Worldliness, Anxiety and Head Scarves

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/world/europe/30iht-letter30.html

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CHANTELOUP-LES-VIGNES, FRANCE — “A dark day for the Republic,” read the portentous statement by a former French government official.

“It puts secularism in question,” intoned the current minister of interior.

In Chanteloup-les-Vignes, an outlying Paris suburb and center of the drama, the mayor ominously warned that her town’s social harmony — its “vivre ensemble” — was in danger because of a ruling by France’s top appeals court.

What set off this gloom-and-doom chorus? In an unexpected reversal of a lower court ruling in a 2008 case, the Court of Cassation ruled March 19 that an employee of a privately run nursery here could come to work with a scarf on her head.

In France, the head scarf worn by Muslim women is more than a piece of clothing; it is a call to arms in a continuing war over laïcité, or secularism, one of the pillars of the French republic.

And the battleground keeps spreading, from schools and public spaces to, now, private organizations that serve the public. The case of Baby Loup, the Chanteloup nursery where an employee was fired in 2008 for refusing to shed her scarf, is just one more front line in the skirmish — both political and ideological — between strict secularism and religious expression.

Catherine Arenou, the mayor of Chanteloup, stands behind her alarmist assessment, even though the “vivre ensemble” of her multiethnic community seemed pretty peaceable, as seen from the window of her upper-floor office in Town Hall.

“There is a real threat when things are not clearly defined,” she said in an interview. “It leaves an opening for extremists on both sides — fundamentalists and hyper-secularists.”

In France’s shifting political landscape, the comments by Ms. Arenou, a member of France’s center-right party, require decrypting. In the past year, the French far right, represented by Marine Le Pen’s party, the National Front, has wrapped “secular values” in a nationalist banner and brandishes it in a campaign to halt the perceived rise in aggressive Islamic practices.

Just this past week, after the National Front made an impressive showing in a special parliamentary election, a party official crowed about how it had taken the lead on key national issues. He cited the head scarf at Baby Loup as one example.

Chanteloup, a town of fewer than 10,000 people representing about 60 ethnicities and nationalities, was built in the 1960s for immigrants, then mostly North Africans transplanted from a shantytown nearer Paris to work in a nearby factory. The factory closed before all the inhabitants arrived, and Chanteloup, which went on to accept wave after wave of new arrivals, was doomed to became an isolated outpost of France’s social ills, plunked in the middle of rich suburbs, 40 minutes by train from the capital.

Today, unemployment in the town’s core hovers around 20 percent, twice the national average. It was even worse in the 1990s, when Chanteloup earned unwelcome fame as the location for the movie “La Haine” (“Hatred”), a searing portrait of life in a French ghetto.

In the past few years, the low-rise apartment complexes have been renovated, and a mosque was built next to the train station, where men in long robes, and the occasional veiled woman, wander in and out. Mothers in African dress clutch the hands of their children as they pick them up at Baby Loup, a nursery created to serve working women.

The head scarf issue here seems oddly disembodied — a theory floating above daily life. Yet Ms. Arenou feels strongly that Parliament must act quickly to close the legal gap opened by the Baby Loup ruling. Like others, she believes that France must hammer home the principle of laïcité before it is too late.

“Yes, we’ve been seeing more and more head scarves worn by young women,” she said. “Before it was the older ladies. Now in recent years, it is different. It is an act by a group, a kind of provocation.”

In the early years of the big wave of immigration to France, the state took a more laissez-faire approach. “Laïcité was not enforced,” she said. “It is a culture that has to be taught. It is in the genes of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it must be shared, absorbed and acquired by new arrivals.”

So now, Parliament is considering yet one more piece of legislation regulating what women can wear, when and where. In 2004, France adopted a law that bans head scarves and other “ostentatious” religious gear in public schools. In 2011, another law was adopted, prohibiting women from wearing full-face veils in public spaces.

Since the Baby Loup ruling, politicians — on the right and left — have rushed to back the notion of giving private establishments the right to ban employees from wearing the scarf, not just nurseries and clinics but also possibly banks and bakeries. A recent poll showed 84 percent of French people would favor such a law.

“I think in French society in 2013, this is the occasion for a consensus,” Ms. Arenou said.

Yet she acknowledges that enforcement of such laws can be tricky. There are, she said, one or two women in Chanteloup who still go outside veiled but do so discreetly, waiting until the close of the local market to do their shopping or taking off their veils in public meetings.

This does not pose a problem for Ms. Arenou, nor apparently for the local police, who have neither stopped the women nor fined them.

“I can accept the women’s position because it means they know the law exists, and they understand it,” the mayor said. “And there are times when the cure can be worse than the illness.”