Muslim Headscarves Should Be Allowed In French Public Schools

As the new academic year commences around France, a young girl approaches the gate to her school then pauses as she lowers her hijab before entering. Is she slipping part of her identity to her shoulders? With the veil away from her face, does she become more French? The French have grappled with questions like these for decades since Islam was introduced to a country that holds secularity at the same level as liberty, equality, and brotherhood. While banning of Muslim headscarves in French public schools may have been appropriate when the Republic was young and freshly hostile to religious power, the face of the nation has changed since 1789. Muslim headscarves should be allowed in French public schools considering they now have more than

As unskilled immigrants lost their jobs with shifting economy and had no options besides living in isolated, low income immigrant communities called ghettos, they started to make “a small replica of the homeland” (Bowen 62). For youth, a significant part of reclaiming identity and finding meaning is connecting with one’s culture and being proud of it (Bowen 75). Dr. Hull also points out that for many young girls who choose to cover their heads, they find the headscarves as part of themselves. By banning the headscarves in schools, girls are being forced into trying to learn and become part of a community without being true to their identities. Denying students, and especially girls, of expressing themselves as they feel they should, can ultimately lead to a feeling of rejection and oppression. Muslims who believe in wearing headscarves may feel as though their needs are not considered, thus reinforcing the norm of minority groups being treated as second-class citizens. Since the headscarf is not purely an “ostentatious” religious symbol, but also a cultural symbol, it has a place in public

However, the veils have come to represent more than religion, they have become a visible manifestation of difference from the mainstream. It was Catholicism that once exerted such power, while Islam could be considered the religion of those colonized and oppressed by the French. The threat in this case, then, is that from the Maghreb immigrants and their descendants will earn too much status and break the mold of what a French person looks like and worships, rather than what they value as a citizen. A fear of immigration and Islam can be disguised as offence to the public display of religion of wearing a hijab, for Islam is seen as “‘foreign’, and associated with a racialized and problematized postcolonial minority” (Winter, 8). Considering that only two to one percent of French Muslim girls and women choose to wear veils and that there is “no directive within the Qur’an for all Muslim women to wear the khimar, jihab, or niqab, and even less to a wear a “curtain” (hijab),” it is clear that there is misunderstanding regarding the headscarves in French culture (Winter 10, 24). Islam has further been stigmatized following terrorist attacks, causing a more widespread association of Muslims with militant violence. Non-Muslims may assume that those who cover