In an article on RFI, a political scientist named Alain Policar, member of the Council of Elders of Secularism, calls for a tolerant and case-by-case application of the 2004 law on religious symbols in schools, in this case the Islamic veil — in other words, its neutralization: a tolerant law on red lights would amount to "abolishing" traffic lights in favor of larger vehicles, as is done in Egypt or elsewhere.
A few hours after little Samara from Montpellier was beaten into a coma in front of her school — with head trauma — because her hairstyle did not please a veiled girl who called her an unbeliever, was it necessary to commit such cowardice? Which in fact initially referred to the Paris high school whose principal was forced to take early retirement (in French, to resign) following the lie of an illegally veiled student in his own high school.
The Montpellier schoolgirl, Samara, had dared to come to her middle school in La Paillade for a week with dyed hair, which earned her, according to her mother, daily spitting, intended to make her fall into line with the Salafist ranks: discreet and dreary dress at school, veiling again upon leaving and in the street, shapeless dress to hide her supposedly alluring young girl's body, no makeup and no clothing likely to attract the gaze of a man, who is assumed not to know how to calm his predatory instincts in front of a young girl. Samara was "lucky". In front of the French high school in Algiers in 1989, as in some cities in England today, acid was thrown at the naked limbs of young girls with hair and skirts, in order to remind them of the patriarchal law of veiling.
We would have to pay for a plane ticket for our political scientist to go to Tunisia, where - despite occasional Salafization and the appearance of the full veil - he could see that in this Muslim country the majority of women walk around without a veil in public spaces, because Bourguiba's egalitarian law, which Tunisians voted for in 2014 when the new constitution was voted on, imposes an egalitarian order on society. The veil is possible, but it is only worn by the poorest and most religious women; in this country, individual emancipation and social advancement, which are the objectives of a modern republic, involve, in particular, the unveiling and freedom of women. This is no longer the situation in the suburbs of Islam in France, where the patriarchal order of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists reigns, and where thugs enforce it with insults (whore, "qahba") - and I know from my daughters and their friends that these daily insults are poured out well beyond just Muslim women in appearance, according to the very words of these street spitters -, spitting, even head-butting and sweeping, as described by the sociologist Sabrina Medjaber, who already experienced this in a French suburb during her adolescence before the arrival of the 2004 law. That was twenty years ago.
Let our political scientist, who must not have many pupils or students, and who seems to visit very rarely the neighbourhoods where the Islamic veil predominates in public spaces, know that the veil is rarely a choice - whatever the official denials - because the populations and cultures he is talking about are, in the working classes at least, subject to a community and collective life that takes no account of individual aspirations. On the contrary, it imposes collective norms on them, of which the veil and the control of women's bodies through invisibility, confinement, marriage and tolerated or imposed relationships are the categorical imperatives. Let him read or reread The Harem and the Cousins, by the pantheonized anthropologist Germaine Tillion, to find out who and what he is talking about.
One might have expected a "wise man of secularism" to be devastated by the dismal chronicle of life in schools under the control of Islamists during this month of Ramadan 2024, which is clearly pushing certain zealots of Islamism to overreact, but the opposite is happening. It is not the most anti-feminist patriarchy that he believes should be fought, it is the republican order that should be perverted a little more. History is clearly useless, after decades of Islamist proselytism sold in the media by young provocative bourgeois women (promoters of the Hijab day at Sciences Po for example), who sleep soundly in their affluent neighborhood, or by agents paid by the Qatari dollars that trickle down — as we have seen up to the summit of the European Parliament. The only response of so many Republicans and so many Europeans, weakened by a history that they cannot digest, is to further debase our principles, which would be without consequences if it did not break the lives and freedom of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens — assuming that citizens are free from such cowardice and its effects.
One might have expected that, revolted by so much determination to trample on our laws (last year, there were up to 200 abayas in a single school in the Lyon region, and this year, an average of 6 teachers are threatened with weapons each day by destination), the former "wise man" of secularism would want to protect all minors in France from the Islamic veil, or even all users of public education and university services, but the opposite has happened: since we have difficulty enforcing the law, let's give it up! Not officially, but with "discernment". Our political scientist clearly has not understood who he is dealing with. Unless he considers that the patriarchy so reviled by our young women must reign supreme over the working classes of the suburbs of France. In which case, her place on the Council of Secularism is no longer justified, and the Ministry of National Education — which appointed her to this position — would do itself credit by demanding her resignation. A free woman in touch with the XNUMXst centurye century would replace it profitably.
Pierre Vermeren, President of the LAIC Scientific Council.
