France proud of its secularism
But struggles grow in this approach to faith, school, integration

WORLD  23 May 2024 - 17:05

Writing in AP, Giovanna Dell’orto has described religious intolerance in France.

“Brought into the international spotlight by the ban on hijabs for French athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympics, France’s unique approach to “laïcité” — loosely translated as “secularism” — has been increasingly stirring controversy from schools to sports fields across the country,” Caliber.Az reports citing the article.

According to the article, the struggle cuts to the core of how France approaches not only the place of religion in public life, but also the integration of its mostly immigrant-origin Muslim population, Western Europe’s largest.

Perhaps the most contested ground is public schools, where visible signs of faith are barred under policies seeking to foster a shared sense of national unity. That includes the headscarves some Muslim women want to wear for piety and modesty, even as others fight them as a symbol of oppression.

For Minane, as for many French Muslim youth, navigating French culture and her spiritual identity is getting harder. The 19-year-old nursing student has heard people say even on the streets of multicultural Marseille that there’s no place for Muslims.

“I ask myself if Islam is accepted in France,” she said in her parents’ apartment, where a bright orange Berber rug woven by her Moroccan grandmother hangs next to Koranic verses in Arabic.

Minane also lives with the collective trauma that has scarred much of France — the gripping fear of Islamist attacks, which have targeted schools and are seen by many as evidence that laïcité (pronounced lah-eee-see-tay) needs to be strictly enforced to prevent radicalization.

For its officials and most educators, secularism in public schools and other public institutions is essential. For many French Muslims, however, and other critics, laïcité is exerting precisely that kind of discriminatory pressure on already disadvantaged minorities, denying them the chance to live their full identity in their own country.

Amid the tension, there’s broad agreement that polarization is skyrocketing, as crackdowns and challenges mount for this French approach to religion and integration.

While open confrontations are still numbered in the dozens among millions of students, it has become common to see girls put their headscarves back on the moment they exit through a public school’s doors.

Secularism is one of four fundamental values enshrined in France’s constitution. The state explicitly charges public schools with instilling those values in children, while allowing private schools to offer religious instruction as long as they also teach the general curriculum that the government establishes.

Unlike the United States, where fights over what values schools teach cleave along partisan lines, support for laïcité is almost universal in France’s political establishment, though some on the right criticize it as anti-religion and on the left as a vestige of colonialism.

At Marseille’s Cedres Mosque, next to the projects, Salah Bariki, who has worked on interreligious affairs with city hall, said youth are struggling with exactly that sense of rejection from France.

“What do they want us to do, look at the Eiffel Tower instead of Mecca?” Bariki quipped. Nine of ten young women in the neighborhood are now veiled, “for identity more than religion,” he added.

To avoid a vicious cycle, more — not less — discussion of religion should be happening in schools, argued Rabbi Haïm Bendao. He runs a small conservative synagogue in a nearby neighborhood, and wishes he could give talks about integration in public institutions as he routinely does in private ones, in partnership with imams.

“To establish peace, it’s a daily effort. It’s crazy important to speak in schools,” said Bendao, who has gone to both Ibn Khaldoun and the Catholic school across from it, Saint-Joseph, which also enrolls many Muslim students.

Caliber.Az