After a year, the headscarf ban is judged a success in curbing jihadist sentiments. This article doesn't explain how officials arrived at this conclusion. Certainly everyone looks more French inside the schools, and that is a powerful visual impression, but has it been accompanied by an abandonment of jihadist teaching in the mosques? From the TimesOnline, with thanks to Scaramouche:
FATHIMA stood outside her lycée chatting and joking with friends. She paused briefly to lift a long, beige scarf off her head and then walked into the playground — an excited teenager back in class after the two-month French summer holidays.Yet a year ago here, at the Lycée Henri Wallon in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, the mood was very different.
France’s centre-Right Government had passed a law banning religious symbols from schools and girls such as Fathima were at the centre of a fierce national controversy.The law applies to all visible symbols, including kippas, turbans and large Christian crosses. But no one ever had any doubt about its main target — the Muslim headscarf that was the focus of a long and bitter struggle between Islamic extremists and the secular state.
At the Lycée Henri Wallon, where Alma and Lila Levy were expelled for refusing to remove their scarves, the debate was heated. Most teachers backed the law on the ground, hoping that it would end a drift towards multiculturalism that was separating pupils along ethnic and religious lines.
But leaders of France’s five million Muslims denounced it as an attack on religious freedom and parents expressed fears that children would be driven out of school because of “a bit of cloth on their heads”.
Twelve months on, the row has subsided and the law is being hailed by the Government as a success that has stemmed the Islamic fundamentalist tide and brought calm to the nation’s lycées.
Fathima, who is 16, agrees. “In the end I really don’t think it was a bad law at all. I wear my voile until I get to the school gates and then I take it off. School is not a place for religion. It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again. There’s no difficulty.”
Yesterday an Indian Muslim, a Miss Miza, played Maria Sharipova at the US open. We were told how she "prayed five times a day and read the Qur'an," and how she was booked with more press interviews than Sharipova was. Clearly the New York crowd was behind her.
Nobody bothered the ask the obvious question, "Miss Miza, how do you feel knowing that as a Muslim woman you are free to play tennis while living in India, but knowing that if you lived in Muslim Pakistan, you would not be allowed to do so?"
I mean really, in almost any Muslim country these days she could be stoned to death for wearing shorts, for crying out loud. Why doesn't anybody ask the pertinent questions? It really is maddening.
She also lost the match.
I bet Maria Sharapova would look DAZZLING in a headscarf.
Could it be the French have stumbled onto a novel approach? Could the imaginative concept of saying what you mean and standing your ground be of some use elsewhere? Who could have thought that showing some backbone would impress upon the muslim population that vitriolic threats of dire consequences will not be allowed to herd, manipulate, and control the majority.
You're NOT special. Get it? Got it? Good.
Rebecca, this might interest you,
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Dress properly, Islamic clerics tell Sania Mirza
Its heartening to see a Muslim girl born in one of the most conservative Islamic area of India reach 4th Round of US Open but the Imams are sure ruining the fun for her.
From the hijab controversy one can draw two conclusions, only one of which is true.
The true conclusion is that, where the Muslim population does not yet feel large enough, or strong enough, to oppose the Infidel nation-state, and where the Infidels stand firm, they will be obeyed.
The false conclusion is that this shows that Muslims can be successfully integrated into the societies of the Western world, and that the alarms of cassandras are exaggerated.
That is false because Muslims are nowhere yet strong enough in numbers. And false because even in Turkey, where for 80 years there was a virtual ban, in schools and govenrment offices, on the hijab, Islam not only did not go away, but as re-emerged as the political and social power it always was, and always will be, wherever enough of the people are Believers. Turkey shows the limits of constraint, and shows too how the secular Turks were fooled into believing that eternal vigilance, and the power of the Kemalist army, was no longer necessary.
The experience with the hijab does not show, as some French (Olivier Roy, perhaps, or Gilles Kepel) that "integration" will work, and there is no need to consider other measures to make France Islam-hostile rather than, as it remains today, Islam-friendly.
One worries that not the true, but the false, lesson of this episode will be the one given most attention. That would be dangerous.
That's an unwarranted jibe at Pakistan. Yes, there are problems for women in general and sportswomen in particular, but there's no question of being not "allowed to do so [play sports/wear shorts/whatever-your-stereotype-of-a-Muslim-woman-is]."
An example from last week:
Carla Khan won the first POF WISPA Squash tournament. She definitely wasn't wearing a hijab. She's the darling of the local press.
Get of your assumptions, please! We're not [all] 8th century barbarians!
Jauhara - sharapova would dazzle me whatever she wore!
shes certainly a cut above that ugly gun-toting fascist b**** on frontpagemag
as for fatima - shes right - the anti headscarf rule in schools is not a problem for islamists(whatever they might have said about it), they just put it back on when they get outside the school gates.
right-wing idiots who think that the french have stuck one up the islamists on this issue are seriously misguided.
similarly, when thousands of french muslims took to the streets to protest the kidnapping of french journalists in iraq (something which certainly did not happen in uk with our hostages), the kidnappers being supposedly amazed at the tv pictures of this, nonetheless any thought that everything now is hunky-dory in frogland re islam is an utter delusion.
one only has to consider sarko's pathetic attempts to corner tariq ramadan to see this.
like the rest of the west, they are completely missing the point
Can you say "hudna?" The success if merely a temporary respite while Islamist forces regroup, look around, and find another opportunity to again force the issue.
This is a lesson from history. Muslims never relent. They merely bide their time and wait for another opportunity.
This confuses me. You had Muslims literaly threatening innocent French citizens with death unless the ban was removed, now it's like "Whatever, it's not that bad of a law."?
“It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again.”
What does this girl mean, exactly? Knowing what I know about Islam, I am tempted to think that once she puts on her headscarf, she again feels superior to the rest of her countrymen.