Tuesday 02 November 2004, 18:42 Makka Time, 15:42 GMT
By Soumayya Ghannoushi
For months, the French elite has been gripped by a seemingly never-ending polemic over the so-called veil problem, or the dispute over the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schools and public institutions.
This controversy reached its climax when the French president endorsed the recommendations issued by a 20-member committee, originally set up to examine "relations between state and religion".
No "conspicuous religious symbols", President Chirac declared, were to be tolerated in French schools or government institutions.
The ban excludes small Christian crosses - which Chirac said could be worn discretely - but not the Islamic headscarf, Jewish yarmulkes (skullcaps), large crosses or Sikh turbans.
Such measures, the French president vehemently declared, were crucial for the preservation of the secularity of French schools and the safeguarding of the "values of the republic".
The "veil problem", it must be noted, is only a small detail in an infinitely more complex narrative and a symptom of a more profound crisis affecting the nature of French laicite (secularity) itself and France's relations with the Muslim world.
These are precisely the two dilemmas France has chosen to turn a blind eye to, and has sought to bring to a close through a set of ruthless, quick-fix political decrees.
The French project of laicite rests on two fundamental pillars. The first is the demand for cultural homogeneity and similarity, to which the school has been devoted (as a substitute for the Catholic Church, which fashioned individual and public consciousness before its erosion by the republic).
French secularism aims to purge the public sphere of all religious meaning and fill it with secular cultural values. The school stands as the vanguard of this process of secularisation, no longer a sphere of learning, where a child's talents are cultivated and his/her civil sense refined.
As Leon XIII had famously declared: "The school is the battlefield where [it] will be decided whether or not society will remain Christian." It is the ideal vehicle for a human being's radical transformation and his/her imbuement with the second nature sought by the republic.
This reliance on cultural and educational institutions for the reconstruction of the social structure is, it must be noted, common to all totalitarian ideologies from fascism to communism and is the hallmark of French republicanism, or "les valeurs de la republique".
The other pillar on which French laicite rests is a heavily interventionist state that sees its role as being one of missionary enlightenment.
The legitimacy of such an entity is founded on the notion that the secular state is the unique guarantor of socio-political and cultural cohesion and unity, in virtue of its extraordinary ability to transcend social and moral divisions within society.
The state, as seen by the ideologues of French laicite, is not a mere instrument of the regulation of public affairs, but "la voix de la nation" (the voice of the nation), the embodiment of the greatest good and the incarnation of absolute justice.
Such an understanding rules out any possibility of state neutrality, the state being at once a defender and producer of moral and aesthetic values.
It is, indeed, interesting that while in Anglo-Saxon British and American political history the state emerged as a construct of the nation, the exact reverse occurred in France, where the republic was perceived as the creator of the nation itself.
The state was, accordingly, granted jurisdiction over the imposition of individual choices and life forms, in the aim of generating an enlightened, socially and culturally cohesive nation.
This explains the great hyperbole generated over what would hardly seem worth mentioning in Britain, the US, or Scandinavian countries, with their liberal, non-interventionist traditions.
French political culture, as expressed in the principle of laicite and the values of the republic, is the outcome of radical and destructive tendencies where moderation and compromise find no place.
Such forces have manifested themselves most starkly in the rise of the Jacobins to power and their rendering of French political and cultural life into an open battlefield in what was to be known as "les annees de la terreur" (the terror years), or of what Robespierre called "the terrorism of freedom".
These dark years have cast their shadows on the French model of political governance, where force and radical interventionism are sanctioned in the name of modernisation and enlightenment.
The uniqueness and singularity of the French mode of radical secularity, or laicite, becomes apparent when viewed in comparison with European and American political histories.
Such peculiarity is the outcome of the evolution of French political experience, where a remedy to the tyrannical authority of the Catholic Church and the brutal wars it waged against heresies was sought in a radical species of secularity, antagonistic to all forms of religious expression and not merely neutral with regards to cultural and social affairs.
Here are found the roots of the intense tension characterising France's relation to Islam, an entity seen as the embodiment of religious otherness in its absolute forms.
Even the simplest and most personal of individual choices, such as dress, thus become capable of triggering a comprehensive crisis, which has recently reached climatic proportions with lamentations for French identity and cries for its protection engulfing vast stretches of the French press for months and months.
The subject of this frenzy is a religion whose five million followers are forced to exist outside the frame of legitimacy in forsaken ghettoes, denied many of their basic rights as human beings.
Islam, the second largest of the country’s faiths, is reduced to an underground religion practised in basements and derelict buildings, in a phenomenon reminiscent of the repression perpetrated by communist regimes in the former Soviet Union against the same faith group in the Caucasus and Balkan regions.
The battle for integration and the "veil problem" are, indeed, no more than the symptoms of the deeper, more abstruse, crisis of France's relation to Islam.
The crucial significance of such issues lies in their ability to expose the tensions and fundamental questions the "eldest daughter of the Church" has struggled to keep dormant deep within the layers of consciousness.
Such questions relate essentially to France's conception of the self, of what place, if any, past tradition holds within such a self, of its relation to the other and the extent of its tolerance of difference.
Rather than acknowledge the shortcomings of its mode of radical secularity and the limits of its conception of history founded on the notion of rupture with the past, France insists on presenting its narrow historical experience as an exemplary model to be universally endorsed.
I find it amusing to think that, if implemented in a country such as Egypt, where over half of female doctors, teachers, university lecturers and engineers wear the Islamic headscarf, the ban imposed in France would no doubt bring the whole country to a standstill.
And if my lot had been to live in that corner of the globe, I, an academic, would be deemed unfit to hold even a job as a cleaner at some French local council, because, I am told, I would be a danger to the republic, nothing less.
Why, you ask. Because while some of my female peers choose to dye their hair in any of the colours of the rainbow they fancy, others to trim, or have it shaved off, I choose to cover mine.
The truth we must all recognise is that secularity, just like religion, may be intolerant, rigid and repressive.
The challenge France must face is one of softening, moderating and humanising its radical, dogmatic and arrogant secularity. Only then will it emerge out of its present impasse.
Soumayya Ghannoushi is a researcher of the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.