CREIL, France — In a move certain to enliven an already intense national debate over immigration and education, teachers at a public school in this industrial town north of Paris voted Monday to prevent Muslim girls from wearing head scarves to class.
The girls, two sisters, 14 and 15, and a companion, 14, were turned away from class on the first day of school after a weeklong holiday. They had arrived wearing the head coverings they say are required by their faith. Principal Ernest Chenieres placed the girls in the school library and threatened to expel them if they continue to insist on wearing the scarves.
French law forbids proselytizing in public schools. Chenieres ignited the controversy three weeks ago when he outlawed head scarves at his junior high school, Gabriel Harvez College, where about half of the students are children of Arab immigrants. Since then, the incident has grown into a public debate in the intellectual community and among political parties, with the issue of religious freedom pitted against French laws separating church and state.
It has even divided families. Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, has not commented publicly on the issue, but he is believed to disagree with the position taken by his wife, Danielle, who supports the girls. It parallels a heated dispute over the planned construction of a mosque in Lyon and another caused by the demolition in August of a small mosque in Charvieu-Chavagneux, near Grenoble.
The demolition was ordered by a right-wing mayor affiliated with the National Front, the rightist party that opposes immigration. A series of unsolved killings, including those of two ethnic Arab youths on Bastille Day, July 14, have added to the tension. The scarves-in-school issue is regarded by some as a rare intellectual confrontation, one of the first since the feud over government aid to Catholic schools, which led to the fall of the first Socialist government. The role of religion in public schools, similar to the issue of church-state separation in the United States, has been at the center of French political life for more than years, beginning with fights between the minority Protestant population and the Roman Catholic majority.
