KILLING FOR A NON-COMMANDMENT?

By Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI Religious Affairs Editor

PARIS, Aug. 31 (UPI)

Should the so-called Islamic Army kill the two French reporters it has kidnapped in Iraq, it will do so under false religious premises -- given that there is nothing in the Koran that allows for such action.

This terrorist group has threatened to "execute" Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot unless the French government revokes a law banning "ostentatious" display of religious symbols in French public schools. This includes wearing or displaying the Jewish skullcap or large crosses, as well as the Muslim headscarf.

This law will take effect at the beginning of the new school year Thursday.

Jews and Christians affected by the new law have not complained. Neither are all that many French Muslims, for that matter. The few thousand veiled women demonstrating against the new law several months ago were by no means representative of the country's Islamic community of five to six million.

Talk to any Parisian female of North African origin you meet in restaurants, cafes or at the workplace, and chances are she will tell you quite adamantly, "No, I do not want the scarf!"

"The law's the law," said Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the "Grande Mosquee" in Paris and president of the French Council of Muslim Faith. And most other leaders of the Islamic establishment in the country -- though not the radical imams in the ghettos -- agree.

In neighboring Germany where some states have laws against head scarves worn by teachers in class, Sevim Ozdemir, a prominent Turkish-born activist for the integration of Muslim children, insists: "The Koran does not command us to wear a scarf or a veil. This is something scribes have read into the two surahs counseling modesty."

Surah 24:31 counsels the faithful: "And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts and do not display their ornaments ... and let them wear their head-coverings over their bosoms."

According to Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic studies professor at the University of Marburg, many Muslim scholars interpret this text as an admonition to keep one's decollete bedecked when leaving the home.

Ozdemir regards the opposite interpretation of this text -- insisting on a headscarf, veil or chador -- as a "political statement of oppression and misogyny, a relic of feudalism and slavery." Those who take this line dream of returning to a Taliban-style society.

"This is the reason that when Turkey instituted the full equality of men and women, it prohibited schoolgirls from wearing the headscarf in class," she says.

"Political statement" is the keyword here. This is precisely what the French government tried to prevent when it drafted the law forbidding the wearing of religious -- and, lest we forget, political -- symbols at school.

Exercising "laicite," or total neutrality in religious matters, the French state is not trying to oppress religion or political opinions. In fact, it protects all "practice of faith -- but within the limits required by public order," explained Daniel Amson, a professor of public law, in the national daily, Le Figaro.

Public order would be endangered by "ostentatious" displays of religious or ideological convictions in places where everyone should be focused on one thing alone -- getting an education.

This is of course a totally different philosophy of state than that of, say, Saudi Arabia or Iran, where Muslim garbs are also imposed on Christian, Buddhist or Hindu women.

The difference is that in those countries all women must look like Muslims outside their homes -- that is to say, they must live in a state of oppression.

In France, on the other hand, any woman can walk about town dressed as she wishes, while schoolgirls must look neither like Muslims, nor like Christians or Jews but simply like, well, schoolgirls learning biology, history and mathematics.

"Down with the veil!" reads the title of a recent book by Chahdortt Djavann, an Iranian woman writer living in exile in Paris. Djavann never ceases to warn her readers of the menace of an Islamist infiltration of Western Europe, the peril that was very much on the French government's mind when it promulgated the headscarf ban.

When the French newsmagazine, Le Point, asked Djavann if she discerned an acceleration of the "clash of the civilizations" predicted by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, she replied, "I prefer to speak of a sickness of the civilizations."

This malady, it seems, is aggravated by a specifically European variant Raymond Williams, the father of cultural studies, observed two decades ago in the United States: Immigrants become more religious than they were before they left their homeland.

In the European-Muslim context this means, according to Djavann, that the "second and third generation of immigrant families develop the zeal and religious dynamism they found lacking with their parents."

Hence Djavann's troubling insight: "Islamists know how to convert the frustrations of the young into religious energy. This explains why Islamism has a greater impact on the youth in Europe than, for example, in Iran, where young people ridicule faith."

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