When a far-right French official disrupted a regional council meeting to demand that a Muslim woman accompanying a group of schoolchildren be ordered to remove her headscarf, “in the name of our secular principles,” her own child buried his head in her shoulder and cried, reports Associated Press.
The scene has triggered a venomous national debate that is scrambling questions over the headscarf, Islam, immigration and radicalization.
The clamor reached a crescendo with the shooting and wounding Monday of two Muslims outside a mosque in southwest France by a suspect with past links to the anti-immigration National Rally party. The 84-year-old alleged gunman told investigators he attacked “to avenge the destruction of Notre Dame,” Paris’ grand cathedral ravaged by fire in April — which he blamed, inexplicably, on Muslims.
In other times, the Oct. 11 confrontation at the council meeting in Dijon might have been but one more installment in France’s decades-long battle with itself over how to define, and enforce, secularism, a principle inscribed in the constitution more than a century ago to ensure neutrality regarding religions.
But today’s uproar illustrates the growing unease — even contempt — by some sectors of society toward those Muslims seen as failing to join the French melting pot. Such views aren’t limited to the far right: The conservative-led Senate approved a bill Tuesday banning mothers from wearing headscarves on school field trips, and a survey by the Ifop polling firm published Sunday suggested that eight out of 10 French think secularism is in danger.