c. 2003 Religion News Service

TORCY, France _ Noura Jaballah pours tea and passes Turkish cookies in her spotless living room, just a few miles from Disneyland Paris.

Outside, neat blocks of look-alike houses line quiet, tree-lined streets. Mothers push strollers in the late-spring sunshine. This bedroom community could be Any Suburb USA _ and Jaballah a French soccer mom spinoff, as she shuttles her three children from home to school to shopping mall in a lime-green family van.

But instead of coaching neighborhood teams, Tunisian-born Jaballah is championing the right of Muslim girls to cover their heads _ an option increasingly under siege in France, as calls grow to ban head scarves in public schools.

No less than four parliamentary draft bills call for outlawing veils, or head scarves, in public schools _ along with other religious accessories, such as crosses and skullcaps. Similar laws already exist for public school teachers and other government employees.

A handful of top French ministers have also declared their personal opposition to veiling in school, including Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who recently launched a national debate on the issue.

“The government must intervene,” said Juliette Minces, a sociologist who has authored a number of books on the veil and Islam. “Teachers have a hard time with these girls, who come to school wearing the veil, who refuse to attend gym or biology courses, or won’t read Voltaire because he was a non-believer.”

But Jaballah and fellow advocates argue that banning the veil in school would threaten basic French liberties _ including their right to religious expression.

“If I wasn’t convinced it was an obligation to veil, I wouldn’t wear it,” said Jaballah, who removed her own veil during an interview with a female reporter, in the privacy of her home. “Life here would be a lot easier if I didn’t.”

The battle over the veil is playing out across Europe, North America and even the Middle East. Scattered U.S. school districts have wrestled with the problem, and on June 6 a Florida judge ruled that a Muslim woman must remove her veil for her driver’s license photo. Scandinavian countries like Sweden, with tiny Muslim populations, have generally tolerated veiling.

But women are barred from wearing the veil, or hijab, in schools, universities and public work places in Turkey and Tunisia, as part of larger crackdowns against Muslim fundamentalists. Even in Egypt, women wearing face-covering niqabs can be harassed, as suspected members of banned Islamic parties.

In France _ home to Europe’s largest Muslim population _ the veil dilemma weaves women’s rights issues with fears of growing fundamentalism. It pits the country’s fiercely secular creed against European human right laws.

It illustrates, too, the sharp divide between a well-educated, upwardly mobile French Muslim minority, and thousands of second- and third-generation immigrants, who remain angry and isolated in peeling, suburban ghettos. Some have found solace in religion.

“The head scarf today symbolizes a defeat for the French government, which has failed to integrate these minorities,” said Francois Gaspard, a sociologist at the Advanced Group of Social Studies in Paris, who opposes a veil ban.

“I can’t predict the future,” she added. “But banning the veil may lead to new Quranic schools. And it’s unlikely they will teach French values of secularity. Or about equality between men and women.”

France’s veil battles began in 1989, when three girls were kicked out of a northern French school for covering their heads. By the mid-1990s, educators were grappling with how to respond to thousands of veiled school girls arriving to class. The cultural clash quickly took new dimensions.

“We began seeing girls and boys who wouldn’t shake their hands in the name of Islam,” said Hanifa Cherifi, who handles veiling issues and the French Ministry of Education. “Boys would dispute the authority of a female teachers. Girls would refuse to attend gym class.”

The official answer _ murky rules permitting veils in school, so long as they were not ostentatious, and students did not proselytize _ was no answer,critics said.

“If we continue being woolly and ambiguous, we’re giving free terrain to the fiercest opponents of an essential part of our Republican identity,” Francois Baroin, a lawmaker from the governing UMP party, and a leading advocate of a veil law, told Le Figaro Magazine in a recent interview. “The veil question … is about the place of women, about equal opportunities for all French.”

Today, the Education Ministry’s Cherifi estimates school veiling disputes have dwindled to roughly 150 a year. But those numbers are deceiving, she says. Teachers work out compromises. Girls drop out of school.

That was the case for Samira Makhlouf, who chose to finish high school by correspondence, after being forced to remove her veil.

“Removing my head scarf was like tearing something away,” recalled Makhlouf, now 22, of her two years at public high school, in the southeastern city of Lyon. “I felt my rights were being abridged.”

France’s veil problem still touches only a small percentage of the country’s estimated five million Muslims. A 2001 survey by the country’s IFOP polling agency found only 20 percent of French Muslims went regularly to mosque. More than a third described themselves as non-practicing.

Nonetheless, experts believe a growing number of Muslim women and girls are donning the veil.

“It’s very obvious on the streets,” Cherifi said. “It was rare to see women veiling 15 years ago. That’s no longer the case.”

Cherifi is not the only French official warning against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. France’s law-and-order interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, finally coaxed long-squabbling religious leaders to launch the country’s first representative Muslim council _ partly as a counterweight to foreign, soapbox imams, preaching what Sarkozy dubbed “an Islam of the cellars.”

But the two-month-old council is already deadlocked on the head scarf issue, reflecting larger split between moderate and conservative Muslims.

“Women should be allowed to wear what they want on the streets. But not in public schools, not in state institutions,” said Khadija Khali, the elegant head of the mainstream French Union for Muslim Women, who does not veil. “Wearing the veil is not a law in Islam _ it is negotiable.”

END BRYANT