(Photo: Scientology members demonstrate against a 1999 fraud trial in Marseille. Their banner says:”Scientology: 40 years in France. A new religion that will always be there.”)
A new French law means the Church of Scientology cannot be dissolved in France even if it is convicted of fraud, it has emerged during a trial of the organisation. A prosecutor has recommended that a Paris court dissolve the church’s French branch, which has been charged with fraud after complaints by former members who say they gave huge sums to the church for spiritual classes and “purification packs”.
The Church of Scientology’s French arm denies fraud.
Whatever the ruling, under a legislative reform passed just before the start of the trial in May, it is no longer possible to punish a fraudulent organisation with dissolution. The legal snag was discovered by the Inter-ministerial Unit to Monitor and Fight Cults. Georges Fenech, head of the unit, demanded on Monday that the legal power to dissolve an organisation be reinstated.
Even if the law is changed again, it cannot be applied retroactively to the Scientology trial, which was held in May and June, with the ruling expected in late October. Registered as a religion in the United States, with celebrity members such as actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, Scientology enjoys no such legal protection in France.
In researching an article on what lay behind government plans to develop France as a European hub for Islamic finance, I was struck by the uneasy atmosphere surrounding the subject. On the one hand, the government sees it as a way to attract Middle Eastern money and wants to push the idea. But on the other, there is a clear sense of apprehension over how Islamic finance would fit into French society, where the policy of laïcité– the strict separation of church and state — tries to keep anything religious out of the public sphere as much as possible.
(Photo: Eiffel Tower in Paris, 20 Nov 2007/Mal Langsdon)
The bankers, lawyers, government officials and Islamic finance specialists trying to get Islamic finance off the ground in France speak publicly about the bright prospects they see for the market. France has the biggest Muslim population in Europe at over five million. The government is pushing the idea hard. There is a huge need for financing of future projects.
But privately, many admit that French companies and banks may hesitate to do anything that uses the label Islamic as this could highlight sensitivities over social and cultural divides. Ever since the French Revolution, France has upheld the idea that its people are all individual and equal citizens and not members of regional, ethnic or religious minorities. Stressing membership in a sub-group is considered divisive. The French frequently point to the multicultural approach taken in Britain and the United States as the source of political and social problems — such as ethnic or religious “ghettoisation” and “identity politics” — that they want to avoid.
Given this outlook, some French fear the Muslim community here is seeking to nurture its own identity in a way that sets them apart from ordinary French citizens and undermines the unity of the nation. The way in which Muslims openly speak about religion, rather than keeping their faith to themselves, looks to these French as a challenge to the principle of laïcité.
(Photo: Employee at an Islamic bank in Malaysia, 13 Jan 2009/Bazuki Muhammad)
Not every charge of laïcité violation is necessarily valid. As one analyst put it: “You can see in so many papers that Islamic finance is a threat to laïcité , which is a complete nonsense. It proves that the people who write about this know nothing about Islamic finance. It has nothing to do with religion. It is making financial transactions according to a set of rules … these rules are ethical because they are Islamic.”
One expert admitted that the label Islamic would “not help” when French companies were deciding whether to raise cash by issuing Islamic bonds or conventional ones. Another said it would be “absolutely crazy” to call an institution conducting such business an Islamic bank. The Idea that a bank branch would have a giant sign reading “Banque Islamique de Paris” or something similar is so outlandish as to not even come up in conversation.
“The crux of the problem is that nobody wants it except for the Muslims and the Muslims have no power in France. They are not organised enough and have no lobbying power to see Islamic retail banking see the light of day,” said one industry specialist on condition of anonymity.
For Islamic finance to really take off, France will need to embrace not only the less visible wholesale banking side but the highly visible retail services too. The cash-heavy Middle Eastern partners whose money France aims to attract may well want to see neighbourhood bank branches offering Islamic mortgages in their shop windows and advertising them in the local media. Some might want their own branches, with their names emblazoned over the bank entrance, maybe in Arabic as well as in French. They will probably think that French banks offering Islamic finance should be as open about it as those in Britain.
(Photo: Islamic Bank of Britain branch in London, 21 Sept 2004/Toby Melville)
Will they understand that one way not to convince the French is to urge them to do things the British way?
(Photo: Muslim women with Belgian flag protest against headscarf bans, 4 Feb 2004/Yves Herman)
A Belgian court is due to rule next week on a ban on the Muslim headscarf at two schools in Dutch-speaking Flanders, an issue that has led to a death threat for one school principal and graffiti sprayed on walls. The schools in Antwerp and nearby Hoboken introduced the ban at the start of the school year last week, arguing that Muslim girls were being pressured to wear headscarves by their families and peers.
Angry pupils have staged protests outside the school and one girl filed a complaint with the Belgian Council of State to contest the ban. The court will rule on the matter next week and one of its chief advocates has already advised it to overturn the ban. The advocate’s advice is followed in 90 percent of cases.
“The advocate said that such a ban is not lawful, and that only the umbrella organisation of state schools can decide on whether or not to introduce such a measure,” a court spokesman said.
The protests with banners reading “No headscarf, no pupils” and “Everybody free except us” have been headline news in Belgium. One of the schools was vandalised and had slogans sprayed on its walls and its director has received a death threat.
Neighbouring France passed a law in 2004 banning pupils from wearing conspicuous signs of their religion at school after a decade of bitter debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class. Such a measure would be difficult to introduce across the region of Flanders, where most of the schools are private Catholic institutions. Those that have introduced headscarf bans are “community schools.”
UPDATE: School officials announced later on Friday that about one fifth of all schools in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking Flanders region would ban pupils from wearing Muslim headscarves. “This decision promotes the feeling of equality and prevents group formation or segregation on the basis of external symbols of life philosophy,” said a statement from the schools.
It’s Ramadan and on a bustling shopping street on the fringes of northern Paris, the holy month is in full swing. Bearded men in long robes collect alms, women in headscarves sell sweet pastries. But the period of fasting and charitable acts has little impact on the work of activist Christine Jamaa, whose office is in a secret location not far from the busy street market.
Jamaa, who heads the Voix de Femmes (Women’s Voice) group helping victims of forced marriage, met me there last week for a interview for my feature “New school year puts French on forced marriage alert.” In the feature, another activist, Fatou Diouf (pictured above in a photo by Jacky Naegelen), told of her family’s attempt to kidnap her and force her into marrying her uncle in Senegal at the age of 18.
While I was in Jamaa’s office, her phone was constantly ringing with emergency calls from threatened girls and women - most of them Muslims of Africa, Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Jamaa herself is a Muslim, like many of the activists who help victims of forced marriage here, and she keeps telling the families and the women at risk that Islam bans forced marriage.
In her experience, however, the families don’t care. “They just pick the parts of Islam that are convenient to them,” she told me. A few years ago, Jamaa worked with an imam to try and use religion to fight the practice. But they had to stop after the imam himself was threatened by angry families.
For now, she believes religion can play a marginal part in dealing with marriage conflicts. Once the girl has fled the family, and the parents show some regret, an imam may be able to smooth the reconciliation process. Faith can also reassure the victims, who almost always feel terribly guilty about running away. And Jamaa believes a strong stance among Muslim leaders could help: “I’m still waiting for a fatwa saying forced marriages are haram (forbidden),” she said with an air of resignation.
Even if such a fatwa were issued, most of these families would probably ignore it. For Fatou Diouf, a French woman of Senegalese descent, the practice is not about religion anyway, but about tradition. Her own ordeal began when she dated a non-Muslim Cameroonian in France at the age of 18. Her family lured her to Senegal, then told her they had already married her off to her 36-year-old uncle in a religious ceremony that did not require her presence.
(Image: Voix de Femmes poster — the text says “Forced marriage … a one-way ticket? The girls refuse.”)
“I had my father on the phone, and he said, I’m fed up with you fooling around in France, you’re going to stay down there,” she told me. Later on, after she escaped, Jamaa travelled back to France and eventually confronted her parents about their betrayal. Her father justified himself - but not by invoking religion. “He said friends had started asking why I was always out, where I was, he said I would be treated like a whore,” she said.
The activists and victims I spoke to cited many different motives for forced marriage in migrant communities here. But the strongest factor seems to be a fear of daughters becoming too independent, too rebellious, “too French”. And even though activists say some of the victims are from Christian, Hindu or Jewish immigrant backgrounds, the majority — based on their accounts — does seem to be Muslim. There are unfortunately no reliable official statistics to give a clearer picture.
One interesting insight the activists gave was that the most fervent young Muslim women - the kind who wear the full veils that have sparked such a lively debate in France - tend to pick their own partners rather than submit to their families’ will. Most fully veiled women say they have chosen to wear the niqab themselves, often against the wishes of their parents. So if their parents try to arrange a union with a man not pious enough for them, they reply by saying Islam forbids forced marriage and then choose a similarly devout spouse.
The France24 satellite television channel has put out an interesting series in English on Ramadan in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority. According to a survey just published, 70% of Muslims polled here said they would fast during the Islamic holy month now underway and only 20% said they would not. The rest said they would fast partially or gave no answer.
Former Paris staffer Brian Rohan (now in Berlin) visited a Ramadan soup kitchen in Paris last year for a Reuters feature illustrated by the photo above taken by Benoit Tessier.
Last week, a college in Mangalore in India banned a student wearing a burqa from attending class. The principal told local media the college had a policy of not allowing symbols of religion.
The media did not say if there were students on campus with a 'bindi' (dot) on their foreheads or crucifixes around their necks or turbans on their heads, other symbols of religion one commonly sees in India, besides the ubiquitous "Om" scarves and t-shirts.
Mangalore, a cosmopolitan city, is no stranger to controversy; it was recently in the news for attacks on bars and women by a fundamentalist Hindu outfit that declared they were against Indian culture.
Nor is the controversy over headscarves and burqas limited to India. UK's Jack Straw sparked a heated debate when he asked Muslim women in his constituency to remove their veils to promote better relations between people.
Turkey last year lifted a ban on women wearing headscarves at universities, ruling it violated the country's secular constitution.
More recently, French president Sarkozy said burqas have no place in the country because they are a symbol of the subjugation of women. The issue has divided France, home to Europe's largest Muslim minority, over how to reconcile secular values with religious freedom.
A 2004 French law bans students from wearing "conspicuous" signs of their religion in state schools, prompting Sikhs to launch a protest to allow them to keep their turbans on.
Sikhs have also fought in some countries for the right to carry the "kirpan", a dagger mandated by their religion and have called on the U.S. Army to end a ban on men with turbans.
How about India, a secular country which allows its citizens the right to follow any religion of their choosing? Can a college or a workplace impose its own rules about religious symbols? And who gets to determine what's conspicuous or not?
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. Sarah Sayeed is a Program Associate at the Interfaith Center of New York and a board member of Women In Islam, Inc.
By Sarah Sayeed
As an American Muslim woman who adheres to religious guidelines on modest dress, I find it ironic that such remarkably different nations as Sudan and France seem similarly preoccupied with legislating Muslim women’s dress. The Sudanese government recently arrested and whipped women, including Christian women, for wearing trousers. The French banned a woman wearing a head-to-toe Muslim bathing suit (a “burkini”) from entering a town pool.
(Photo: Australian lifeguard Mecca Laalaa in her burkini, 13 Jan 2007/Tim Wimborne)
Even if we were to give credence to an argument that pants are immodest for women, there is no injunction in the Quran or any example from Prophet Muhammad which demands corporeal punishment for “inappropriate” dress. Such a harsh practice completely contradicts the justice and compassion that Islam mandates.
Likewise, the French ban on burkinis is outrageous. Wearing the burkini has given me the freedom to enjoy water sports with my son; it has not limited me, but rather enhanced the quality of my life. But now, I worry that other public pools will follow suit. In recent years, France banned religious symbols in public schools, including the headscarf, and denied citizenship to a Muslim woman who wears a face veil. Will this disturbing trend spread across other democratic nations?
France and Sudan are miles apart geographically, politically, and culturally. Yet both countries have imposed on the personal freedom of Muslim women to dress as they choose, and ultimately, to participate in the public sphere. Sudan’s choice to impose corporeal punishment is far more egregious, relative to banning a woman from entering a pool. For the average person, Sudan’s actions seem barbaric, but in a way, unsurprising because they conform to a prevailing stereotype about Islamic law as harsh and oppressive to women.
But because French laws are enacted in a context which purports more openness, plurality and freedom, they could be more harmful to the cause of global freedom and democracy. France perceives itself as a free country that allows its citizens to practice the religion of their choice. France, like other Western European countries or the United States, would want Muslim nations to “look up to it,” to learn from its example how to separate religion and state. However, the French ban on head covers, face covers, and now on pool attire suggests that religious freedom is bounded, even within a democratic context.
It is true that the ban on headscarves emerged out of a debate among French Muslims. Specifically, one group of Muslims felt that their freedom of choice and conscience were imposed upon when other Muslims insulted and physically harassed girls who were not wearing a scarf. The former turned to the government for assistance. Out of its sense of responsibility to maintain public order, the government banned all religious symbols in public schools. But preserving the freedom of conscience of one party need not come at the expense of freedom of religious practice of another. There are other methods of resolving such conflicts, including prosecuting harassment and attacks as hate crimes, imposing strict penalties on perpetrators, and even community mediation.
(Photo: Palestinian girls play beach volleyball at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, 20 \june 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)
French authorities also voiced a concern that loose fitting swim gear that “can be worn in public may carry molecules and viruses that can be transmitted to other bathers.” Even though most Muslim women are unlikely to wear the burkini anywhere else, surely a shower before entering the water and the chlorine of a public pool can be counted upon to take care of these dangerous “molecules and viruses!” A deeper mistrust of Muslims emerges in Mayor Kelyor’s statement that to permit the burkini is to “go back in civilization.” Muslim women’s practice of modesty poses a threat to French notions of progress just as Sudanese Muslim women’s choice to wear pants was also deemed threatening.
Ultimately, authorities in Sudan and France conveyed a parallel message. To democracy’s nay-sayers in the Muslim world, France communicated that those who practice Islam will be marginalized. To Islam’s nay-sayers Sudan confirmed the interpretation that Islamic law is an oppressive and restrictive. Both have infringed upon the rights of minority groups within their respective contexts.
Governments and political movements worldwide, from Turkey to Afghanistan, from France to the U.K, from Sudan to Saudi Arabia, all are inappropriately focused on controlling Muslim women’s dress. It is surprising that even within nations that uphold individual freedom, democracy and the separation of religion and state, governments seem to be anxious about Muslim women’s attire. Would governments ever legislate that men who wear beards may not become citizens and those who wear fitted pants should be whipped? I say to these governments: get out of our hair, and stay away from our pants! Instead, what government must do is to protect the freedom of Muslim women to choose our dress. Protecting choice guarantees human dignity and maintains fairness. Ultimately, the preservation of democracy as well as the practice of Islam depends on it.
(Photo: Kabul women in burqas, 20 Nov 2001/Yannis Behrakis)
Last week, a somewhat unlikely group of commentators joined the debate — fashion designers at the haute couture shows in Paris. The niqab and the burqa are, after all, garments, so maybe it should not be surprising that the high priests of fashion have spent some thought on the issue.
In fact, many top French designers make customised abayas (long, baggy gowns some Arab women usually worn with a veil) and other luxury versions of traditional outfits for their Middle Eastern clients.
Speaking backstage before and after their shows, surrounded by half-naked models, most stuck to the middle ground, saying they had nothing against the burqa, abaya or niqab as long as the woman was not forced into it. Couturier Franck Sorbier pointed out that in most hot places, including Corsica, women
wear some kind of headscarf.
“If someone tells me, ‘design an abaya,’ why not, I’m proud of that. It’s just a garment,” haute couture designer Stephane Rolland, who has made many abayas for Middle Eastern clients, told me.
(Photo: Stephane Rolland and model in wedding dress he designed, 21 Jan 2004/Philippe Wojazer)
When asked about the broader debate whether veils are a sign of subservience and should be outlawed, his confidence wavered. “I don’t want to speak about religion, that’s a different subject. But I don’t want to cover the woman — alas, I don’t want to think about that,” he said before turning away.
And at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld mused about the practical side of the burqa:
“It might be quite nice to wear it, you don’t need to go to the hairdresser and you can see everything without being seen, I find that quite comfortable,” he told me after the Chanel haute couture show last week. “Veils, tunics, I’m not against all that, I find it picturesque. Live and let live!”
For the latest on the French burqa debate, from the chic fashion shows to burqa shops in scruffy Paris suburbs, read my feature here.
France 24, the French international television channel, invited me to debate the proposed ban on burqas and niqabs today with one of the parliamentary deputies leading the campaign. That’s me on the left. On the right is Jacques Myard, deputy for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party and a spirited defender of French interests. Myard wanted to ban full facial veils in France two years ago but could not muster enough support at the time. The mood in the National Assembly has changed since then and another deputy, the Communist André Gerin, got together 58 deputies from different parties to launch the inquiry that began work yesterday.
Here’s the video on the France 24 website. It’s about 20 minutes long. Myard presents the French case for banning burqas and niqabs very clearly. If you’ve read about this debate and can’t understand it, he is worth hearing to get a good feel for how many French people state the case for a ban.
Myard puts the debate squarely in the context of laïcité, the quintessentially French way of separating church and state. That separation is such an important principle in Western countries that even the Vatican — history’s big loser in this debate — now supports it. However, this principle is interpreted in different ways in different countries.
In France, it is seen through the lens of French history, where the Catholic Church was so powerful that the parliament passed a law in 1905 officially separating the two and banishing religion to the private sphere. It is meant to protect the state against the power of religion — exactly the opposite of the American view that the separation protects religion against the power of the state. Religion, more specifically the Catholic Church, was very powerful in France in 1905, but nobody would argue that now. In fact, the civil religion of laïcitéis much more powerful now.
(Photo: Woman in niqab, 17 Jan 2004/Mohammed Salem)
Defining the burqa/niqab issue in terms of laïcitéframes this debate as a religious one. It widens a practice by a tiny minority of ultra-conservative Muslims into the stéréotype du jour of the Muslim minority (about 8 percent) that makes France so uncomfortable. In a Western society, having people hide their faces in public and refuse to show nature’s ID card even for driver’s licences or wedding ceremonies is a problem. Even at its strictest in centuries past, Christianity covered up its nuns but left their faces open. This is such a basic cultural fact in an open Western society that politicians should be able to appeal to this simple rule to outlaw such masks in the public sphere.
That would mean striking out into new territory. It would mean leaving the well-beaten and reassuring path of debate about laïcité, where one is assured of support, for a more challenging but more egalitarian approach based on the duties of a citizen in an open society.
Leaving the studio, France 24 had a taxi waiting to take me home. The 30-ish driver asked me if I’d been in a television discussion and what the topic was. When I mentioned the burqa, he asked “Are you for or against this freedom?” His tone and choice of words made it clear he was a Muslim opposed to a ban.
Once I explained my position, he said he was shocked to see some women appearing fully veiled at the Saturday market in his Paris suburb. This was not the Islam he knew, he said. He was not in favour of burqas either. However, he was deeply suspicious that the burqa ban was only a smokescreen for a wider assault against Islam itself. “Islamophobia is institutionalised in France,” he declared.
(Photo: French Muslims protest against Danish Prophet Mohammad cartoons, 11 Feb 2006/Vincent Kessler)
By the end of the short ride, we had ironed out our differences and more or less agreed. We parted on that positive note that one-on-one dialogue can bring. I’m afraid we will not see that kind of dialogue in the coming months, but a polarising debate that misses the main point. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
(Photo:A burqa-clad woman in Kabul’s old bazaar, 4 March 2009/Ahmad Masood)
Here’s some news for Nicolas Sarkozy. While the French president has begun a battle against the burqa in France, the famous blue garment that covers women from head to toe is losing favour back in its stronghold Afghanistan. In Herat, burqa seller Nehmatullah Yusefy says sales have dropped 50 percent since the Taliban were toppled in 2001 and he says he will soon need to start stocking other styles of Islamic dress to make up for lost profits.
(Photo right: Baghdad woman in chador, 12 Nov 2008/Mahmoud Raouf)
“I think, God willing, the sales of burqas will decrease, then I will sell chador namaz and even maybe mantau chalvar,” Yusefy said, standing behind the counter of his small outlet on a strip of burqa shops in the western city’s main market.
The chador namaz is a long, billowing dress in black or sombre-patterned fabric which is widely worn in Iran. It exposes the woman’s face but covers the rest of her head and body until her ankles.
Mantau chalvar is a long coat worn over trousers and it is popular with women in the capital Kabul, who are comparatively more free to dress as they choose. It is always worn with a scarf covering the head that is tied firmly under the chin.
(Photo left: Kabul woman in mantau chalvar, 28 June 2009/Ahmad Masood)
