RITE AND REASON:Ireland is unlikely to emulate France or the Netherlands when it comes to engagement with its Muslim population
IN JANUARY 2004 I attended a conference at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The topic was “racial, ethnic and homophobic violence in the English-speaking world”. Doctoral students I spoke to there were adamant that the prohibition on any public display of religious symbols should be vigorously imposed.
Did that mean, I asked, that they would prevent a Muslim wearing a headscarf from coming onto the campus? Yes, they insisted. What about that man I asked, pointing to an African American professor wearing a large crucifix? He was there to give a paper on race riots in Los Angeles and happened to be a Presbyterian minister.
I made to get out of my chair and asked them to rise also and show me la laicité, the French vision of secularism, in operation. Would they not escort the scholar off the premises?
No, they urged me to sit down, they only objected to Muslims. I explained, to their amazement, that the Irish Constitution allowed for denominational schools and these included a Muslim school that had been opened by the Irish President.
When a handful of Muslim girls sought permission to wear a hijab as part of their school uniform the then minister of State for integration Conor Lenihan advocated tolerance: “For those that wear the hijab, it’s an issue of modesty. It’s not so long since Irishwomen wore headscarves to church, so we have to respect that.”
In September 2007 the principal of Gorey Community School in Co Wexford sought guidelines on the wearing of the hijab by Muslim schoolgirls. The issue had also exercised the local GAA club (Naomh Éanna) which decided to allow the girls to wear hijabs underneath their helmets when playing camogie.
Groups such as the Joint Managerial Body for secondary schools and the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools advise schools not to make an issue of school uniform rules where these conflict with a child’s religion.
When asked to comment, in May 2008, then minister of education Batt O’Keeffe said he did not regard questions about the Muslim veil as a serious issue in Ireland. France, by contrast, experienced what French sociologist Emmanuel Terray calls headscarf hysteria. Four million Muslims live in France. Yet somehow the fact that 1,200 or so Muslim girls sought to wear a headscarf to school came to be depicted as a national crisis.
In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh came to personify a new Dutch anti-multiculturalism. Their advocacy of aggressive intolerance towards any intolerance of liberalism influenced debates in other western countries.
Fortuyn’s anti-Muslim political epiphany supposedly occurred when immigrant youths attacked a bathhouse he frequented. In a 2002 interview, he said he had no desire “to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again”. Fortuyn described Islam as a backward culture, “a bit like those old Calvinists”.
Since the 9/11 attacks on the US, for a few years at least, the new orthodoxy appeared to be an aggressive muscular liberalism. However, it seems that western liberalisms and histories of modernisation differ from country to country. France defined itself as a secular state. The Netherlands depicts libertarianism as a core national value. Irish liberalism, the creed of the Celtic Tiger, was primarily an economic liberalism.
In different countries debates about Muslims have often been proxies for different domestic conversations about the future and the past. This is why Ireland will not rush to copy France or the Netherlands in how it engages with its Muslim population.
Prof Bryan Fanning is the author of Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester University Press)