[news] France and the other face of secularism

[Resist!ca]

aljazeera by Soumayya Ghannoushi 02 November 2004 The "veil problem", it must be noted, is only a small detail in an infinitely more complex narrative and a symptom of a more profound crisis affecting the nature of French laicite (secularity) itself and France\'s relations with the Muslim world. ...The subject of this frenzy is a religion whose five million followers are forced to exist outside the frame of legitimacy in forsaken ghettoes, denied many of their basic rights as human beings. Islam, the second largest of the country's faiths, is reduced to an underground religion practised in basements and derelict buildings,

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2004/11/3/5619/32239