LONDON: A 13-year-old girl is an exemplary pupil in every way; she listens carefully to her teachers, does her homework and is a cheerful member of the class.
But in one respect, her behaviour threatens nothing less than the social peace and national cohesion of the French nation, according to President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday - she insists on wearing a headscarf.
All around her, pupils are wearing the kind of outlandish clothes and hairstyles one would expect of teenagers anywhere in Europe. But there is one garment of clothing that the president has declared challenges the secularity of republican France: the square metre or so of material that covers this girl’s hair.
It seems preposterous: how can the clothing of schoolgirls become an issue of such enormous symbolic weight that for 14 years it has been the touchstone of a debate about the French constitution, about what it is to be French and how France should “integrate” its 3.7 million Muslims - the largest Muslim minority in Europe? (Significantly, France talks of integration, not multi-culturalism)
The French secularist tradition has its own coherent logic, but it was conceived in one set of historical circumstances, and is now being applied in another, vastly different set. The end result of this logic - the breeding of a generation of angry Muslims - could be, quite literally, catastrophic.
Secularism gone Mad!
Two men in tight T-shirts, showing bulging biceps, walked past hand in hand, occasionally stopping to kiss one another affectionately.
“That’s disgusting!” exclaimed Antoine, a middle-aged, rather conventional French businessman.
“What, the two men?” I asked.
“No, no, not them. Behind them, the two women.”
I turned to Antoine, mystified.
“The veils!” he exclaimed.
These two incidents highlight all to well the hypocrisy of the West and is all too familiar to muslims, the land of liberty crow on about freedom and democracy but this incident of a simple piece of cloth on a womans head has exposed the fallacy and lies of freedom and secularism yet again!