Campaign in France spotlights headscarves
Far-right candidate Le Pen seeks to ban them
PERTUIS, France – Muslim headscarves, a perennial issue in France, took center stage in the country’s presidential campaign Friday amid far-right candidate Marine Le Pen’s push to ban them in the country that has western Europe’s largest Muslim population.
Both she and rival Emmanuel Macron, the frontrunner in polls as he seeks a second term as president, face a tightly contested April 24 runoff. They both were confronted by women in headscarves who asked why their clothing choices should be caught up in politics.
Macron wouldn’t ban religious clothing, but he has overseen the closure of numerous mosques, schools and Islamic groups, with help from a special team to root out suspected breeding grounds for radicalism. The Macron government also passed a controversial law last year to fight “separatism,” the word used to describe the mixing of politics with Islam, deemed dangerous to the nation’s prime value of secularism.
Now, some Muslims feel the presidential campaign is once again stigmatizing their faith.
At a farmers’ market in the southern town of Pertuis, a woman in a blue-andwhite head covering approached Le Pen as the candidate weaved past fishmongers and vendors to greet supporters.
“What is the headscarf doing in politics?” the woman asked.
Le Pen defended her position, calling the headscarf a “uniform imposed over time by people who have a radical vision of Islam.”
“That’s not true,” countered the woman. “I started to wear the veil when I was an older woman ... For me it is a sign of being a grandmother.” The woman noted that her father had served in the French military for 15 years.
Le Pen’s platform calls for banning Islamic headscarves in French streets, a giant step further than two laws already in place, a 2004 ban on headscarves in classrooms and a 2010 ban on the facecovering niqab in streets. Headscarves are common apparel for many Muslim women.
Her opposition to the headscarf has encapsulated what her critics say makes her dangerous to French unity, by stigmatizing millions of French Muslims. Le Pen would also slash immigration and wants to outlaw ritual slaughter, which would restrict French Muslims’ and Jews’ access to kosher and halal meat.
Macron, too, debated a woman in a Muslim headscarf on Friday in a lively exchange on broadcaster France-Info. He sought to distance himself from Le Pen by saying he would not change any laws.
The woman, Sara El Attar, said she had felt insulted by previous comments by Macron where he’d suggested that headscarves destabilize relations between men and women.
French women “have been castigated these recent years for a simple scarf, without any leader deigning to denounce this injustice,” she said. And she repeated the argument that many veiled women in France make: that people mistakenly think they’re veiled because men make them wear headscarves, not by personal choice.
“For me personally, the question of the headscarf is not an obsession,” Macron said, seeking to defend his record.