ABSTRACT
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. 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 laïcité, or secularism. 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. The students involved in the headscarf cases of 1989 and subsequent years were either second-generation immigrants or had arrived in France at a very young age.
