“However modestly sized the hijab, many of us would recognise it – like a nun’s wimple – as a clear nuisance and hindrance, and more importantly, as a prominent signifier of female subservience, enforced at the behest of men – not the Quran.”
Catherine Bennett in the Guardian, 22 January 2004
In Britain, Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris, the honourable secretary of the National Secular Society, sees the ban on scarves, yarmulkes, crucifixes and turbans as “in keeping with centuries of secularism as far as state institutions are concerned in France”.
He’s angered by the continual claim that it is all women who are to be forbidden from wearing the hijab. It is, he reiterates, a ban where “girls – not women – in school – not out of school – will be asked not to wear the hijab. That is already the convention and this [law] is just codifying the proposal and the same will apply to Jews with skullcaps in school and Christians with large and visible crosses. There is a tradition that education in France is secular and that there shouldn’t be overt symbols of religion.”
He adds: “The commission in France that looked into this found that in many cases girls were being forced to wear [the hijab], to cover their hair, by the men in their community, and I think that France recognises that in school, at least, girls should be free from that sort of cultural persuasion.”
“In the UK, the position is very clear. Some children want to express themselves culturally by wearing some items of fashion that we don’t allow in schools – it is the same with facial jewellery. In fact, I suspect many more children feel more strongly about fashion and identifying themselves with a fashion than they do with religion. So it is not an unheard-of step for schools to say, ‘We draw the line at this sort of thing.’
“I think it’s a reasonable thing to do and certainly not something that we in this country are in a position to criticise, when we sanction discrimination against children by saying, ‘You can’t come to this school because you are of the wrong religion or of no religion.’ That’s what happens with faith schools in our country.”
About 250 protesters have demonstrated outside the French Consulate in Edinburgh against plans to ban the wearing of headscarves in France’s state schools.
The protest was organised by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) as part of an international day of action.
Other campaigners travelled from Scotland to join a march in London.
The association said it was encouraging non-Muslims to wear headscarves in the Scottish capital to show “solidarity” with those in France.
Organisers said 25 protests were planned across the world, including London, Paris and several other French cities.
“The most vocal advocate of Wahhabism in France is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss philosophy teacher who happens to be the grandson of Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan has been very active in France during the past ten years, spreading his extremist views and becoming the unofficial voice of French Islam.”
Seriously – Tariq Ramadan is a proponent of Wahhabism! Who is responsible for this nonsense? It’s Olivier Guitta.
“A 13-year-old girl is an exemplary pupil in every way; she listens carefully to her teachers, does her homework and is a cheerful member of the class. But in one respect, according to President Jacques Chirac yesterday, her behaviour threatens nothing less than the social peace and national cohesion of the French nation – she insists on wearing a headscarf. All around her, pupils are wearing the kind of outlandish clothes and hairstyles one would expect of teenagers anywhere in Europe. But there is one garment that, the president has declared, challenges the secularity of republican France: the square metre or so of material that covers this girl’s hair.”
Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 18 December 2003
“We have received the news of banning Hijab in schools and universities in France with great enthusiasm and pleasure.”
Nadia Mahmood of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq / Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq writes to the French prime minister applauding the decision to ban the Islamic headscarf in schools.
“This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam…. It is used as a means of exerting pressure on Muslim women who do not wear it because they do not share the sick ideology behind it. It is a sign of support for extremists who wish to impose their creed, first on Muslims, and then on the world through psychological pressure, violence, terror, and, ultimately, war.”
Right-wing Iranian exile Amir Taheri commenting on the French hijab ban in the New York Post, 15 August 2003.
Reproduced on the website of the US neocon consultancy Benador Associates.
More than 13,000 Arab and Muslim men in the US are facing deportation after co-operating with post-11 September anti-terror measures, it has been revealed.
They are among 82,000 adult males who obeyed a government demand to register with the immigration service earlier this year, on the grounds they come from 25 mainly Muslim countries said to harbour terror groups.
Only 11 of those who registered, and of the tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings, have been found to have links with terrorism.
The backlash from the war on terror on Britain’s non-white population is growing. Applications to visit relatives in Britain from countries with large Muslim populations are twice as likely to be turned down than they were just over a year ago. Families in Britain’s biggest ethnic minority communities are now struggling to have relatives visit them.
An analysis of last year’s statistical reports from British embassies around the world by Citizens Advice, the charity and national body for the bureaux, shows that refusals increased by more than 100% in countries with big Muslim populations.
The biggest rises in refusals were for applications from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. In Tehran, refusals jumped 188% between the first and second half of last year. From January to July, 8.5% of applicants were refused, but from August to December, a quarter was turned down. In New Delhi and Mumbai, refusals increased 105% during the same period.
Britain’s biggest non-white communities have been badly affected. There are 1 million people of Indian descent and 500,000 of Bangladeshi origin in the UK. Refusals of applications from families in Calcutta rose by 443%, and in Dhaka more than 60% of applications to visit relatives in Britain were refused in the second half of the year, compared with 38% in the first.
While it is getting harder for some people to visit relatives, it is getting easier for others. Refusals of applications from North America declined by 29% and from South America by 1% during the same period.
This dramatic rise in refusals of applications from one set of countries, many observers say, is driven by the “war on terror”. Decisions may be based less on hard evidence than on the possibility that applicants could be in some way connected to terrorist organisations.
A British academic accused by the US of leading an Islamic terror group has defended himself, saying his only “crime” was to talk about politics to friends on the phone.
Dr Basheer Musa Mohammed Nafi, 50, was one of a total of 16 men charged by the US last week. The father-of-two from Oxford was accused of being the UK head of Islamic Jihad – believed to be responsible for more than 100 killings in and around Israel. The indictment against Mr Nafi was 170-pages long, and listed 50 charges. Its main evidence was years of tapped telephone conversations.
But Dr Nafi denies having anything to do with the militant Palestinian organisation. “As I have repeatedly told reporters: I have never been a member of Islamic Jihad, I have never spoken on behalf of Islamic Jihad and I have never raised funds for Islamic Jihad,” he said.
US intelligence said Dr Nafi had a number of conversations with Florida lecturer Sami al-Arian – arrested in the US, and accused of being the US head of the group – about funding of the Jihad.
But Dr Nafi said: “Of course I have spoken with Sami al-Arian. He is a friend, a good friend of mine. We have spoken hundreds of times and about Palestinian politics. But since when was that a crime?
“I meet people all the time on trains, in shops, on planes, and we talk. Palestine is a very small nation, and everybody talks about politics all their life. The problem with this indictment is that they have just lumped together a group of people who have no connection with each other.”
Some of the total of 16 people indicted had nothing do with political organisations, he said – while others had publicly spoken on their behalf. “How can they all be put together in this one document?”
Dr Nafi, who has lived in Oxfordshire for 20 years, is an Islamic studies lecturer at London’s Birkbeck College.