A student at a top law school writes with comments on the Arab poet Adonis's defense of French secuarlism:
"I check your website regularly; thanks for the insightful posts. I write to respond to one of them.
"I begin by writing that I feel blessed to not live in France. I’m a law student at [school name omitted]. My wife did her undergrad at [school name omitted] and will apply to public and private dental schools in the fall. She proudly wears the head scarf. Contrary to Orientalist fantasies, no aggressive, overbearing patriarch in her family made her do it; her father actually opposed it at the time. She did it as an affirmation of her religion (Islam,) and has never faced a lick of opposition Stateside for wearing it—she’s had access to the best internships, job opportunities, and academic opportunities. Under Title 7 and the Free Exercise clause, she can’t legally be denied work or schooling unless she lacks merit.
"At any rate, to the article. Adonis is way, way off. He begins with a factual inaccuracy: “nowhere in the Quran or hadith is there a single, unequivocal passage that imposes the veil on Muslim women.” Wrong. There is an unequivocal mandate to wear the hijab in a sound Hadith. On that point, he’s flatly wrong. He puts his foot further in his mouth by demonstrating a horrendous misunderstanding of religion in general: “is it acceptable then, on a religious level, that a mere 'interpretation' can have the force of dogma and law?” Absolutely! See the Talmud, Christian law, and Islamic Sharia. All based on interpretation. To go through all his fallacies, exaggerations, and flat misunderstandings of basic Islamic principles would be too time consuming; his lack of basic knowdlege on Islam is shocking. Then again, what would one expect? In America, our most well-known poets are rappers. If foreigners judged America’s understanding of Christianity from the lyrics of Tupac Shakur,
we’d probably be in bad shape, but I digress.
"I write to say this and this alone: first, France cannot be taken seriously as a democracy if it weakens free exercise of religion like this. This law doesn’t make France more secular; quite the contrary. To be totally and earnestly secular, you’d /never/ abridge religious freedom like this. This is animus, plain and simple, and it shows a distinct disregard for one religion, which surely doesn’t smell secular to me. I’ll finish with a critique one of Adonis’ more incoherent points: “they are denying the principles of republican democracy in the countries that have welcomed them with work and freedom.” Wrong again. Many women who wear the headscarves do so because they hold their religion close to their heart and wish to practice it freely. In countries such as Syria,
this can’t be done; in Syria, the ruling Assad family has made it a longstanding policy to oppress Muslims that become “too radical” [read: actually pray and observe the tenets of faith.] So what happens? These families strive to emigrate to democracies where free exercise is allowed and where they won’t be molested for doing something as harmless as putting on a head scarf.
"So much for free exercise and so much for freedom in France."
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I am obviously in no position to dispute questions about the requirements of Islamic law or religion (though I invite further reader comments on that subject from those knowledgeable).
This reader has certainly put his finger on the primary difference between the French and American approaches: namely, the U.S. provides constitutional protection for the "free exercise" of religion on a par with disestablishment (no state "establishment" of religion), and France does not. (How essential this freedom is to democracy or liberty values is a separate matter.) The costs of the French approach are apparent, and expressed with suitable indignation by the reader quoted above.
But the costs of the American approach--which via the combination of free exercise rights and the application of free speech "viewpoint discrimination" doctrine (which precludes the state from discriminating against expression because of its viewpoint, which includes, inter alia, its religious viewpoint)--are less often noted. Consider Eugene Volokh's discussion of a Dallas case in which a schoolchild was prohibited from distributing Christian proseltyzing messages at a public school event. Volokh is, sad to say, correct about the current state of the law, but notice what that means: organized religious groups can now invade public schools through the instrument of schoolchildren, which of course is what happened in this case. (Volokh does not note what is well-known in Texas, namely, that there is an organized effort by fundamentalists to put children up to these proseltyzing activities.) Free exercise and free speech have the potential here to effectively destroy the non-sectarian nature of the public schools, at least in many communities. The burden on the non-religious, or those who adhere to minority religions, is as significant, in my view, as the French burden on the devout. The hajib may be the wrong place to focus this issue, but overall I still prefer the French approach (or the older American approach, which treated "religion" and "religious" speech as constitutionally special: i.e., the state had to steer clear of it, keep it out of the public schools, etc.).
UPDATE: Philosopher Chris Bertram (Bristol) makes a good point in an e-mail:
"[S]uccessive decisions of the Conseil d'Etat have affirmed that various
constitutional documents and international treaties that France is party to commit them to something quite close to the US view. See
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/felina/doc/laic/conseil_etat.htm
The trouble is that there is a mismatch between the French cultural perception of what "laicity" requires and what their law actually says. Remember that the current proposals are just that, proposals. And it may well be that any comprehensive ban will again fall foul of the Conseil d'Etat."
As often happens, there may turn out to be a difference between "the law on the books" and the "law in practice," but that remains to be seen. In any case, I am more interested in the cultural phenomenon: namely, that a proposal like the French one could even be made, which would be unthinkable in the U.S. It can be proposed because secularism is a cultural value in France, but is not in the U.S.; because the idea that religion ought to be strictly private has some moral status in France, but does not in the U.S.; because the state ought to side with reason over faith has some intellectual status in the public culture in France, but not in the U.S.; and so on.
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