About 200 protesters circled Wilshire Boulevard in front of the
French consulate Saturday to protest French President Jacques
Chirac’s support of a proposal banning religious headscarves
and other religious symbols from France’s state schools.
The two-and-a-half hour afternoon protest featured speakers and
was attended mostly by students from surrounding high schools,
colleges and universities. Nearly every woman present at the
demonstration was wearing a headscarf, known as a hijab.
Numerous Muslim-affiliated organizations sponsored the
demonstration, which charged the French government with supporting
“religious intolerance.”
According to the event’s organizers, the protest was part
of an international day of protest ostensibly designed to pressure
the French government into discarding the controversial
proposal.
The hijab controversy stems from a recommendation by a committee
of French experts last December who recommended banning
“conspicuous” religious insignia ““ including the
hijab, the Jewish kippa, or skullcap, and large crucifixes ““
from France’s state-sponsored schools, which are secular.
Later, in a Dec. 17 speech to the French parliament, Chirac came
out in favor of the ban, which he wants written into law by the
start of the next academic year. Chirac also said in a televised
speech that religious symbols were contradictory to France’s
long-established secular traditions.
Since then, protests have taken place throughout Muslim and
non-Muslim countries alike.
Although the Westwood protest was largely peaceful, Sgt. Lally
of the Los Angeles Police Department said there was a minor
incident when one of the protesters placed his picket sign against
a passing motorists’ window.
“It was a little scuffle. We didn’t even make a
report,” Lally said.
Wearing a hijab, Mariam Jukaku, a third-year computer science
student and president of UCLA’s Muslim Student Association,
said the use of hijab confers upon Muslim women a sense of dignity
and self-respect.
“It’s a symbol of modesty. Dressing modestly ensures
one is accepted for who you are and not for what you look
like,” she said.
Mohammad Mertaban, a fifth-year psychobiology and French student
and former MSA president, said the proposed hijab ban denies
Muslims the free exercise of their religious duties.
“Especially for our Muslim women, because they are
obligated to wear the hijab, in a sense, they are denying them
their right to observe their religious practices,” he
said.
“They are not respecting individual freedoms,”
Mertaban said.
In the face of international outcry, there is some variance
within the Muslim intellectual community whether the hijab is a
mandate in the Koran, the Islamic holy text.
Gamal Banna, an internationally known Muslim intellectual and
author of several works on the rights of Muslim women, was firm in
arguing against any religious mandate concerning the hijab.
“The headscarf is not an obligation,” he told the
Agence France Presse news wire service.
“Neither the Koran, nor the Hadith (the sayings of the
prophet Mohammed) require women to wear a headscarf,” the
writer said. “An erroneous interpretation of the Koran leads
one to believe that women are obliged to cover their
head.”
Mertaban, Jukaku and other students plan to present the French
consulate deputy general a petition with 10,000 signatures
protesting the proposed ban next week.
With reports from Daily Bruin wire services.