Title
The Manifestation of Belief and the Display of Ostentatious Religious Symbols in France
Abstract
The controversy over the ban against wearing the Muslim hijab first began in 1989 when the headmaster of a junior high school in Creil, a suburb north of Paris, expelled three Muslim girls for wearing Islamic scarves in school. This incident raised questions as to whether the wearing of religious clothing in schools could be reconciled with the important French doctrine of Laïcité. The Conseil d'Etat, in 1989, allowed students to wear headscarves, not only as a right to manifest religious belief , but also raised concerns upon State obligations to guarantee the right to education. In spite of this ruling and subsequent favorable decisions, France enacted the Law 2004-228 of March 15, 2004 prohibiting the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols or clothing in publicly-operated schools, colleges and lycées as a constitutional requirement of the principle of Laïcité Although, the law received an overwhelming response during the opinion poll, the law also raised serious questions upon France’s international human rights obligations. The enactment can easily be understood as France’s attempt to integrate the five million strong Muslim population in the light of the new wave of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, post-September 11, 2001 Islamophobia and the expanded European Union with greater religious, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. The prohibition on wearing only large Christian crosses not gives a secular flavour to the law, but it also serves the purpose of avoiding to revive the age old conflict with the Christian church which has been the central feature of the French revolutions in the past. The Law, in effect, has created conditions in which minority groups are required to surrenders their distinctive characteristics for the sake of assimilation in the garb of the constitutional requirement of Laïcité.
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