Looking for defiance is hardly wise statesmanship. Unfortunately, for the president of France, Mr Jacques Chirac, and his government, the attempt to defend the hard-won secular ideals of France has provoked an enormous outburst of indignation from Muslims, not just in France, but in other countries as well. Mr Chirac’s new bill proposes to ban the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap, outsize Christian crosses and other overt signs of religious affiliation within state schools. The question of secularism of the state is always a confusing one. The state shall not interfere in the practice of any religion, and it shall not endorse any particular religion. The line in between is blurred and shifting. So, behind the thousands of marching Muslim women, proclaiming the freedom to wear the hijab, loom the shadows of the most difficult of today’s questions: about identity and freedom, about discrimination, oppression and equality, about the overlapping grids of religion, nationhood, gender and ethnicity.

France’s dilemma is obvious. If such a bill were to become the law, it would, instead of integrating the Muslim community in the country with the mainstream, add further to its sense of marginalization. Inevitably, such a law would be grist to the mill of extremist forces. While the headgear, being the signature of a religion, is perceived as divisive in a secular state, a law to ban it would turn out to be frighteningly more so. The confusion runs deep into the concept of secularism, itself a result of the struggle between the church and the state. In France, “outsize” crosses would be banned by the same law — but who would decide on size, and do crosses equal headgear? It is an accident of history and regional custom that most lay Christians do not carry overt signs of their religion among their apparel. This, together with the history of secularism, has created a peculiar situation. In Christianity-dominated Western countries, all religions except Christianity are “marked” religions. This is enough to obfuscate the more important issues that lie at the heart of the problem. The debate in feminism, for example, between those who feel that the women’s headscarf is a sign of male oppression, and those who feel that there is here an element of women’s choice of identity, is conducted on a completely different plane. In the case of a ban by the state, it has to be decided whether suppressing “signs” of religion falls within the domain of secularism too. The next step would be to discuss whether beards must be shaved off as well. This kind of argument promises dizzying descents into the absurdity of trying to decide which beard is religious and which is not.