Imagine you’re quietly sitting in a remote corner of a university library, deeply immersed in a book, when someone comes up to you and says:
“Excuse me miss, I need to escort you out.”
“Pardon me?”
“Your skirt. It’s too long. That’s a blatant display of your religious affiliation, and we can’t tolerate that on campus. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave now.”
Sound preposterous? Not in France.
The land of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” has some of the world’s harshest rules on women’s religious attire: In 2004, it passed a law forbidding “ostentatious” religious symbols in schools—including the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, large crosses and the Jewish kippah—and that was closely followed by a controversial “burqa ban” in 2011, which outlawed full face-covering veils in public.
But if that weren’t already enough, French politician Manuel Valls made waves this week by suggesting that the ban on simple Islamic headscarves – the hijab, that unlike the burqa, leaves the face totally uncovered – should also be extended to public universities.
“Secularism is in our DNA”, he told leftist newspaper Liberation in a lengthy interview, “But today, secularism is confronted with the rise of radical Islam and has to reckon with the place of Islam in our societies.”
The principle of laïcité —a strict separation of religion and public affairs—is central to French identity. In theory, it means faith is a strictly personal business. Everyone’s free to believe what they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with public order. In practice, however, state secularism has quickly turned into an unhealthy, almost totalitarian, obsession with conformity; an injunction to stifle all religious expression, which now overwhelmingly tends to discriminate against Islam.
As a French citizen, I understand the safety concerns underlying the ban on face coverings. But why is the hijab, which only covers women’s hair, subject to similar scrutiny? A veil is a personal clothing choice, not a deliberate act of proselytism. The same goes for the Jewish kippah, or skullcap; and the Sikh turban. It’s free expression – a basic right, under America’s First Amendment.
But France has no such free speech protections.
Depriving adult women of their right to wear a headscarf, or a cross for that matter, is attacking their freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and depriving them of a fundamental human right: the same right Hassidic women exercise when they choose to wear a wig – or that Air France air hostesses exercise when they chose NOT to wear the Islamic scarf to an Arab country when their company demanded it of them.
Secularism should be the choice to be free of religion – not to be free of the sight of other people exercising their religion.
France’s authoritarianism is the real cover-up here.