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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| France: Banning Scarves While Accepting Indecency |
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| Fozia |
| 10/12/03 at 15:19:43 |
| A number of European countries are currently struggling with the Muslim headscarf while permitting all kinds of indecency and nudity in the name of tolerance and equality. This throws up a variety of difficult issues relating to tolerance and equality. In France, secularity has been enshrined in the constitution since 1905. But the country has not always been so keen to assert a ban on headscarves in schools. In 1989, the then left-wing government declared that the wearing of scarves was not necessarily incompatible with France being a secular state as long as they were not ostentatious. The decision on whether to allow pupils to wear them or not has been left up to the discretion of headteachers. The new centre-right government however has said it is prepared to pass a law banning all religious effects from the classroom. Those hostile to the headscarf on the grounds of their objection to Islam find themselves in the awkward position of seeking, themselves, to stamp out the expression of religion in the name of tolerance. The issue of women's rights and the headscarf is also problematic for many feminists. "If we allow women to wear headscarves in state schools, then the republic and French democracy have made clear their religious tolerance but they have given up on any equality of the sexes in our country," says French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter However, these concerns about female oppression within the Islamic faith also have to be squared with the fact that a number of Muslim women are clearly keen to wear the scarf. Campaigns to stop the state from cracking down on the wearing of the headscarf are often run by young Muslim women confident of their right to fulfil their potential and their right to express their religion. An educated young woman of middle-class parents, has no qualms about her right to pursue a career or to wear a headscarf. "I see my religion as a fundamental part of my identity," she has declared. Critics worry that issuing a law banning scarves - under the name of banning all religious effects from the classroom - would simply push Muslim girls out of the state system, jeopardising integration. This term, the country's first private Muslim school opened in the northern city of Lille. Bizarrely, the campaign to force Muslim girls to abandon headscarves in France is running parallel to a craze for G-strings worn by adolescent girls in high schools. A hundred metres from the lycé e at La Celle Saint-Cloud in the Paris suburbs, the street poster for Sloggi's skimpy underwear could hardly be more cheekily positioned. With a national debate raging over girls wearing le string to school, the poster focuses on the bottoms of three adolescent girls writhing like go-go dancers in barely there underwear. The high school is among hundreds of French colleges discussing whether G-strings are exposing girls as young as 10 to potential abusers. Pupils in France's state schools can choose their own clothes as long as they are decent. But a high school that ordered girls to cover up was faced with a near-riot last week. Encouraged by fashion ads, girls make a point of wearing low-slung jeans and cropped T-shirts so that their G-strings are exposed. France's best known popular brand of lingerie, Dim, has doubled production in a year, selling 1.3 million strings in supermarkets alone. L'Institut Français de la Mode said the rush to buy the flimsy garment had boosted sales of feminine underwear by 12 percent. 'I don't think parents and teachers can stop even pre-adolescents wearing these things - they seem to think it's a laugh,' an assistant in the Galeries Lafayette lingerie department said. A former Education Minister, Segolene Royale, whose partner, François Hollande, runs the Socialist Party, raised the alarm after a meeting with parent-teacher associations who had expressed concern that the fashion craze could incite crime. But the risks in imposing a ban were underlined at the Ribeauville lycée in Alsace, where 10 girls were told to change their clothes because of what was considered an indecent gap between jeans and a T-shirt that left their midriffs in view. Three days later 100 girls besieged the headmistress's office and claimed the right to wear whatever they wanted. The head, Claudine Wendling-Brickert, said she was ready to accept that girls showed off their navels 'but not in my high school'. Teachers have been told to pick out offenders and warnings have been stuck on classroom doors. At La Celle Saint-Cloud, which has yet to agree on a formal ban, students said they did not think that strings were provocative. 'Some of those in terminal - the top form - are 19 years old,' said Katherine Lebras, 17. 'They should be allowed to wear what they like, just as you do at university. Strings are just fun - they're not a come-on.' http://www.islamweb.net/web/misc.Article?vArticle=47318&thelang=E |
| Re: France: Banning Scarves While Accepting Indece |
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| amatullah |
| 10/13/03 at 23:12:49 |
Dear brother and sisters, Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah. Again one French school bans headscarf for muslim girls.InshaAllah the authority will be defeated but we should do our duties by protesting.Brothers of France, PLEASE BE SINCERE TO FIGHT AGAINST THIS UNJUST DECESION.Please communicate the news to all. FRENCH SCHOOL BANS HEADSCARF GIRLS (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/europe/3183962.stm) Two teenage sisters have been expelled from their high school in a suburb of Paris for wearing the Islamic headscarf. The move against 16-year-old Alma Levy and her sister Lila, 18, by the Henri Wallon lycee, in the northern suburb of Aubervilliers, followed a vote taken at a meeting of the school's disciplinary board late on Friday night. "The Islamic veil they were wearing in class was judged to be ostentatious," French TV said. National regulations lay down that signs of religious observance should not be displayed in state educational institutions. Anger "I'm disappointed and angry. It's terrible," Alma Levy said on learning of the board's decision. "I think the school took their decision a long time ago and that they wanted to make an example of us". Since being suspended from the school in September, the girls had been studying at home pending the disciplinary board's decision. The girls' lawyer, Gerard Tcholkian, said the decision to expel the girls was "unjust" and he would appeal against it. The president of the French anti-racist movement MRAP, Mouloud Aounit, called the ruling "a terrible defeat for secularism, intelligence and dialogue". But a teacher at the school, Loris Castellani, told French TV that the school would not cave in to pressure. "We have been talking to some of the pupils of Maghreb or Muslim origin and they are saying to us: Stick to your guns, because we don't want the headscarf in school, because for these girls the school is the last place of refuge," he said. "They can rely on the school to resist the social pressures in their community, in the district they live in." |
| Re: France: Banning Scarves While Accepting Indece |
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| se7en |
| 10/16/03 at 20:03:46 |
| as salaamu alaykum, man more than anything else I feel such incredible *pride* to be able to call these girls my sisters.. holding fast to the deen despite the consequences, drawing from the same pool of strength and courage as Rasulullah [saw], Sumayyah, and the men and women who lived by Islam, even in the face of incredible adversity and difficulty. may Allah grant our sisters *strength* and *courage* to match their nobility and faith.. ameen. power to da :-)'s... keep ya head up wasalaamu alaykum wa rahmatullah |
| 10/16/03 at 20:05:36 |
| se7en |
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