VEILS IN FRENCH SCHOOLS
A friend of mine sent me an interesting article about the dispute over headscarves in French schools. I wasn't sure if it was public domain or not so I won't post it, but here's the BBC's account of the dispute.

Now my dad knows far more about this than I do. His first book, Foreordained Failure, argued against any constitutional "principle" (as opposed to practice) of religious freedom. Here is a review of the book.

So, headscarves in France. A lot of Muslim girls want to wear headscarves to school in France. Many Muslims consider it halal to have the hair exposed-- that's how I understand it. They consider it necessary to wear a veil. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but in America, not only would this be perfectly acceptable, but if anyone tried to prevent it, it would be a scandal. The Muslims would take it to court, where the case would be a no-brainer: of course people have a right to practice their religion. Why don't the French understand this? Even if it annoys some people, how can they think that they have a right to prohibit it?

Well, the French think that they are defending a principle: secularism. It's a lot like our "separation of church and state." While some people seem to think that separation of church and state is part of the constitution, it is not; however, it is certainly a principle that influences our judicial system. In both France and the US the exclusion of religion from the public sphere is widely considered to have a sort of sacred, constitutional status, but this is not universal among wealthy democracies. I know that at least England has "religious education" classes in schools (albeit very irreligious ones) and other church-state entanglements, and I think Germany does too.

By American standards, French secularism, embodied in an idea like forbidding the headscarf, is an infringement of religious freedom. Meanwhile, millions of religiously inclined Americans consider it an assault on their religious freedom that their children face compulsory education in secular humanist schools. In many countries in the Islamic world, to leave the Muslim religion is punishable by death. If we tried to force the Muslim world to leave apostates unmolested, such an intervention would be seen as an assault on their religion. In the US, to forbid proselytization (ban Mormon missionaries knocking on doors, for example) would be seen as a clear infringement of religious freedom, yet open proselytization is forbidden not only in the Arab world but also in China, Russia, and even countries like Portugal.

So there's a diversity of institutional fixes to the problem of how to manage confessional diversity in a polity. I'm inclined to think that secularism is more of a danger to religious freedom than "fundamentalism" is, in the US; more so in France; and most obviously under regimes like the Soviet Union.

Yet at the same time, it seems plausible that religious freedom needs to be balanced against more intangible things like a sense of community, and social cohesion. That's what the French are up against: their own intelligentsia has drifted further and further into an experimental and philosophic leftism that has been discredited by history, which has largely neutralized France's Catholic heritage, and yet which cannot form the basis for a viable society. Even as French social cohesion is in crisis, it is challenged by Islam, represented by millions of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa. They have reason to feel threatened. They want to defend a French identity, already eroded in so many ways, from this new assault.

It's possible to put a very negative spin on this. The French want to ban the headscarf to enforce national unity. But national unity around what? What is the French creed that is being taught, and to what extent is it true? That's a different kind of question, and one which we have lost the habit of asking. We lose the habit by becoming a tolerant society. If tolerance is taken to extremes, it becomes relativism. Relativism puts to sleep the critical faculties. And without the critical faculties, we are helpless to defend ourselves intellectually and morally, and therefore (because the mind governs the body) physically against when a doctrine better at enforcing social cohesion (such as Islam) comes along. In France, this process has run its course and brought the French into the strange, contradictory position they are now in: the land of revolutionary liberty which once stormed the Bastille has become the friend of Arab tyrants and religious fanaticism against the torch-bearer of liberty; meanwhile, within, they cannot articulate a cogent critique of Islam, or a forthright and proud defense of their own civilization. Instead they take refuge in bigotry, in voting for Le Pen, in banning the headscarf, in cosmetic defensive moves. Is France in the grip of a prolonged and worsening crisis? A lot of smart people, French and foreign, think so. I don't know enough about the country to judge.