Should France Ban Head Scarves?

Whatever one thinks of the head scarf, does refusing to take it off justify a humiliating appearance before a disciplinary committee? Has anyone measured the psychological impact of this stigmatization on a girl of 15? And what kind of educational, professional and social future can you offer students who have been shut out of school? Isn't state education, whatever its deficiencies, irreplaceable as a space where students acquire knowledge, know-how and diplomas — some of the most important tools of their emancipation?

At the end of the 19th century, France passed its basic laws defining state secularism. Those laws deal not with students but with school buildings, curriculum and teachers. Why not keep it at that? There are rules for the students, such as class attendance, but it is simply unrealistic to place too many demands on adolescents who come to school to grow and discover themselves.

Those favoring a ban on the head scarf often present themselves as feminists, fighting a "symbol of oppression." But is it really feminism to stress only principles, to attack the scarf as a symbol, and show no concern for the human cost? I can understand that some teachers, because of their own feminist convictions, find it hard to tolerate a student with a head scarf in the classroom. But I find it impossible to understand how they can accept the termination of a young girl's education.

Some prohibitionists also argue they are fighting "fundamentalist groups who are hiding behind girls in head scarves." But if these groups are "hiding behind them," a law aimed at girls in head scarves isn't going to reach them. It could even strengthen their influence: they might well increase their hold over these girls by enrolling them in their own educational structures.

The prohibitionists' final argument is to present the exclusion of students in head scarves as a necessary evil. It is, they say, the only way of defending the other girls who don't wear scarves, especially those pressured by a backward or fanatical entourage. Under those circumstances, a ban can be a very risky affair. If the student's family is able to impose the head scarf, why should they back down when faced with the threat of exclusion? On the contrary, they would be delighted to get hold of the excluded student in order to marry her off or send her to a religious school. In other words, for a relatively small gain — the possibility that some young girls will take off their head scarves inside the school and put them back on when they leave — one must accept a very serious sacrifice: the exclusion from school of other girls in head scarves, those who deliberately choose the hijab but also those who do not dare to remove it in school.

Wouldn't it be better for state schools to welcome all girls in head scarves — those who choose them as well as those who are forced to wear them — and to work with the latter so that they can stand up to whomever is influencing them and, if they choose, shed the head scarf, not only at school but also outside? This approach is clearly harder work than convening a disciplinary committee, but it would allow those who really need it to be helped, without running the risk of excluding some of them, and without penalizing those who choose to wear the head scarf.

The proposed law would create a climate of tension and suspicion in schools. Students who don't wear head scarves, particularly Muslim ones, would take this message as one of contempt not only for Islam, but for the right of education in general. More broadly speaking, shouldn't we worry about anti-Muslim racism, which is more and more commonplace in France, and fueled in part by the debate over the hijab? We cannot fail to see that a student in a head scarf is nothing more than a scapegoat, the target of a French society that would prefer to forget the real problems of segregation, domination and exclusion affecting our schools and the community at large.