ABSTRACT
In 1989 three female students were excluded from their classes at school in a town near Paris. Their crime was that they refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class and therefore contravened the secular tradition in French state schools. The affair became a passionate national debate. This debate would have been incomprehensible to outsiders who had not followed events in the years prior to this incident. These were years in which the question of immigration had become politicised and popularised as a problem of non-European immigrants (especially North African) in French society. It would also have been incomprehensible to those who had no knowledge of the secular tradition in France or the development of the modern French republic. They might have wondered how a simple piece of cloth on someone’s head could send a whole country into a prolonged frenzy. It would have to be explained that the headscarves were symptoms of a wider crisis in contemporary France. This book attempts to explain the crisis that lies behind the affair of the headscarves.
