French Headscarf Essay

The French headscarf controversy reached its peak when, in 2004, the French parliament passed a law banning conspicuous religious clothing from school classrooms. This law and the controversy surrounding the wearing of hijabs, veils, and headscarfs by muslim schoolgirls can trace its immediate root to 1989 when a principal in Creil expelled three girls for refusing to remove the garment in the school. This starting point still neglects the influence of France’s colonial past and her struggle to absorb immigrants from former colonial holdings — especially the predominately muslim Algeria — and the impact of racist remnants of colonial sentiment on modern political and cultural dialog surrounding immigrants. The controversy also served as a rock on which the Front National, a radically right French political party, and its followers were able to create and promote a

The French considered their versions of these lofty ideals to be superior to all others existing both within and without the Occident. Due to their feeling as the supreme culture they, “felt entitled to treat colonial subjects in a way that … aimed to assimilate these underdeveloped peoples to French culture.” The French perceived Islam as unique in its ability to prohibit the civilizing mission. Islam, the French believed, was simultaneously the cause and effect of cultural inferiority. To counter the power the french alleged Islam had they respond by, “closing religious schools and libraries and seizing properties of the Islamic foundations that supported them.” (Scott 46-47). Islam was seen as a barrier to true education and assimilation to French culture in Algeria, just as an expression of Islamic culture — in the headscarf — was taken as an affront to French republicanism and education in continental France in 1989 and again in