it is refusal of integration, maybe even apartheid. Some people say that the “Anglo-Saxon multicultural model” is not for France. These French people are from the left and the right. Just as the new challenge to the French Way of Life is complicated, so the response to that challenge is complicated. I agree with the French argument in that sense. But I might add that the complexity is not visible unless one looks at the problem directly, with French eyes, and with not-French eyes.

French Identity and “communautarisme”

During my quest for understanding, I also found it odd that there were no other permissible identities in France other than just plain vanilla “French”. One can be “from” somewhere, one can have a family of immense dimensions, but the French state really does prefer that there be nothing much between the individual citizen and the state. No complications. No ethnic identity, no public religious practices, nothing important in life determined by skin colour or racial, cultural or regional identity, but everyone equal, in a quantitative way. I am simplifying here only slightly. In the altogether suspicious constructed “Anglo-Saxon” countries, there are Italian-Americans, Mormons, Anglo- Caribbeans, or even Welsh, all peacefully, if sometimes uncomfortably, co-existing in the same state. In France, everyone is French or….. not-French. The French guardians of the République have a powerfully rooted fear of what they call “communautarisme”. They do not want to pander to or even recognise subcultures or communities within France. For example, virtually nowhere (the “virtually” is to protect myself if somewhere in France it is otherwise) in all the state bureaucracies did I ever see anything helpful to immigrants written in any language other than…French. The République knows full well that many of the people coming to their “social security offices” are immigrants who speak or read French badly or not at all. They are, after all, immigrants from “somewhere else”. Most immigrants usually speak more languages than the autochthones, but the immigrants might speak or read the local language poorly. This also includes the up to 500,000 English speaking “immigrants”. I never found even the most basic documentation in English, much less Arabic or other African languages. If any group is not fully and completely French, they are accused of being a “separate” community, a kind of cancer which if left to grow “naturally” will eventually destroy the Republic, and possibly the French way of life. “They” (the many “not-French” who are legally recognised persons in France, with Republican rights) are responsible for causing one of the greatest contemporary French problems, communautarisme.

In France, not-French people don’t feel and act, and therefore are simply are NOT plain vanilla French. This applies equally to British, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, German or North African people, and their families, who live in France legally or illegally. Many British people are “illegal immigrants”, that is, without all the proper papers and working/living outside the state system of regulation. You don’t hear much about the “British (or Dutch or German) immigration problem”, although it exists, albeit in a different form than “the mostly African immigration problem”. In France most people think “immigration” and they automatically think of African-related immigrants. They are pretty much blind to the nature of the Northern European immigration problem.  Still, there are loads more African immigrants and families than there are European immigrants and their families.

How many of “them” are there?

No one knows how many Muslims or Arabs or Africans there are in France. I found this bizarre, especially given the obvious importance of knowing basic information about them. Because the French Republican elite cling to the idea that all French people are only French (which makes them equal in law), not “something else” as well, the national census does not ask ethnic or religious questions. I don’t know the details of the census practices of all the other countries on earth, but I imagine many ask about religion or ethnic background (the USA and the UK ask). The French don’t. They just don’t see it as a legitimate or important piece of data. There is nothing important to be learned by knowing the religion or ethnic origin of a citizen.  In addition, the French state ideology (French Republicanism) cannot admit to treating religions as genuinely different, or the needs of different religious people as different. One of the ways they keep things simple is that they don’t ever count how many Muslims (or members of any religion) or Muslim immigrant/descendants there actually are in France. So the French state does not actually know how many of “them” there are, mainly because all French citizens are the same, equal. It therefore refuses to use the state census to find out basic facts like where they live, how poor they are, how educated they are, and so forth. You should notice that no complex report on the French social situation ever gives a precise number or percentage for the population of Muslims, Arabs or Africans in any particular part of France (including the recently rambunctious “suburbs”), or in France as a whole. They are all estimates. The French Republican ideology pretends that once you are born (or become) a French citizen you are treated equally, automatiquement. Under the laws of the Republic, one is dealt with regardless of and totally ignoring ethnic origins and religion. So it’s a kind of grossly exaggerated, logically correct, quantitative extremism. The only problem with this claim of “equality”, in all nation states and certainly in France, is that it is total nonsense. Its just utterly preposterous to suppose that the needs or duties of an old non-French speaking Muslim woman in France are the same as, or equal to, a young, male Catholic, born and raised in Lyon. So they pretend they don’t know who is Catholic and who is Muslim, Who is white and who is not, they just don’t ask. That’s how they think. Many French people, especially in ruling political positions, are very proud of this ideology and will be loathe to give it up. To begin to take seriously the flawed and unsuccessful Anglo-Saxon multicultural model is something “many French” are very reluctant to even think about.    

Non-French readers have to keep in mind that a lot of these conflicts turn around whether a person, a group or a culture could identify itself as not being first and foremost (and only?) French. I can tell you that having been a USA citizen living in Britain (with a British passport for many years), and an Anglo-British citizen living in France, it is virtually (just to protect myself in case someone has made the leap) impossible for someone who is born elsewhere to become “really French”. Even if one lives here, has a French partner, has kids go to school in France, pays French taxes and speaks French all day long. And furthermore, and most importantly, I, and many other immigrants, don’t even WANT to “become French”, and yet we still think we am entitled to live here equally, and be treated fairly. I think the not entirely dissimilar actual real-life impossibility for most non-white French to become “really French” is at the bottom of many of the problems concerning the foulard. I suppose we are talking about some form of deeply rooted xenophobia, racism or discrimination here, although it is more complex than just plain vanilla. It is so hard to clearly and analytically separate race, culture, poverty and other important variables. There are plenty of French and foreign people, who see the problems of riots in France as a “basically Muslim” problem. A recent Sunday Times commentator wrote half a page and never mentioned the words racism or poverty. It is nearly impossible to avoid noticing that mostly brown and black French people have a problem with being permitted or feeling “really French”. Although of course some brown or black French people feel they are as “really French” as a white French person. Its hard to call, but for me, until nearly every French white person, or at least 90%, believes that a person who “looks” like they are “African”, and who might speak with a solid Midi accent, is in fact “really French”, then there will be a problem. I should also add that even the President of France mentions that France has a big problem with racism. I don’t know that I remember leaders like Tony Blair or George Bush say out loud, in an important speech, that their countries have a big problem with racism. The French sometimes can call a cat a cat (as they say), even if they don’t know what to do about it.

The actual political actions

This brings us back to a group of young schoolgirls who wore the headscarf for a variety of reasons, all being told that they couldn’t wear it at school. There were a few demonstrations, but mostly not very big. There were some pretty dicey Islamic groups in these demonstrations, as well as the young lasses and their supporters. The left and the trade unions, who swell most demonstrations, plus the 30,000 strong Attac altermondialistes, plus many of the democratic, human rights people had a great deal of trouble supporting these young women (and their Muslim male supporters). For obvious reasons, as mentioned earlier, supporting separatist, communitarian or religious practices is pretty hard for normal leftists and Republican types. Some of these individuals, as individuals, went along to the demos, but the demos were not very impressive and failed to begin to make an impression on the political elite. The fault line in French society held, and most of the girls, a few hundred in all of France, took off their foulards at the entrance to the schools, and put them on again when they left. There was not much reportage on what happened to any civil servants who had been or wanted to wear foulards. I reckon they just stopped wearing them, as the life of “functionaries” in France is a good one. Good hours, long holidays, great pensions. No need to take big risks. Things have been left pretty much like that, with the teachers still having the job of deciding what exactly was a foulard and what was just a decorative piece of female headwear. One of the major purposes of the law Sharif refers to was to relieve teachers of this burden by defining things clearly. They failed. The teachers still have to make the crucial decisions.

The Real Problem

What was the “real” problem? It was not truly, deeply, the headscarf worn by a few schoolgirls. The struggle of the working class against the ruling class often ends up, in a particular instance, being about a few pence more on a wage deal and other small side benefits, once it is crammed into the limiting discourses of contemporary political capitalist institutions. The crisis in modern food production, science and capitalism is not about “mad cows”, even though those cows exist. In a similar way the foulard issue was not merely about the foulard. It was complicated. Did separation of the church and state mean that the state really should have nothing to say about religious practice and garment wearing, except if it hurt others? Apparently not. A headscarf never hurt anyone. Wearing a headscarf, as such, by a random group of young women, is actually no big deal. Any more than a baseball cap means all that much. Anyone with a certain amount of sense knows that clothing varies. Some young women would never be caught dead in a short skirt and others never in a long one. Some young women have outrageous (for many French people) hairdos, but these were all right. In short, it was the Muslims who were not allowed to do what they had been doing and wanted to continue doing in larger numbers. The lawmakers’ defence that all religions were banned from overly visible symbols of religion was a smokescreen. I am not even going into the silly semantics around what was obvious and overly obvious, legal language is usually for legal types. You could wear a massive Star of David or cross hidden under your clothes. I guess you can’t really wear a small skullcap or a small headscarf on your head. The law was made to stop young Muslim lasses from displaying or revealing their religion by wearing a headscarf and to preserve, as I have outlined above in detail, the values and practices of the République.

Can immigration be stopped or controlled tightly

Many French people, including the right wing or xenophobic people, and some others, firmly believe that immigration can be controlled in the modern world, that borders can be closed, and that the movement of people in the world, by and large from poor areas to rich areas, can be stopped. They see economic immigration (trying to earn some decent money), asylum, war casualties, and other causes of immigration as something that a government policy can stop. They think that their countries can fill the dirtiest and worst paid job entirely with truly local people. They think they can protect their idea of “traditional French culture” from being affected by immigrants and their families. Those fearful of immigrants are right to say that integrating large numbers of actually different people with non-indigenous, non-traditional practices into a well developed and complicated existing political and cultural system is really hard to do. I don’t know that there are many examples of wildly successful “integration” on earth. In our era, immigration has become rampant throughout the rich world. There are exceptions, like Japan, where massive immigration is less likely. Britain, and especially the USA (who are obviously the global champs as the preferred destination) began the process of receiving large numbers of immigrants earlier than France. But the French believe that nothing is to be learned from these Anglo-Saxon experiments, which they believe are a complete failure. So anti “not-French” people are right that there is a huge problem genuinely integrating large numbers of immigrants, especially ones of a different colour and religion. They are of course wrong, totally wrong, that they can make the problem go away by ultra tight border controls. However, the fences are getting higher and longer throughout Europe.

Neutral public space

A word on “neutral public space”. Some French people think that not only does this neutral public space exist in France, but that the creation of this neutral public space was a direct result the mix of current French practice in regard to laïcité , communautarisme, and the wider values of the Republic and the Enlightenment. My own experience is that there is no more “neutral public space” in France than in the USA or Britain, the only countries I know about in any detail. I would admit that at this point in history there might be a little less public space in America than France, but in my experience there is roughly as much in Britain as in France. My basic contention is that public space is more and more “for sale” in the world today. More and more private. That the danger to taking over and controlling public space comes not from religion, but from global capitalism. If you are rich, or know people who are, then you can find a public space to rent or buy anywhere you like. If you are not connected, then you can’t find public space so easily. If it is true that France is, for the moment, resisting the globalisation of everything, the commodification of everything, including space, better than elsewhere in Europe, then we should be proud of their resistance. To me it was clear that the recent NON on the Euro-referendum demonstrated this, among other things, quite clearly. To some extent, I would expect that, all things considered, there is more uncommodified public space in France than in many other countries. But the difference, on the ground, is not that great, and I would be hard pressed to figure out how you would weigh up this question with any precision. Public space is more and more regulated and purchased in all the countries I know about. If the French are the best resistors in Europe, bully for them. I can’t see much difference, and the most effective attack is not from religion, but from global capitalism.    

Conclusion

As you can see, in spite of my passionate, amateur, non-comprehensive research, I am still confused a bit by the overall French political elite view of this headscarf matter, much less the related larger issues. I find their notion of laïcité  both extreme and full of contradictions and tensions. I don’t think it is appropriate for the modern world, with unstoppable immigrations of all sorts of people to all sorts of places. I am stunned by the French state’s inability to acknowledge that some of their immigrants are not French (for example, don’t speak French well, or at all) and to make some sort of effort to spend a bit of money to teach them French. The Germans do. At the very least, they could print a few leaflets for them in their own language, regarding social benefits, rules of behaviour and so forth. As a legal immigrant I found it practically impossible to get any neutral help in English. Think of the poor folk who speak Arabic or a less widely spoken language, especially if they have no family or community to help them. I also think that they have been slightly blinded or obsessed by their historical battle with the Catholic Church, even though the world has moved on. The French ruling political elite seem to believe that if it says something in the constitution of the Republic, then it must be so. If everyone is an equal citizen of the Republic, then there cannot be and must never be sub-cultures, sub-communities, and religious practices in neutral, open, public spaces. Yet it is obvious there are sub-communities, sub-cultures and religious practices visible all over the place. The equality of treatment of churches means that the massively expensive and ill-attended Catholic churches are never allowed to go into serious disrepair (national heritage after all, and bit of a tourist attraction). The fast growing Muslim population is not well served by fancy mosques or even any mosques at all. When all the churches built before 1905 are owned and looked after by the state, then the meaning and practice of “separation of church and state” is, at the very least, a challenging notion. Furthermore, the denial of the official existence of race or religion as important variables, even though everyone admits that racism and religious practice are a problem, is a strange way to hide what is going on in France today. I think the long-running affair of the foulard has shown the tensions, very much unresolved, in French society. Although I have said nothing about the recent riots throughout France, it seems to me rather obvious that those riots have their causes rooted in some of the problems I have mentioned. One of the most interesting thing about my immigration to France is discovering the small and large differences between my previous countries and this one. It is no longer a surprise to me that the French are deeply attached to a doctrine concerning the Enlightenment, race, ethnicity, religion and so forth that is full of tensions. The management of those tensions involves dealing with a particular combination of factors in France. Of course, there are equally complex tensions in other countries. Understanding how the French deal with their contradictions is, nonetheless, a continuing challenge to me, and to the French. But they really should have let those lasses wear the headscarf is school. I was really disappointed that all the female students didn’t turn up one day with headscarves. Now that would have been interesting.

---- Tom Cahill

February 2006