Culture clash comes to a head

By CATHERINE FIELD Herald correspondent

PARIS - Rows in France and Germany over the wearing of the Islamic headscarf have highlighted the increasingly fraught relationship between Europe's secular state and its fast-growing Muslim minority.

Germany's constitutional court has ruled that an Afghan-born woman can wear a traditional Muslim headscarf while teaching in a state school. It determined that education authorities in the southwestern city of Stuttgart had acted illegally by barring Fereshta Ludin, 31, from a teaching job because she insisted on wearing the scarf in the classroom.

In France, meanwhile, two teenage sisters have been suspended from school after insisting on attending class with their heads covered. The school says it is simply enforcing secular laws that ban all displays of religious faith in state schools and public buildings.

"The girls' argument that they have a right [to wear a headscarf] is incompatible with secularism and school rules," Education Ministry Inspector Jean-Charles Ringard said.

Alma and Lila Levy, whose mother is Muslim and whose father is a Jewish atheist, say they are simply demanding that two basic rights be respected.

"We are being asked to decide between our religion and our education; we want both," said Alma Levy, 16. Last week, some 80 of their classmates staged a march outside the school, carrying banners reading "Freedom for the veil", "No to discrimination," and "School for everyone".

"Why stop them from demonstrating their religion? Nobody says anything to people who come dressed in gothic outfits wearing Satan T-shirts," one classmate pointed out.

An estimated 10 million Muslims now live in Western Europe, mainly as a result of post-war immigration from the former French and British colonies and from Turkey, the recruiting source for "Gastarbeiter" (guest workers) in Germany.

For decades, Muslims were almost invisible in the eyes of the Christian or agnostic majority - they were the people who did jobs that were boring, dirty, dangerous or too lowly-paid to be of interest to home-born Europeans.

They lived quietly in poor neighbourhoods, were generally law-abiding, sent money home to relatives and went to the mosque.

The invisibility began to lift as a result of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and growing awareness in Europe of the hostility in the Middle East that provides the drive for Islamic terrorism.

Since then, European countries have been boosting scrutiny of Islamic organisations to see if they present a terrorism threat; but they are also asking themselves what should be done to encourage integration and religious tolerance, both towards Islam and by Muslims themselves.

Yet the latest storms show just how tough and unclear this process can be.

In the case of Germany, which has three million Muslims, two key legal concepts have clashed head-to-head: the right of religious freedom and the right to have an education that is religiously neutral.

Ludin, whose case had been rejected by a federal court, argued that the constitution guaranteed her freedom of religious expression and unlimited access to public jobs. The minister responsible for education in the state of Baden-Wuerttemburg, Annette Schaven, argued that the headscarf was political and "understood as a symbol of the exclusion of woman from civil and cultural society".

The constitutional court came down on Ludin's side. It upheld her appeal against the federal court's decision, saying there was no law prohibiting teachers from covering their heads. But, complicating matters, it also said that individual states within Germany should seek to find an acceptable balance in law between religious freedom and neutrality in schools.

In France, where there are between four and five million Muslims, secularism was enshrined in the constitution in 1905 and is actively promoted by the state. There are strict rules forbidding the display of any religious symbols in state schools. A constitutional ruling gives schools power to ban any religious symbol - headscarf, Jewish skullcap or Christian cross - worn as an "act of pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda."

The headscarf, or hijab as it is called in Arabic, has stirred controversy in France for more than a decade. It is one of the few things on which mainstream political parties, left and right, are united. Even though there are many private Catholic and Jewish schools in France, all parties are united in their belief that religion should be kept clearly out of state schools.

French feminists and left-wingers say the scarf is a token of servitude, a sign of submission to male dominance rather than to God, as devout Muslims claim it to be.

Right-wing French Catholics are secretly alarmed at the rising numbers of Muslims in a country where Christian fervour is dwindling. Many fear Islamic fanaticism and a dilution of the traditional national identity, and see the secularity of the state as their biggest defence.

Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, a professor of philosophy, says the problem has historical roots that reach into centuries of hostility between Islam and Christianity as well as the traditional Catholic dominance in France.

"France now faces a new religious reality. Islam, now the second largest religion in France is different from the Judeo-Christian heritage which lies at the basis of our society and culture."