Brought into the international highlight by the ban on hijabs for French athletes on 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.
The struggle cuts to the core of how France approaches not only the place of faith in public life, but additionally the combination of its mostly immigrant-origin Muslim population, Western Europe’s largest.
Perhaps probably the most contested ground is public schools, where visible signs of religion are barred under policies searching for to foster a shared sense of national unity. That includes the headscarves some Muslim women wish to wear for piety and modesty, whilst others fight them as a logo of oppression.
“It has turn out to be a privilege to be allowed to practice our religion,” said Majda Ould Ibbat, who was considering leaving Marseille, France’s second-largest city, until she discovered a personal Muslim school, Ibn Khaldoun, where her children could each freely live their faith and flourish academically.
“We wanted them to have an important education, and with our principles and our values,” added Ould Ibbat, who only began wearing a scarf recently, while her teen daughter, Minane, hasn’t felt able to. Her 15-year-old son, Chahid, often prays in the varsity’s mosque during recess.
For Minane, as for a lot of 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 vibrant 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) must be strictly enforced to forestall radicalization.
Minane vividly remembers observing a moment of silence at Ibn Khaldoun in honor of Samuel Paty, a public school teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist in 2020. A memorial to Paty as a defender of France’s values hangs in the doorway of the Education Ministry in Paris.
For its officials and most educators, secularism in public schools and other public institutions is important. They say it encourages a way of belonging to a united French identity and prevents those that are less or not religiously observant from feeling pressured, while leaving everyone free to worship in private spaces.
For many French Muslims, nonetheless, and other critics, laïcité is exerting precisely that type of discriminatory pressure on already disadvantaged minorities, denying them the prospect to live their full identity in their very own country.
Amid the stress, 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 handfuls amongst tens of millions of scholars, it has turn out to be common to see girls put their headscarves back on the moment they exit through a public school’s doors.
“Laws on laïcité protect and permit for coexistence — which is less and fewer easy,” said Isabelle Tretola, principal of the general public primary school whose front gate faces the door to Ibn Khaldoun’s small mosque.
She addresses challenges to secularism each day — like children in choir class who put their hands on their ears “because their families told them singing variety songs isn’t good.”
“You can’t force them to sing, but teachers tell them they’ll’t cover their ears out of respect for the teacher and classmates,” Tretola said. “In school, you come to learn the values of the republic.”
Secularism is one among 4 fundamental values enshrined in France’s structure. The state explicitly charges public schools with instilling those values in children, while allowing private schools to supply religious instruction so long as additionally they teach the overall curriculum that the federal government establishes.
Unlike the United States, where fights over what values schools teach cleave along partisan lines, support for laïcité is nearly universal in France’s political establishment, though some on the correct criticize it as anti-religion and on the left as a vestige of colonialism.
Government officials argue the prohibition against showcasing a selected faith is obligatory to avoid threats to democracy. In the nineteenth century, those were seen as stemming from the political influence of the Catholic Church. Today, the federal government has made fighting radical Islam a priority, and secularism is seen as a bulwark against the dreaded growth of spiritual influence on each day life, all the way down to beachwear.
“In a public school, the varsity for everybody, one behaves like everyone else, and shouldn’t make a display,” said Alain Seksig, secretary general of the Education Ministry’s council on secularism. It has produced guides for teachers and students after a rise in incidents, especially over headscarves.
“What do we are saying to the girl who says, ‘I don’t wish to wear it under pressure?’ The school is on her side,” he added.
For many teachers and principals, having strict government rules helps confront multiplying challenges. The curriculum — from music to evolution to sexual health — is a recent goal, though all public students receive a “secularism at school” guide that notes objecting to teaching on the premise of faith is forbidden.
Some 40% of teachers report self-censoring after the attacks on Paty and one other teacher, Dominique Bernard, slain last fall by a suspected Islamic extremist, said Didier Georges. He’s accountable for secularism issues for SNPDEN-UNSA, a union representing greater than half of France’s principals.
Like him, Laurent Le Drezen, a principal in a small city about an hour from Marseille and a frontrunner of one other education staff union, SGEN-CFDT, sees a nefarious influence of social media in the expansion of Muslim students difficult secularism in school.
“I’m intransigent on laïcité, since it helps with national cohesion, national community. It’s not a negation of faith,” Le Drezen said.
His classroom experience in Marseille’s Quartiers Nord — often dilapidated suburbs with projects housing mostly families of North African origin — also taught him the importance of showing students that schools aren’t coming after them for being Muslim.
At Marseille’s Cedres Mosque, next to the projects, Salah Bariki, who has worked on interreligious affairs with city hall, said youth are combating exactly that sense of rejection from France.
“What do they need us to do, take a look at the Eiffel Tower as an alternative of Mecca?” Bariki quipped. Nine of ten young women within the neighborhood are actually veiled, “for identity greater than religion,” he added.
To avoid a vicious cycle, more — not less — discussion of faith needs to be happening in schools, argued Rabbi Haïm Bendao. He runs a small conservative synagogue in a close-by neighborhood, and desires 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 each day effort. It’s crazy vital to talk in schools,” said Bendao, who has gone to each Ibn Khaldoun and the Catholic school across from it, Saint-Joseph, which also enrolls many Muslim students.
Its principal, Cédric Coureur, says private schools have the advantage of being allowed to handle questions students may need about God — and supply the type of answers “inside the republican framework” that helped him integrate into France because the son of Mauritian immigrants.
“School welcomed me, it gave me the keys to like this country without telling me to achieve this,” Coureur said. “The French state doesn’t recognize being Christian or Muslim or Jew or Buddhist, it recognizes that you just are French.”
Several families at Ibn Khaldoun said they selected that non-public school, nonetheless, because it may well support each identities as an alternative of exacerbating all-too-public doubts over whether being Muslim is compatible with being French.
“When I hear the controversy over compatibility, that’s once I turn off the TV. Fear has invaded the world,” said Nancy Chihane, president of the parents’ association at Ibn Khaldoun.
At a recent spring recess where girls with hijabs, others with their hair flowing within the fierce local wind often known as Mistral, and boys all mingled, one headscarf-wearing high-schooler said transferring to Ibn Khaldoun meant each freedom and community.
“Here all of us understand one another, we’re not marginalized,” said Asmaa Abdelah, 17.
Nouali Yacine, her history and geography teacher, was born in Algeria — which was under French colonial rule until it won independence in 1962 in a violent struggle — and raised in France since he was 7 months old. While his parents would have considered it treason to discover as French within the anti-colonial context, his daughter — a public school student — tells him she knows no other identity.
“We are inside the citizenry. We don’t pose that query, but they pose it to us,” Yacine says.
Started in 2009 with 25 students, Ibn Khaldoun now enrolls nearly 400 as one among the few private Muslim schools under contract with the French government. That means they’re financially supported but should abide by strict curricular and behavioral requirements.
The school’s founding director, Mohsen Ngazou, who’s also an imam and president of the national association Muslims of France, is equally adamant about respecting religious and education obligations.
He recalls once “making a scene” when he saw a student wearing an abaya over pajamas — the coed code prohibits the latter alongside shorts and revealing necklines.
“I told her she wasn’t ready for sophistication,” Ngazou said. “The abaya doesn’t make a lady religious. The vital thing is to be ok with who you’re.”
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