President Emmanuel Macron is rightly doubling down on his defense of free speech and France’s secular national identity. But as Macron does so, he should reconsider laws that are incongruous with those values.
Specifically, Macron should eliminate the headscarf ban which prevents most Muslim women from wearing veils in public places. While the ban only affects more conservative Sunni Islamic Muslims who believe full veils are required by Islamic teaching, it serves as a legal barrier to freedom. It thus also represents an obstruction of free speech on a matter of immense value to some French Muslims.
This bears noting amid the Charlie Hebdo Prophet Mohammed cartoon saga.
Since the recent murder of a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, who was decapitated for showing his class the magazine’s cartoon, Macron has advanced a message of resolution in the face of terrorist intimidation. Rightly pointing out that the ability of a person or publication to speak their mind is instrumental to France’s identity, Macron has pledged to give no quarter in the face of those who would corral French freedom. Even and especially as Salafi-Jihadist groups such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb now threaten his life, Macron is right to adopt this hardline. It would be inexcusable for any political leader to allow terrorists or sectarians to restructure what constitutes acceptable speech involving Islam. More broadly, France’s reckoning with separatist Islamic activity is long overdue.
That said, bringing France together into a better union of shared values requires more than a defense of Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty. It must also include efforts to provide greater economic and societal opportunity to those young French Muslims who believe they are second class citizens. Any visit to the rundown “banlieue” housing projects which afflict many French cities will attest to the fact that these gripes are not without merit. But one way to better persuade these citizens that they are valued as such is to allow them to live as they would wish. That means affording rights to true freedom of worship, which necessarily also entails freedom to wear a veil.
Don’t misunderstand me. This is not to say that Macron’s government should tolerate exclusionary Islamist elements which, for example, have sought to segregate public swimming pools. But there is a significant difference between wearing a veil in public and beheading an innocent teacher. Governmental recognition of that distinction would help delegitimize more extremist sentiments. After all, where some Muslims are unable to practice their faith publicly, while their faith is publicly insulted as via Charlie Hebdo, they are not necessarily inclined to have faith in the system.
France deserves American and global support as it deals with these difficult issues. But so also must Macron recognize that he’ll never truly be able to bring his people together unless all his people believe they are treated fairly. That means the freedom to be funny or to insult, but also the freedom to be a conservative Muslim.
