When Youssra’s three-and-a-half-year-old son started nursery school, he really wanted his mum to come on a school trip. So she signed up to help out on a cinema visit. She buttoned the children’s coats outside their classroom and accompanied them to the front hall. But there, she was stopped by the headteacher, who told her, in front of the baffled children: “You don’t have the right to accompany the class because you’re wearing a headscarf.” She was told to remove her hijab, or basic Muslim head covering, because it was an affront to the secular French Republic. “I fought back,” she says. “I brought up all the arguments about equality and freedom for all. But I was forced home, humiliated. The last thing I saw was my distressed son in tears. He didn’t understand why I’d been made to leave.”
The French charity worker is now part of the protest group Mamans Toutes Égales, or Mothers All Equal. Based in Montreuil outside Paris, it has blocked school coaches, boycotted outings and staged street demonstrations in protest at the growing number of mothers in headscarves being barred from school trips. “This is an attack on freedom and democracy in state schools. They seem to want to wipe Muslim women off the landscape,” says Youssra, 36.
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Anissa Fathi, 34, stirs her coffee in a halal burger bar in Montreuil while her eldest son plays. She has three children. Since her eight-year-old second son’s primary school barred her from helping on outings because of her headscarf, she worries about the impact on a new generation who have seen their mothers picked out and excluded in front of the class. “Children are not stupid. They understand. A lot of children who have been exposed to this treatment of their mothers have had psychological difficulties. My son would have fits of rage, he was self-harming and hitting his head against the wall at home because I couldn’t go. Whenever the date of a school trip approached, he would be extremely anxious and in tears.”
From a piece by Angelique Chrisafis in today’s Guardian on attempts to extend the reach of an illiberal French tradition. (For earlier normblog posts on this issue see the 54 links I give here.)