A woman demonstrates in Marseilles against a ban on Islamic headscarves in French state schools. (Reuters)

Paris, Jan. 18 (Reuters): The official spokesman for France’s Muslims urged the community’s “silent majority” today to oppose fundamentalism as militants planned to step up pressure against a looming ban on Islamic headscarves in state schools.

Dalil Boubakeur, moderate head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), said the thousands of Muslims who marched in France yesterday against the ban on all religious symbols in schools were only 0.6 per cent of the country’s Muslim population.

Mohamed Latreche, controversial leader of the Paris protest, promised more protests if parliament debates the draft law next month while other small groups said they were organising a demonstration outside the National Assembly on February 7.

The ban on Muslim veils, Jewish scullcaps and large Christian crosses, due to be made law in the coming months and imposed in September, also prompted protests in London, Brussels, Bahrain, Bethlehem, Gaza, Amman and Kashmir.

Speaking of the 5,000 protesters in Paris, Boubakeur said: “I don’t think one should see this as a growth of fundamentalism, but of the organisational capacity of these minority movements.”

“The big unknown now is how the silent majority, those four or five million moderate and liberal Muslims, can organise,” he told the newspaper Le Parisien. “I urge these moderates to come out of the shadows and take their turn to speak out,” he added.

Boubakeur, an ally of President Jacques Chirac, had urged Muslims not to march yesterday. Other Muslim groups stayed away to avoid being linked to Latreche, who gave a fiery speech denouncing Zionism and accusing Israel of apartheid against Arabs.

But several groups in the CFCM reject Boubakeur’s moderate line. The militant Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), second-largest member of the CFCM, has urged its members to protest against the looming ban.