In late December, Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese radical organisation Hezbollah, released to the Western media a letter in which he complained of a “stripping of liberties from Muslims, even when they have not disobeyed the law,” and warned of an emerging climate “hostile to religion and to Muslim citizens.” The tone was not unusual for a Hezbollah letter. What was unusual was the addressee. For the broadside was launched neither at George Bush nor at John Ashcroft but at French president Jacques Chirac, who until recently was hailed as a hero among Arab radicals for his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. Last March, Chirac was mobbed by hundreds of thousands of Algerian well-wishers in the streets of Oran. Even Fadlallah in his letter professed himself “mindful of France’s political role — under your administration — in Lebanese, Arab, and French matters, and the convergence of our positions, along with our interests, despite differences on certain points.”Fadlallah’s gripe is a law now being rushed to the French National Assembly that by February will, in many settings, forbid women and girls to wear Muslim headscarves. On December 11, a Chirac-appointed blue-ribbon commission under the direction of the centrist politician Bernard Stasi recommended a ban on “conspicuous” religious symbols — including headscarves, yarmulkes, and “large crosses” — in schools, hospitals, and other public buildings. There were other things in the report, including the proposal to add two new national holidays — Yom Kippur and Id al-Adha, the Islamic feast of Abraham. The new holidays were approved by 98 per cent of Muslims, according to mid-December polling done by daily Le Parisien.But the commission’s proposals on the veil dwarfed everything else. The French are obsessed with Muslim headwear, with an intensity that can mystify foreigners. There are a dozen books on the veil selling briskly in French bookstores now, and to rattle off some of their titles puts one in mind of a Monty Python routine: “One Veiled, the Other Not”; “The Veil That Is Tearing France Apart”; “A Veil Over the Republic”; “Drop the Veil!” (by the Iranian feminist Chahdortt Djavann), and “What the Veil Veils” (by the leftist gadfly and Stasi commission member Regis Debray). The controversy dates from 1989, when the first cases of girls’ refusing to uncover themselves cropped up. Over 15 years, the issue has been settled and reopened through a series of bans, rules, waivers, overturnings, and decrees.But the most recent statistics — 1,200 cases of veiled girls in state schools, with four expulsions — would seem to indicate little more than a dress-code problem of limited extent. Yet the French are debating it as Americans would debate a declaration of war.Extracted from an article by Christopher Caldwell in the January 19 issue of ‘The Weekly Standard’
