[By Claude-Henri Pirat, academic, writer]

Sir,

Your comments heard on September 9 on France Inter facing Natacha Polony and again on November 12 on France Culture, facing Alain Finkielkraut and Iannis Roder about wearing the veil at school, and which follow your last publication: The Republic? What values? Essay on a new political fundamentalism, published by Gallimard, take on particular significance in light of the current women's revolt in Iran, and following the anniversary of the beheading of Samuel Paty.

You do not hesitate, despite your status as an academic, to use the rhetoric that characterizes the militant speeches of those, some of whom claim to be feminists, who defend the wearing of the veil at school and who, to do so, conceal its true nature by speaking of it as a simple headscarf. You consider that the French State, by banning it at school by the law of March 15, 2004, is demonstrating "republican fundamentalism", guilty of "intolerance, anti-liberalism and repression" because, you say, "we cannot prohibit people from dressing as they wish."

Indeed, such a ban would legitimately push every citizen, every republican, to indignation!

But the hijab, which you do not call the "Islamic veil", is not and is not worn as a simple scarf. This is what the power of the Iranian ayatollahs reminded the young Mahsa Amini, cruelly and tragically. It has a meaning that is, as you well know, religious but, above all, political. Held very tight by pins, it is a real straitjacket.

It must be added, and you do not do so, that the clothes that can be worn on the rest of the body are also subject to a strict code, and that legs and arms cannot be bare. Because it is indeed the whole body that must be constrained, concealed. A young Muslim girl who wears the hijab, in France as in Iran, therefore does not have, as you try to make us believe, any freedom of dress at her disposal in the morning, before leaving her house, apart from that of being able to choose the color.

She will obviously not be able to decide not to wear it either. Or to wear it in the morning and not in the afternoon. Because the choice of the hijab, if it is indeed a true individual choice not influenced by those around her, is one that can only be made once. It is a choice that, with regard to family and community, one cannot go back on. The "choice", for a young girl, of no longer having a choice. Going back, if not impossible, can expose the one who decides to it to male vindictiveness and violence. "Going through difference to achieve equality", you say. The wearing of the hijab by teenage girls would be "only a simple attempt to mark one's difference" among many others, which you compare to the extravagant hairstyles of those who do not wear the veil and who can change it as they please, and which the Republic should accept.

“Republican fundamentalism”, you had to dare!

Indeed, why be so offended by religious fundamentalisms, starting with Islamic fundamentalism which does not repress the wearing of the veil by eight-year-old girls, since there are even republican ones, like the one you accuse the French Republic of, in the country of the Enlightenment? Listening to you, could we not, then, dismiss all these fundamentalisms back to back? Your words are very disrespectful to these very many women and the men who support them in Muslim countries who, by their actions, their writings, revolt against this veil.

This veil that, symbolically and physically, locks women in and forces them into submission. Would they appreciate noting, if they happened to read you, that among the academic elites of France, there are authors who defend, for young girls at school, what they are fighting against?

You are, Sir, professor emeritus at Paris-Sorbonne. This gives you intellectual authority and constitutes, for your readers, a guarantee of rigor in the analysis of facts and concepts. You are free to disapprove of the law against wearing the veil at school. That is not the problem. And you are free to defend an Anglo-Saxon type of tolerance, the Republic not having, you say, "to scrutinize the reasons for wearing a headscarf which must be accepted like any behavior that does not
does not harm the interests of third parties." Which extremely and dangerously widens the scope of acceptance, especially in the area of ​​violence against women! 

Is.

But a minimum of academic rigor should require you to say, then, what is the true nature of what you are asking the Republic to accept and tolerate at school. You do not do so. You do not say, like all those who campaign in its favor, that the hijab becomes, once "chosen", a coercive garment, a permanent confinement of the woman's body when she is outside her home. 

Hiding this from your readers by appropriating, from the height of your academic status where it should have no place, a militant rhetoric is, in my opinion, deliberate manipulation, which strongly resembles this "intellectual police" that you describe and that you condemn elsewhere. Rhetorical manipulation that can only satisfy and serve the more dangerous one of Islamism.