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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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Young Muslim women in France are being forbidden to wear headscarves in school. Is this because religion should be kept out of education or is the ruling simply an attack on Muslims? We reprint this article from the French socialist paper Socialisme Internationale |
The French Tory government has circulated state schools ordering that ‘ostentatious’ religious emblems should not be worn. It claims to be defending the French tradition of secular (non-religious) education. But in reality it is attacking Muslim girls wearing headscarves.
Education minister Bayrou supports the extension of the private sector in education. Yet private schools are mainly Catholic. He wanted to increase public funding of these schools and only the million strong mass demonstration in January this year stopped him. Religious symbols are common in parts of the education system. In Alsace in eastern France there are crosses on the walls of state schools, chaplains paid for by the state to teach in them and thousands of children wear crucifixes in class. Bayrou has never protested about any of this.
Expelling young Muslim women from state schools for wearing scarves would give the green light to the growth of private schools, whether Muslim or not. Each community would create its own private teaching system.
Some argue that they oppose the scarf because it reinforces women’s oppression. But it is government policy to reinforce women’s oppression. It is financing thousands of private religious establishments which refuse to install condom machines in secondary schools, to provide information about contraception or abortion rights.
Expelling young women with headscarves will have the effect of ghettoising them even more in the family or in Muslim schools, which are just as conservative about women as Catholic schools.
In a country where racism is increasingly being used to divide workers, the Islamic veil is not necessarily a sign of oppression. Often it can be a sign of resistance to the religious and racist oppression which young Muslim women suffer.
Pressure for the circular came from the most right wing section of the conservative RPR, which is trying to rival the National Front. It repeats word for word parts of a bill introduced by Yves Chenière about religious symbols in school. Chenière used to be the headmaster of a secondary school, which in 1989 expelled several young Muslim women. He is now an MP for the RPR who is supported by the National Front.
In 1989 people like Chenière thought they could get rid of the headscarf through repression. As usual, repression of religious customs produced the opposite effect: in the absence of any support from the left against discrimination thousands of young Muslim women have also begun to wear this symbol in defiance against oppression. Young women, often born in France, are most confident about fighting oppression and most often wear headscarves. Bayrou’s action will only spark off more rebellion.
The government circular is racist and discriminatory. It is an accompaniment to the crackdown on Muslims because of a supposed ‘fundamentalist threat’.
The supposed neutrality of the school system only hides the real ideological monopoly that the government exercises over education.
Supporters of secular education often argue that all this may be true but all political and religious insignia should be banned. This would mean that tens of thousands of students would face expulsion from state schools. For besides the ‘discreet’ (and not so discreet) religious insignia some students wear, others wear SOS-Racisme badges saying ‘Don’t Touch My Mate’, the Palestinian head dress, Malcolm X T-shirts and baseball caps, and pacifist symbols.
Rasta or Mohican hairstyles also express a ‘philosophical’ outlook on life.
The repressive logic of banning insignia leads supporters of secular education to recommend reintroducing school uniforms, which would impose a dictatorship on young people, and the restoration of a more disciplined regime inside school establishments.
Anti-racists should fight for school students to have the right to complete freedom of expression (including in matters of clothing) and complete freedom of association and organisation. These rights have already been partially removed by teachers. We should make no concession to racism. We should defend young Muslim women who wear headscarves.
Often secularism is presented as neutrality in school. Education should be a non-political sanctuary which safeguards children from the political brawls adults get involved in, it is argued.
However, the history of secularism suggests something rather different. In the 19th century the struggle for secularism was an expression of the capitalist class’s victorious struggle against the last bastions of the Old Regime which existed before the French Revolution. The church was deprived of its control over teaching so that the people could be taught the ideas of the new ruling class.
After the Paris Commune in 1871 the growth of trade unions and socialist parties led the most enlightened members of the ruling class to see that education, directed by the Republic, must be available to working people. Jules Ferry, the founder of lay education in France, put the case with great clarity:
‘In religious schools the young receive an education which is entirely directed against modern institutions. The Old Regime and the social structures which characterised it are held up as a model. If this state of things is allowed to continue, the danger is that other schools, open to workers’ and peasants’ children, will be founded, where diametrically opposed values will be taught. These may take their inspiration from the socialist or communist ideal of recent times, for example the violent and sinister period between 18 March and 24 May 1871.’
The dates he refers to are those of the birth of the Paris Commune and its crushing by the forces of reaction.
In response to the working class threat the ruling class tried to maintain and utilise religious institutions to buttress its power. Jules Ferry praised Christian virtues and the need for teachers to develop spiritual values. At the same time as expanding state education he supported the development of religious schools. The numbers working in them rose from less than 500,000 in 1880 to more than 1,250,000 at the beginning of the century.
The separation between state and church came finally in 1905 as a result of pressure from the left. But the ruling class no longer wanted major confrontation with the church. So when Alsace became part of France again in 1918, a religious agreement was concluded which means to this day primary schools in Alsace are religious schools. The state pays the salaries of the clerical officials of the main religions – with the exception of Islam. Despite real tensions between the state and the church there is an alliance with the Catholic hierarchy and other religions are oppressed.
Real secularism requires both complete separation between religious institutions and the state, and the creation of a single, public and free education system independent of all private interests.
Neither of these two conditions exists in France.
Secularism has nothing in common with supposed political neutrality in the schools. It is not concerned with insignia or clothing. On the contrary, it should uphold the right of everyone, believer or non-believer, whatever their religion or conviction, to be given a good education independent of the wealth they possess.
The state should not take sides in matters of belief. There should be complete freedom of expression and of organisation.
Because it runs up against religious institutions as much as it does against state institutions, genuinely non-religious education would require the overthrow of the ruling order, in education as elsewhere. Only the working class, the largest class in society and the class most hungry for the knowledge of which it has been deprived, has an interest in allying with the oppressed and challenging the ruling order. The bourgeoisie long ago abandoned the struggle.
At the Saint-Exupéry secondary school, in Mantes-la-Jolie near Paris, 24 young women wearing headscarves have been threatened with expulsion. They have been forbidden to attend class since October. The headmaster has kept them in isolation in a detention room. The students’ first reaction has been to express solidarity – the legacy of student unity developed during mass demonstrations against cuts in the minimum wage for youth.
Hundreds out of the 1,600 school students have signed petitions supporting the young women. But the pressures on these women are considerable. The media presents them as arch-fundementalists. They are frequently insulted in the street. One of them had her headscarf snatched away and was spat upon.
The headmaster threatened to punish students if they joined the strike call. The school students have organised two solidarity demonstrations which were met with mobilisations of the riot police who made baton charges and arrests.
Despite this a thousand of them held a meeting in the school car park. After a stormy meeting the school council threw out the Bayrou circular. This was a sign of the teachers’ defiance. But the expulsion threat is still hanging over the young womens’ heads. We should not tolerate discrimination against young Muslim women, or other school students will be targets tomorrow.
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