Bans On Headscarves Will Create Problems, Not Solve Them

To the editors:

As an Arab-American Muslim who wears a headscarf, I am dismayed with Daniel B. Holoch’s comment, “One Nation, Secular and Indivisible” (Feb. 12). Holoch defines the Muslim girls who wear headscarves as “young French ethnic Arabs who do not adhere to fundamentalist Islam for cultural reasons” but as a means of composing a new identity at odds with the French republic. By describing those who wear headscarves as adhering to fundamentalist Islam, Holoch misses both the point of wearing the headscarf and the meaning of “fundamentalist Islam”—two things that aren’t analogous. Wearing a headscarf is believed by many Muslims to be a divine prescription, much like the ban on drinking alcohol and eating pork. I certainly do not follow any extreme version of Islam by wearing a headscarf.

Many people who approve of the ban on headscarves in French schools in the name of secularism, integrating the Muslim community into French culture, and combating extremism fail to see an important point: the ban will lead to the very things it claims to oppose. Muslim girls who choose to wear headscarves will be forced to leave the mainstream society by lack of being afforded a public education. This will further entrench the fragmentation of French society. It will lead to a whole community of economically deprived, marginalized, ghettoized, and privately educated youth who feel antagonism towards the French republic for helping to aggravate their situation, instead of improving it. Since they will be segregated from mainstream society and perceived as belonging to an unpatriotic religion, this will only fuel extremism and lead many youth towards fundamentalist Islam, not help to integrate them into French society.

Hebah M. Ismail ’06

Feb. 13, 2004