External Islamist pressure united French Muslims behind the secular state’s headscarf law

Evidence

Yet in September 2004, two French journalists were seized in Iraq and threatened with death unless the law limiting headscarves was not instituted the following week, when school was to begin in France. The reaction was not a sense of support for the struggle for an Islamic identity in France. Indeed, virtually all of the French Muslim institutions, from the official French Council of the Muslim Faith to the radical Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), spoke out against the outside pressure, even though it came from the ‘Islamic’ world. As Olivier Roy, a leading French scholar of Islam, noted, ‘They may disagree on the law of the veil, but they are saying, “This is our fight and don’t interfere.” This is a pivotal moment.’ Indeed, Lhaj Thami Breze, the head of UOIF, who had been opposed to the law, proposed a compromise in which a moderate interpretation of the law would permit ‘modest head covering’. It was indeed a public change of attitude, as the unity of the Islamic community in France in opposition to ‘foreign’ interference concerning the ‘law of the veil’ suddenly was seen as a sign of the development of a secular consciousness in this religious community. What was striking is that the majority of Muslim schoolgirls did not wear or quickly removed their head coverings the day school began. Only about two hundred to two hundred and fifty girls, mainly in Alsace, wore their scarves to school, and all but about one hundred took them off before entering the buildings. The girls who kept them on were removed from the classroom and provided with ‘counselling’ in school. For them the hijab, which had been seen as ‘a way to reconcile modernity, self-affirmation and authenticity’, was a sign of the Western rights that they demanded as Muslims. These were less central than the rule of law. Three male Sikh students in Bobigny, a Paris suburb, were sent home on the first day of class for wearing their traditional head covering. The irony was that a law aimed at Muslim students initially impacted non-Muslims. This was true whether they saw the headscarf as a political, ethnic or religious symbol. The demand that one see oneself as a citizen with the rights of the citizen to contest the claims of the secular state overrode any sense of the primary identification as a member of the Ummah, the Islamic religious community. Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, research director at the Political Science Center of the National Center for Research in Paris (CEVIPOF), noted that ‘the hostage taking has helped the Muslim community in France, mainly the young people, to understand that they can live in a democratic society and still be Muslims’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 874

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on French secularism/headscarf debates and to the moral panic literature on how out-group pressure reshapes in-group identity positions. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”
• QUESTION: Does this pattern — outside pressure cementing minority buy-in to the majority state’s restrictive law — recur in other contexts, e.g. Jewish communities distancing from Israeli right-wing rhetoric?