Why the French Don't Like Headscarves by Bowen John R.;

Author:Bowen, John R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

“The Poor Sikhs”

Not anticipated in the original discussions was the problem of the Sikhs. After a certain age, Sikh males are required by their religion to cover their uncut hair, usually with a turban. Few in France knew what a Sikh was—some Sikhs said that they often were mistaken for “radical Muslims” because of their beards and turbans. Many of them live in Bobigny, Drancy, and other eastern suburbs of Paris. Officials consider them model citizens; the mayor of Drancy, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, said they were “infinitely respectful of the laws of the Republic”—except, now, for the law against religious signs in schools. (The deputy mayor of Drancy, who is also in the National Assembly, had voted against the law because of its impact on the Sikhs.)

The question of Sikh turbans had arisen before. One Sikh contacted by Libération had worked for years to be allowed to have his turban on when his photo was taken for identity purposes, and in 1995 he succeeded in getting the Interior Ministry to issue a statement saying that people whose religion required them to wear head coverings could keep them on in their photos. But once Sarkozy launched his campaign against foulards in photos in 2003, this arrangement collapsed.35

As one city official in Bobigny put it to me, “if they had just kept quiet no one would have worried about them.” But the law said otherwise, and at the start of school in 2004, something had to be done about them. In some schools, a compromise (promoted by Dominique de Villepin, the new interior minister) allowed Sikh boys to substitute a “discreet turban” consisting of a cloth worn over the hair. No one believed that these boys would not be instantly recognized as “Sikhs in discreet turbans,” but they had compromised, and that was enough. But state officials were divided on the issue. In Seine-Saint-Denis, the inspectorate of the academy approved the “discreet turban” compromise. But some of the schools in his district had already passed internal rules prohibiting any head covering, and some professors refused to treat Muslims and Sikhs differently. Fillon, the hard-liner, overrode de Villepin’s compromise and said that no turbans of any material could be allowed.36

Lycée Louise-Michel in Bobigny had the most Sikhs of any school in the Paris region. In 2003, the school had accepted nine Sikhs with turbans on the grounds that for Sikhs the turban “has an ethnic as well as religious value,” which confused the issue nicely and kept them in school.37 But after the third week in 2004, three Sikh students at the lycée had been kept isolated since the start of school in a room near the principal’s office, not allowed to go outside, and required to arrive and leave at a different time than the others. They had showed up the first day with the compromise black cotton cloth on their heads, but in the meantime the lycée had adopted an internal rule prohibiting any head covering and this rule (along with Fillon’s directive) nullified the compromise.

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