No scarves on the left bank

Anwer Mooraj The Dawn Asia News Network Karachi

France always represented to me a country which excelled in good life. Throughout the twentieth century, writers have demonstrated with unfailing relish, how its capital played host to millionaires and paupers, artists and artisans, poets and philosophers, thieves and entertainers.

But more importantly, Paris always offered sanctuary to people of all shades of political and religious opinion, and tolerated every eccentricity known to man. It is for this reason that Jacques Chirac's recent recommendation to ban on ostentatious religious symbols in state schools, has come as a rude shock.

No more will French students see Muslim head scarves, Jewish skull caps, Christian crosses, Sikh turbans and Buddhist saffron robes. France has gone secular, with a vengeance, and today stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from states like Iran and Saudi Arabia. But in the process, the country appears to have lost some of its exotic flavor, and its reputation for being a bastion of liberalism and democracy.

Though the French claim to have valid reasons for sticking to their secular moorings, the ban is seen largely as an attack on the 3.7 million Muslims who form the largest minority in the country.

If one walks into a classroom in a state school in Paris, one is accosted by the sight of boys and girls in the outlandish clothes and peculiar hair styles that teenagers are accustomed to all over the western world.

But for some curious reason, President Jaques Chirac feels that the sight of a head scarf or a skull cap or a turban in various colors of the rainbow, challenges and threatens the secularity of republican France.

Pockets of the press in the United Kingdom and indeed elsewhere, have questioned this move and have pointed to many more years of continued confrontation between the French state and the Muslims.

Some see it as intelligent defeatism. Others as an attempt to efface their own personality. The Guardian put it rather nicely when its correspondent stated that "it seems preposterous that the clothing of schoolgirls should become an issue of such symbolic weight, that for 14 years it has been the touchstone of a debate about the French constitution, about what it is to be French and how France should integrate its Muslim minority."

Jewish and Islamic scholars in the U.S. are equally concerned and cannot understand why so much political, intellectual and emotional energy has been spent on this issue, to the exclusion of factors like integration and the fact that the highest rates of unemployment can be found in the Muslim community.

But some of them have recognized that the roots of France's secularism lie in the struggle against the overweening power of the Catholic church, and that the secularist tradition in France has its own coherent logic.

After all, the French government hasn't yet been able to tackle the issue of belonging and identity in the Muslim minority with its profoundly social faith. Is the girl in the head scarf French or Muslim? Or can she be both? The point is, does it really matter?

Jacques Chirac's action has saddened many people, both inside and outside France, especially those with fond memories of the country. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be a city quite like Paris.

I can never forget her boulevards and trees, her pavement cafes and restaurants, her naughty cabarets and neon fluorescence, her newspaper kiosks and pissoirs, her art galleries and boat rides under the bridges, her Montmarte artists and provincial whores, her haute couture and earthy scents, her musical comedy policemen and accordionists in World War II uniforms.

There were quaint cinemas and theaters, and of course ballet and opera. But for students like myself who had hopped over from England between terms at the university, and were trying to stretch a meager budget, entertainment meant spending an evening in a left bank coffee house where politics and religion were discussed in an atmosphere of creative ecstasy.

The coffee house was essentially a meeting place. The air was so thick with Gauloise smoke that you could cut it with a knife. Sustenance was provided by long sticks of French bread and cheese and one's thirst was quenched by the juice of the serine grape.

Cinema critics praised the virtues of classics like Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis and Rene Clair's Sous les toits de Paris, without having seen either film, and debunked the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, probably because they were German. But the place was warm and friendly and after a few visits one got to identify the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, the freeloaders and members of the bourgeoisie who were slumming.

The queers and the girls who were moonlighting in the evenings, were the only ones who owned black Citroens. There were a few students who received an allowance from well to do parents, which made them natural candidates for Marxism! But the majority of the students who patronized the coffee houses, were existentialists.

Black was the existentialist uniform, and Sartre was the high priest of the Latin Quarter. He was more important than the Pope, at least to the people of the Left Bank.

It was in one of these cafes where I had the honor of sharing the same bowl of brown sugar with Simone de Beauvior, and where I became acquainted with the various catchwords of the existentialist philosophy.

I can still remember them as if they were uttered yesterday -- Angst, the abyss, immediacy, the turning back to a situation, man first is, then he is this or that, and so on. A liberal philosophy produced by a liberal mind.

In those days in Paris one hardly ever saw Muslim women in hijab or head scarves, or Sikhs driving cabs, though Jews in long black coats, their hair in ringlets under skull caps, were very much in evidence. But no Frenchman ever felt that secularism was in any danger or that the constitution was about to be undermined.

One hopes that the French parliament takes its time while deliberating on the issue, before endorsing the recommendations of an official commission. Otherwise it will lose much of the respect it had earned, not just from the Arab world, but from the Muslim world as a whole, for the stand it took against the Anglo- American position on Iraq.