MARSEILLE, France – Brought into the international spotlight by the ban on hijabs for French athletes at the upcoming Paris Olympic Games, France’s unique approach to “secularism” – loosely translated as “secularism” – has generated increasing controversy from schools to sports fields in All country.
The fight goes to the heart of the way France approaches not only the place of religion in public life, but also the integration of its Muslim population, mostly of immigrant origin, the largest in Western Europe.
Perhaps the most contested terrain is public schools, where visible signs of faith are barred in policies that seek to promote a shared sense of national unity. This includes the headscarves that some Muslim women want to wear out of piety and modesty, even as others combat them as a symbol of oppression.
“It has become a privilege to be able to practice our religion,” said Majda Ould Ibbat, who was considering leaving Marseille, France’s second largest city, until she discovered a private Muslim school, Ibn Khaldoun, where her children could live freely. their faith and prosper academically.
“We wanted them to have an excellent education, and with our principles and values”, added Ould Ibbat, who only recently started wearing a headscarf, while her teenage daughter, Minane, did not yet feel ready to do so. His 15-year-old son, Chahid, often prays at the school mosque during recess.
For Minane, like many young French Muslims, navigating French culture and spiritual identity is increasingly difficult. The 19-year-old nursing student has heard people say, even on the streets of multicultural Marseille, that there is no place for Muslims.
“I wonder if Islam is accepted in France,” she said in her parents’ apartment, where a bright orange Berber rug woven by her Moroccan grandmother hangs next to verses from the Quran in Arabic.
Minane also lives with the collective trauma that has marked much of France – the overwhelming fear of Islamist attacks, which target schools and are seen by many as evidence that secularism (pronounced lah-eee-see-tay) needs be strictly enforced to prevent radicalization.
Minane vividly remembers observing a moment of silence at Ibn Khaldoun in honor of Samuel Paty, a public school teacher beheaded by a radicalized Islamist in 2020. A memorial to Paty as a defender of French values hangs at the entrance to the Ministry of Education in Paris.
For its employees and most educators, secularism in public schools and other public institutions is essential. They say it encourages a sense of belonging to a united French identity and prevents those who are less or non-religiously observant from feeling pressured, while leaving everyone free to worship in private spaces.
For many French Muslims, however, and other critics, secularism is exerting precisely this kind of discriminatory pressure on already disadvantaged minorities, denying them the opportunity to live out their full identity in their own country.
Amid the tension, there is broad agreement that polarization is soaring as crackdowns and challenges to this French approach to religion and integration mount.
Although open confrontations are still counted by the dozens among millions of students, it has become common to see girls replace their headscarves the moment they leave the doors of a public school.
“The laws on secularism protect and allow coexistence – which is becoming less and less easy,” said Isabelle Tretola, principal of the public primary school whose main gate overlooks the small mosque of Ibn Khaldoun.
She addresses challenges to secularism every day – like kids in choir class who put their hands over their ears “because their families told them that singing a variety of songs is not good.”
“You can’t force them to sing, but the teachers tell them they can’t cover their ears out of respect for the instructor and their classmates,” Tretola said. “At school you learn the values of the republic.”
Secularism is one of the four fundamental values enshrined in France’s constitution. The state explicitly accuses public schools of instilling these values in children while allowing private schools to offer religious instruction as long as they also teach the general curriculum established by the government.
Unlike in the United States, where fights over the values schools teach divide along party lines, support for secularism is nearly universal in the French political establishment, although some on the right criticize it as anti-religion and on the left as a vestige of colonialism.
Government officials argue that the ban on displaying a specific faith is necessary to prevent threats to democracy. In the 19th century, these were seen as arising from the political influence of the Catholic Church. Today, the government has made the fight against radical Islam a priority and secularism is seen as a bulwark against the feared growth of religious influence in everyday life, right down to beachwear.
“In a public school, the school for everyone, we behave like everyone else and we shouldn’t show off,” said Alain Seksig, secretary general of the Ministry of Education’s council on secularism. It produced guides for teachers and students following a rise in incidents, particularly about headscarves.
“What do we say to the girl who says, ‘I don’t want to wear this under pressure?’ The school is on her side,” she added.
For many teachers and principals, having strict government rules is helping them face multiplier challenges. The curriculum – from music to evolution to sexual health – is a new target, although all public students receive a “secularism in school” guide that indicates that objecting to teaching on the basis of religion is prohibited.
About 40% of teachers report self-censorship following the attacks on Paty and another teacher, Dominique Bernard, who was murdered last fall by a suspected Islamic extremist, Didier Georges said. He is responsible for secularism issues at SNPDEN-UNSA, a union that represents more than half of France’s leaders.
Like him, Laurent Le Drezen, director of a small town about an hour from Marseille and leader of another education workers’ union, SGEN-CFDT, sees a harmful influence of social media on the growth of Muslim students who defy the secularism at school.
“I am intransigent with secularism, because it helps with national cohesion, in the national community. It is not a denial of religion,” said Le Drezen.
His classroom experience in Marseille’s Quartiers Nord – often dilapidated project suburbs housing mainly families of North African origin – also taught him the importance of showing students that schools will not persecute them for being Muslim.
At the Cedres Mosque in Marseille, next to the projects, Salah Bariki, who worked on interfaith issues with the City Council, said that young people are struggling with exactly that feeling of rejection from France.
“What do they want us to do, look at the Eiffel Tower instead of Mecca?” Bariki joked. Nine out of ten young people in the neighborhood now wear the veil, “more for identity than for religion”, she added.
To avoid a vicious cycle, more – not less – discussion about religion should happen in schools, argued Rabbi Haïm Bendao. He runs a small conservative synagogue in a nearby neighborhood and would like to be able to give lectures on integration in public institutions, as he routinely does in private ones, in partnership with imams.
“To establish peace is a daily effort. It is extremely important to speak up in schools,” said Bendao, who studied at both Ibn Khaldoun and the Catholic school across the street, Saint-Joseph, which also enrolls many Muslim students.
Its director, Cédric Coureur, says private schools have the advantage of being able to answer questions students might have about God – and provide the kind of answers “within the republican framework” that helped him integrate into France as son of Mauritian immigrants.
“The school welcomed me, gave me the keys to love this country without telling me to do so,” said Coureur. “The French State does not recognize that you are a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist, it recognizes that you are French.”
Several Ibn Khaldoun families said they chose this private school, however, because it can support both identities rather than exacerbating public doubts about whether being Muslim is compatible with being French.
“When I hear the debate about compatibility, that’s when I turn off the TV. Fear has invaded the world,” said Nancy Chihane, president of the Ibn Khaldoun parents association.
On a recent spring break, where girls in hijabs, others with hair flowing in the strong local wind known as Mistral, and boys mingled, a high school student wearing a headscarf said transferring to Ibn Khaldoun meant freedom and community. .
“Here we all understand each other, we are not marginalized,” said Asmaa Abdelah, 17 years old.
Nouali Yacine, his history and geography teacher, was born in Algeria – which was under French colonial rule until it gained independence in 1962, in a violent struggle – and was raised in France since he was 7 months old. Although his parents considered it a betrayal to identify as French in the anti-colonial context, his daughter – a public school student – tells him that she knows no other identity.
“We are within citizenship. We don’t ask this question, but they ask it to us”, says Yacine.
Started in 2009 with 25 students, Ibn Khaldoun now enrolls around 400 as one of the few private Muslim schools under contract with the French government. This means they are supported financially but must comply with strict curricular and behavioral requirements.
The school’s founding director, Mohsen Ngazou, who is also an imam and president of the national association Muslims of France, is equally adamant about respecting religious and educational obligations.
He remembers once “making a scene” when he saw a student wearing an abaya over pajamas – the student code prohibits the latter along with revealing shorts and cleavage.
“I told her she wasn’t ready for class,” Ngazou said. “The abaya does not make a woman religious. The important thing is to feel good about who you are.”
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