Some very good writing here. Everywhere that cultures mix, there is trouble. The trouble works itself out in different ways. Overall, I think the US has a far better *official* policy towards religion than France. But mostly, its just people trying to make themselves a life, the way they conceive of it. Laïcité once stood against the power of the Catholic Church, which was until 1905 the state religion. But it is probably not an accident that in modern times, the flash points all involve Islam. In 2005, after many years of discussion, girls were banned from wearing Muslim head scarves in public schools. (The law is neutral on its face: it prohibits all obvious religious dress, but nobody thinks it’s targeting Catholic kids wearing crosses.) As the Algerian poet and anthropologist Habib Tengour, who has lived in France since he was 5, put it to me when we met for coffee, if girls want to wear a head scarf, they can go to a religious school. (Right now that would mean a Catholic school, since there are few Muslim schools in France. And, indeed, some Muslim parents today prefer Catholic school for their daughters, as Tengour said was also the case in colonial Algeria.) Thus, one of the paradoxes of laïcité is that it can reinforce the very social exclusion it is intended to prevent: What is gained if a Muslim girl leaves public school so she can wear her scarf, or if Muslims in France, like French Jews, set up their own religious day schools? For Patrick Weil, a historian and political scientist who sat on the Stasi Commission that proposed the head-scarf ban, the ban is feminist because boys were pressuring girls into wearing head scarves and calling them whores if they didn’t. “The issue was a group of males against girls,” he insisted. Let’s say this was sometimes the case: If the problem was the boys’ behavior, is the solution to deprive girls of their freedom to choose their dress? I had a long conversation with the sociologist Nilüfer Göle, who has written an important book about veiling, in her office at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. A Turkish Muslim, Göle said the girls who wear the scarf are believers making an autonomous decision as part of their negotiation with religion. “They’re not following their mother’s traditional path. They want to go to school, have a profession. They don’t want early marriages or arranged marriages. They’re searching for their own way.” Seems to me each of us deserves that chance, regardless of where were starting from. Some of us got lucky, and were raised free of the religion virus - others are still shaking it off. That is hard to do. They need compassion, even when they act badly. *Especially* when they act badly. Indeed, displaying compassion when you are being attacked by someone who is ignorant of something of which you are not, is what it means to be enlightened. On a personal, and on a societal level.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 08:54:41 +0000
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