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I. INTRODUCTION
On February 10, 2004, the French National Assembly voted 494 to 36 to pass legislation that would ban the wearing of an Islamic headscarf, or any other conspicuous religious symbol, within French public schools.1 The bill passed the French Senate by a similar margin, 276 to 20, on March 3, 2004.2 The text of the law is extremely terse, stipulating only: "In public schools, the wearing of symbols or clothing by which students conspicuously [ostensiblement] manifest a religious appearance is forbidden. Internal regulations state that the initiation of disciplinary proceedings must be preceded by a dialogue with the student."3
The headscarf legislation of 2004 emerged as a direct response to the recommendations of a commission appointed in 2003 by French President Jacques Chirac. Chirac charged the Stasi Commission, composed of prominent politicians, scholars, and others, with examining the issue of laicite, or secularism.4 On December 11, 2003, the commission issued its recommendations, among them a ban on wearing the headscarf in public schools. One week later, with strong public opinion behind him,5 Chirac came out in favor of legislation to put such a ban into effect.6 The Commission's report provides a sweeping historical and philosophical overview of the principle of laicite. While denying that laicite mandates "a militant atheism"7 or that laicite is incompatible with Islam,8 the report states that just as the state must abandon all authority within matters of personal conscience and spirituality, so must religion "renounce [its] political dimension. Laicite is incompatible with any conception of religion that hopes to rule over . . . the social system or the political order."9 This separation is mutually beneficial to both religion and the state,10 as well as providing an equal footing to all individual citizens." While addressing numerous other applications of the principle of laicite, the Commission spends a particularly significant portion of its report discussing the reasoning behind its recommendation to ban the headscarf in public schools.12
The international attention that the report's release and then the law's passage have attracted serves as the latest demonstration of the power of the headscarf to crystallize the controversies over Islam, immigration, and national identity that have emerged in France and, in various other guises, other Western democracies.13 This particular variation of...