It is rare that religion and science find agreement, but that is what happened when Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke at a meeting on saving the earth from climate change.

“The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a book in 2007 called “Creation”, subtitled An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” Sacks told leaders of all the major faiths meeting at Lambeth Palace in London on Thursday.

(Photo: A partially dried reservoir in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, China, 29 Oct 2009/stringer)

“I thought that was a very good book. E.O. Wilson is known not to be religious, but what this book was was a call to religious people and scientists to call off the war between religion and science and work together for the sake of the future of life on earth.

“And I felt that was a very generous and appropriate call by a non-religious scientist.”

He said “that science and religion despite their apparent friction actually converge on a profoundly scientific and at the same time religious idea that there is a kinship of life and hence a covenant of life”.

Not only did such a high-profile religious figure agree with the scientific world, but faith leaders found harmony among themselves at the same meeting.

Sitting next to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, was the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who only days earlier had delivered the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans the chance to convert to Rome.

Also attending were faith and community organisation leaders including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian.

(Photo: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 23 July 2006/Paul Hackett)

Organised by Williams, the leaders issued a joint statement in which they “recognised unequivocally that there is a moral imperative” to tackle the causes of global warming.

They agreed to work together to raise awareness about the effects of “catastrophic climate change”, saying it was the poor and vulnerable who most suffered from the ensuing droughts, floods, water shortages and rising sea levels.

Quoting from the book of Genesis, Sacks said man was placed on earth to serve it and protect it. “Man was a guardian, not the owner using and abusing the good things on earth,” he said.

“We are taken from the earth and therefore owe it a sense of kinship and responsibility. We believe our very existence as human beings come wrapped up in environmental imperatives and ecological responsibility.”

Drawing on the story of Noah’s Ark where all animals, including the lion and the lamb, had to survive side by side, he said we would all drown if we failed to work together.

Of course, if everybody kept the Sabbath, when nobody drove cars, flew by plane, or switched on any electrical appliances, the environmental problem would be solved, he said.

But more realistically, a new set of rituals would have to be devised that recognise the importance of the environment.

“What religion allows us to do is take the big ideas and translate them into daily rituals,” he said.

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October is a busy month for Indian religious festivals in India. Here are Reuters videos from three of them.

Diwali, the five-day festival of lights, was celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains across the country with fireworks and prayers. It marks the return of Lord Raama to his kingdom Ayodhya after defeating Ravana, the ruler of Lanka, in the ancient epic Ramayana.

The three-day Chhath Puja, an ancient Hindu festival dedicated to Surya, the chief solar deity, concluded on Sunday with thousands of devotees offering prayers to Sun God across India. Most devotees are married women praying for their families.

Women in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh prayed for the long life of their brothers on the occasion of Bhai Dooj, a one-day Hindu sibling festival celebrated during Diwali. According to the Hindu tradition, both the brother and the sister take a holy dip in the river together, after which the sister applies vermilion mark on the forehead of her brother wishing him a long life.

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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?

(Photo: Sikhs pray at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, 17 Sept 2001/Rajesh Bhambi)

Are some holy sites so holy or so unique that they shouldn’t be copied? Should monuments like the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican or the Western Wall in Jerusalem have a kind of copyright so nobody can replicate them elsewhere?

It seems unlikely that believers of any faith would undertake such a project, if for no other reason that most holy sites are quite complex, with artwork that would be very expensive to reproduce. But some Sikhs in India are building what looks like a copy of the Golden Temple, their religion’s holiest shrine, in Sangrur, 265 miles (427 km) southeast of the temple in Amritsar. The project has sparked off a debate in the Sikh community and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), which maintains gurdwaras in India’s Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh states, has protested against it and called on the religion’s five high priests to intervene. The Sikhs building the new gurdwara deny they’re copying the famous temple, simply giving a facelift to their dilapidated gurdwara.

As Mumbai’s DNA daily put it: “Imitation is sometimes not the most acceptable form of flattery.”

Here’s an IBN-CNN video on the dispute, accompanied by a written report with more background.

Why did the murder of a preacher in a Sikh temple in Vienna spark riots in the faraway Indian state of Punjab, in which thousands took to the streets to torch cars, trains and battle security forces?

The root cause may lie in India's caste system that Sikhism officially rejects, but that still grips swathes of India's billion-plus people, including in Sikh-dominated Punjab state in northwestern India.

"Via Vienna, Sikh caste war returns, sets Punjab aflame" ran the headline of the Hindustan Times.

The preacher, Guru Sant Rama Nand, 57, was killed in a gurdwara in the Austrian capital in an attack by six men armed with knives and a gun.

He was from the Dera Sach Khand, a religious sect separate from mainstream Sikhism that has a large support base of Indian Dalits, or "untouchables", and other lower castes.

The leader of Dera Sach Khand, Guru Sant Niranjan Das, 68, was wounded in the attack.

The thousands who went on the rampage in Punjab on Monday were mainly Dalits. Authorities have imposed a curfew in parts of the state, in which three protesters died on Monday in clashes with security forces.

The Dera Sach Khand sect was inspired by the 15th century spiritual leader Ravidas, himself from a lower caste. It differs from mainstream Sikhism, for example, in that it reveres living gurus such as Sant Niranjan Das. Some pious Sikhs find this concept offensive.

Traditional Sikhism recognises 10 gurus who led the community from the founding of the faith by Guru Nanak in the late 15th century. The 10th guru named the religion's holy book, known as the Guru Granth Sahib, as his successor.

Sikhism does not recognise caste, but "the clash in a Vienna gurdwara and the mob fury are yet another manifestation of simmering discontent that Dalits in Punjab feel due to increasing social inequality and oppression in a society that was supposed to be free of it," writes the Times of India.

In the relatively prosperous state, "caste prejudices and biases remain steeped among followers of Sikhism...facing-off in a festering, endless dispute over rights, rituals and religion."

In such a context, the appeal of sects such as the Dera Sach Khand is easy to understand.

"The legitimacy given to these deras and the steady weaning away of the faithful from the gurdwaras has often rattled the Sikh clergy and its more hardline followers pitting them against the deras," writes the Indian Express.

The caste conflict may have been the cause of the Vienna attack as well.

"Caste has moved beyond India with Indian diaspora as the latter does not move as individuals but takes its cultural baggage along," Vivek Kumar, who teaches sociology in New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, told the Times of India.

According to some reports, the attackers objected to the temple allowing a living guru to speak in the presence of the holy book.

But Vienna police say they are still unclear on what motivated the kiling.

The temple which was attacked is newer than Vienna's two other Sikh temples and had been gaining popularity, but so far there had been no hostilities between the different groups in Vienna, said Bernhard Fuchs, an ethnologist at Vienna university.

And the city's two other Sikh temples have distanced themselves from the attack and condemned it as against the basic tenets of the Sikh faith.

"The foundation of Sikhism besides brotherly love and care for others, is also the principle of non-violence," they said in an open message.

"Based on these principles, the Sikh religious community in Austria therefore reject all act of fanaticism and condemned this outrageous attack in the strongest term."

Multicultural Malaysia, whose official religion is Islam but which has sizeable numbers of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, has been struggling of late to ensure religious freedoms for its minorities, without offending the sensibilities of majority Muslims.

In the latest case, a Malaysian court granted permission to a Christian to challenge the authorities for seizing religious materials that used the word “Allah”. The government has banned the use of the Arabic word to describe God by all except for Muslims, saying it might confuse Muslims or offend their sensisibilities.

(Photo: A Hindu pilgrim outside Kuala Lumpur, 8 Feb 2009/Zainal Abd Halim)

The Catholic Herald, Malaysia’s main Catholic newspaper, has been fighting the government for months over the right to use the word “Allah”. Herald Editor Rev. Lawrence Andrew argues that Malaysian Christians have used “Allah” as their term for God for centuries. In a recent edition, the Herald slammed a new locally produced Bible, which further muddied these troubled waters by using the Hebrew word “Elohim” instead of “Allah” (or God for that matter) for the Almighty.

The new government of Prime Minister Najib Razak, which took over last month, is trying to portray itself as reformist. It has begun dismantling, albeit in an incremental way, some of the economic and educational privileges guaranteed Malay Muslims under Malaysia’s ethnically based political system. Najib’s government has undertaken a review of a draconian internal security law that allows indefinite detention without trial and which has been used liberally against Indian and Chinese opposition figures.

In another apparent concession to religious pressure, Legal Affairs Minister Nazri Aziz last month banned the conversion of children to Islam without the consent of both parents. The decision concerned the highly publicised case of a 34-year-old Hindu woman, Indira Gandhi (no relation to the late Indian leader), whose estranged husband converted to Islam and then did the same with their children. Nazri said minors were to be bound by the common religion of their parents at the time of marriage, even if one parent were later to become a Muslim. A number of Muslim organisations were opposed to the move, saying it was unfair to the Muslim parent, and the case has wound up in the courts.

(Photo: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, 10 April 2009/Udo Weitz)

Najib’s reform platform may make some Malay Muslims uneasy. But the coalition government led by the Malay nationalist UMNO party is responding to the debacle it suffered in the last general election, when minorities, and even many Malays, deserted a coalition that has ruled Malaysia uninterrupted since 1957, and made a huge swing to the fractious opposition alliance.

So the government will likely continue its balancing act, offsetting concessions to Hindu and Christians here with a sop to Muslims there. The Ahmadiyyas, a moderate but controversial Muslim sect, may have lost out in these equations. An Islamic council issued a fatwa against the sect last month that bans it from conducting prayers in its mosque. The Ahmadis are considered heretical by some Muslims because they refuse to accept the Prophet Mohammad was Islam’s final prophet, and say that the founder of the sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is a prophet and messiah.

All of this is taking place as Muslims have taken a more activist approach to the changing religious climate in Malaysia. A coalition of 50 Malaysian Muslim non-governmental organsiations known as Pembela that came together in 2006 has been spearheading the fight against apostasy, particularly the series of conversion cases (including Indira Gandhi’s) that have come before the courts the last few years.

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Or politics in Malaysia for that matter.

(Photo: A Malaysian Muslim at prayer, January 2009/Zainal Abd Halim)

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Matthew Weiner is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. Rev. Bud Heckman is Director for External Relations at Religions for Peace and editor of InterActive Faith: The Essential Interreligious Community-Building Handbook (SkyLight, 2008).

By Matthew Weiner and Rev. Bud Heckman

Mary Rosenblatt grew up Jewish, she married a Catholic and her children are “exposed to both faiths.” In her adult life, she has become particularly drawn to meditation as practiced by a local Buddhist circle. If she participated in a survey about religious identity, how might she be portrayed?  And what about her kids?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has just released a survey entitled “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” that attempts to map changes in religious affiliation in the U.S.  It follows on the coattails of the important “U.S Religious Landscape Survey” conducted by the Pew Forum in 2007.  If read in cross-tension with the “American Religious Identification Survey 2008″ released by Trinity College in Hartford, one can begin to see a complex and diverse picture of faith affiliation for Americans, as well as some patterns of change.

One key result is that perhaps as many as six in ten American adults have changed their faith tradition. Nationwide surveys are certainly important, and getting statistics about changing religion is also important. But thinking about the problems with this survey is perhaps as important as the information that it provides.

The first important problem with both surveys is that they do not allow for the likes of Mary Rosenblatt. Is she Jewish, Buddhist, Unaffiliated or Other?  The survey questions assume that she is only one of these, and so asks “What is your religion?” in the singular. Of course, Buddhists, Baha’is, Sikhs and others who think of their “religion” as a faith or those who view themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” might not make it through the early stages of the questions gauntlet either.

(Photo: A Tibetan Buddhist monk at Washington’s National Cathedral, 19 Oct 2007/Jim Young)

Others who because of life circumstance, e.g. inter-marriage, geographic transplantation, or cultural expectations, may think of themselves as being multireligious or somewhere in-between, are equally off the grid. In the ARIS study an unusually high number of Asians were unwilling to identify their religious identification, perhaps because of the imposition of Western presuppositions and categories.

If the first problem is a misunderstanding about how religion is lived out by many Americans, the second problem is that not all religious Americans speak sophisticated English.  In fact, many of those attempted to be questioned for the Pew study were dropped out of the interviewing because there was a language barrier or they “did not confirm their religion.” Scholars of religion and immigration have detected the increase of religiosity amongst new immigrant groups in America: religion serves as an organizing force, houses of worship as community centers, often across religious lines. Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim newcomers, not to mention Latino Christians and Russian Jews, find themselves increasingly identified with their faith tradition when they come here. Yet this segment of the population is largely left out of the Pew survey because of language.

Mentioning these other faiths leads to the third major problem. The survey claims to speak for American religious trends, but focuses on Christians. Researchers set aside another 4% before the survey started because they belonged to small groups, other world religions, other faiths, or because they merely moved around within the broad stroke of the unaffiliated.  What would happen if Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Hindus were included in this survey with equal numbers?

(Photo: Mosque in Atlanta, 25 Feb 2007/Tami Chappell)

As the ARIS study is more apt to lead one to discover, after sifting through the weight of the data, there may be more yet hidden from our maps of knowing than heretofore realized.  It shows that the number of people refusing to answer the survey or declaring no religion (atheist, agnostic, or searching) has more than doubled since the 1990’s.  These two categories of people now account for one in five Americans.  And the geographic breakdown shows that this phenomenon, while concentrated in the West and Northeast, is widespread and now is evident even in the deep South.

With President Obama recently joining an interfaith prayer service the morning after his inauguration, and with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships claiming that they will work with all faiths, national surveys conducted by organizations like the Pew Forum must at least acknowledge that their surveys are about Christian Americans, or reconfigure how they approach their sample audience.

(Photo: Woman attends Mass by Pope Benedict in Washington, 17 April 2008/Jason Reed)

What else can we see in these set of surveys? The growth in unaffiliated respondents is the overriding story.  According to Pew, four of every five becoming unaffiliated reported that they were raised in a religion as a child. But of the former Catholics and former Protestants - where Pew concentrated its analysis of research - few of those who became unaffiliated reported a strong faith as a child.  Further, three-fourths of them cite both the view that “religious people as being hypocritical, judgmental, and insincere” and the view that “many religions as being partly true, but none completely true” as factors at play.  And half of them give this outlook as an important reason for having become unaffiliated.

But much remains unknown. Perhaps the most important missing factors are the changes one makes within a faith -say from Jewish Reform to Orthodoxy. These changes are substantial, in terms of how one dresses, who one lives and communicates with and how one lives ones life in both public and private. While the change between a liberal Christian and a liberal Buddhist may go unseen by anyone, the move from Jewish Reform to Jewish Orthodoxy could not be missed by anyone.

Likewise, a person changing from being a Methodist to a Presbyterian because they have moved or married may be captured by the way these surveys are structured, but these moves are often uneventful and give false impressions of the “churn.”

(Phoito: Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meeting in New York, 21 Nov 2008/Chip East)

In fact, allowing for a picture of the pluralism that may be within the individual and, in some ways, within a tradition is not in the cards yet for the designs of these surveys.  It is a little like looking at a puzzle table in its very early stages.  The pieces are there, and perhaps there are some connections, but it is not clear that they will fit together.  Worse yet, the box cover is not to be found, and whether it provides a picture worth looking at once it is put together is still unclear.

Annotated Bibles come in all shapes, sizes and standpoints. One of the most interesting recent examples is The New Community Bible in India. The novelty is not the text itself but the extensive footnotes comparing and contrasting Christian teachings with those of India’s main religions. Christians make up only 2.3% of India’s 1.1 billion population compared to 80% for Hindus and 13% for Muslims. The illustrations are also clearly Indian — in the drawing for the Flight to Egypt (at right), Mary wears a sari and a bindi on her forehead while Joseph sports a turban.

The New Community Bible (NCB) stirred up some controversy when it was published, with official Church approval, by a Roman Catholic group in Mumbai last summer. A Protestant pastor called it “a complete turn back from the real Bible.” Hindu natiotionalists denounced it as a bid to convert Hindus to Christianity. A blog named after Hindu guru (CORRECTED: see comment below) Sathya Sai Baba warned that Christian missionaries were “taking aim at India” with a “deceptive Bible and other questionable tactics.” . There was also criticism from Catholic laity, enough to prompt the bishops to order a study of the issue and have the publisher hold off with a second edition. That’s too bad because the first edition quickly sold out.

During my recent visit to India, I got a look at a friend’s copy of the NCB and found it fascinating. Following are a few points that stood out while I paged through it (and a few not very professional photos I took of its illustrations):

In Genesis:

• After its opening “in the beginning,” the footnote observes: “Even in the Upanishad, some creation accounts open with the word ‘agre’ (at the beginning)…”
• At the phrase “God saw that the light was good,” it notes: “Light is considered good and desirable also in the Vedas. The expression “TJ” is well known. Tamasoma jyotirgamaya…” Lead from from darkness to light… (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28).”
  
• After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve “become shamefully conscious of their nakedness and plan a cover-up from God (3:7-8). To use Indian terminology, they regress into avidya, that is nescience or lack of right perspective, which causes alienation and suffering.”
  
• On Noah and the Flood - “There exist myths of the flood in almost every religion, and the Biblical acocunt shows some striking parallels to the Mesopotamian flood story. Satapath Brahmana (1.8.1-10) offers the earliest Indian version. The Mahabharata (3.187) also narrates a similar story.”
• On the Tower of Babel — “For the Yahwist author, Babel meant confusion, a athetic symbol of the folly of human pride and self-sufficiency… We can find modern Babels all around us, constructed by the stinking rich and proud politicians. Instead of using wealth and power to creatively solve the real problems of the people, they use these to bolster their own images and pamper their presitge. To make a name for themselves, they ignore, nay, trample down on the legitimate rights of millions of poor and oppressed people. The resentment and revolt this causes is another sort of babel, confusion, alienation.”

Since it’s aimed at today’s Indians, Bollywood naturally rates a mention. At the end of the Book of Job, when God restores Job’s fortunes, a footnote comments: “Like in modern TV soap operas and box-office films from Bollywood, ‘God’ reenters in the form of a deus ex machina who, with a word and a magic wand, restores everything to its earlier felicity and Job lived happily ever after.”

Not all references are to Hinduism. In Matthew’s nativity account, the NCB notes: The Koran, written some six hundred years after the Gospels (about AD 650), affirms the virginal conception of Jesus - called Isa, probably an Arabic form of the Syriac version of his name (Sura 19:16-22). This forms part of the common belief of Muslims. Interestingly, Joseph is not mentioned in the Koran… The wise men were priests of the Zoroastrian religion, which used to be the religion of Persia before the country was taken over and converted by Islam. It now survives as the religion of the Parsees in India… For Matthew, the magi are the highly respected religious leaders, representing non-Jewish religions.”

The NCB notes that Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and uses Jesus’s criticism of the Jewish purity laws as an opportunity to make a wider point about Indian society today: “The same kind of distinction underlies the caste system in India. The ‘dalits’ are treated as ‘untouchables’ by the so-called ‘clean’ castes, because the kind of work they do brings them into touch with ‘polluting’ things and so makes them in Hindu society ritually impure. Jesus completely abolishes this kind of purity/pollution distinction. He shows that true ‘purity’ (that is, fitness for worshipping God) does not depend on external things but upon the attitudes of the heart.”

The illustrations also make points about modern-day India. In the Exodus story of Moses and the burning bush, the NCB notes that God told Moses to take off his sandals because he was on holy ground. The accompanying illustration (below) shows modern footwear in front of a church, a mosque and Hindu and Sikh temples. “Every religion is deserving of our respect, even if we do not accept all of their cultural and social wrappings,” the footnote says. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, respect for other religions helps us to understand our own religion better.”

The NCB tries to explain Christianity in the Indian context, both to Christians living in a culture marked much more by other religions and Indians of other faiths trying to understand the Christians among them. Why should that be controversial?

How much fun — really — can you make of religion?  A U.S. marketer of board games may find out with ”Playing Gods” which it calls “the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare.” It had its European premier this week at the London Toy Fair and will make a U.S. debut at the New York Toy Fair in February.

Ben Radford, head of the company that put the game together, said in a news release it is designed for two to five players who act as “gods” and …

“Try try to take over the world and make everyone on Earth worship him or her. As a god, you can try to convert other gods’ followers, promising them things like Afterlife, Prosperity, and Miracles. Or you can kill them off with plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, and other Acts of Gods.

“Watch out, though, because bad things can happen to good gods—one of your vicars is caught with a prostitute? Too bad, you lose a sect!

“Players can pit Christians against Muslims and Hindus against Jews, or be the mascot, a machine-gun-toting Buddha. Players may choose to be any god from Jesus to Moses, from Cthulu to Zeus, from the Cult of Oprah to the Almighty Dollar. (And yes, there is a Muslim figure.) Though the theme includes religious battles, it is really a satire with an underlying message of peace, encouraging people to think about the tragedy of killing others just because they have different beliefs.”

It costs about $40, and German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are available in preparation for the European launch. Information is available at http://www.PlayingGods.com. Radford says the gods seem to be smiling anyway — he’s selling about 10 games a day.

When French President Jacques Chirac ’s government wanted to ban Muslim headscarves in state schools back in 2004, it had to find a way to (1) make the ban look fair and (2) avoid a backlash from the majority Catholic electorate.  A ban had to target all religions, but couldn’t be absolute because that could violate international rights norms. It also risked alienating some Catholic voters because because many Catholic girls wore necklaces with small gold crosses. So Paris came up with a ban on “conspicuous religious symbols” that would bar  Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses. That only bishops actually wore large crosses did not seem to matter.

(Photo: Sikhs in France protest against turban ban, 31 Jan 2004/Charles Platiau)

In the haste to pass and apply the law, the government overlooked a religious group that would also be hit by the new restrictions — the Sikhs. There are about 10,000 of them, mostly living in the Paris area, easily identifiable by the distinctive turbans the men wear. When local Sikh community leaders and Sikh activists from London protested that a turban is not a religious symbol, they were given a polite hearing and ignored. The Sikhs said the turban was simply a practical way of covering the real religious symbol, their uncut hair, so taking it off would expose the religious symbol the ban was meant to bar from state schools. It was a clever argument — one that, as the cynical French quip puts it, had the additional merit of being true — but the government was not going to allow any exceptions that could leave a back door open for Muslim girls to squeeze some kind of  headscarf through.

The uproar over the ban has long since calmed down, but the Sikhs continue to campaign to overturn it. A group called United Sikhs asked a U.N. human rights committee on Monday to declare that France had violated a student’s rights by expelling him for wearing a turban and to recommend repealing the law that led to it.

The outlook for this initiative is not bright. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights dismissed an appeal by a Sikh who had been told he could not get his driving license renewed unless he took off his turban for the picture. Earlier this month, it threw out a complaint by two French Muslim girls who were expelled from their school for refusing to remove their headscarves during sports lessons.

(Photo: Sikhs in New Delhi protest against French ban, 20 Feb 2006/Adnan Abidi)

Several other countries have made exceptions for Sikhs to allow them to continue wearing their turbans, but those countries are also more flexible than France about Muslim headscarves. Do you think France should make an exception for them too?