#laicity

[la-dame-grise]

One side of my family was very conservative, the other side was more into laicity but still partly religious. I was lucky enough to be given the choice and didn't have a religious education. Which is relatively common for my generation and younger generations in France.

Someone suggested that the reason there is less leftist believers in France is because religion has been used to establish hierarchies. Which not all French are a big fan of. So christianism and catholicism specifically are heavily associated with the right. And I don't know how I feel about that. Faith has to be a choice and something you experience and feel. Not something enforced on people making them think that it's okay to weaponize it for bigotry.

[mask131]

The French abaya situation simply explained by someone who doesn't give a fuck about all that (3)

[But not giving a fuck doesn't mean you can't educate and inform yourself about the situation]

And here are the last points you must kow to fully understand the situation!

The banning of the abaya was quite a special event in terms of French school legislation. It was a special event, because for the first fuckin' time in a long time, they actually bothered to be CLEAR AND PRECISE. You see, there are already a lot of laws and rules and circulars when it comes to school legislation, but the thing that school teachers, school directors and school students keep complaining about is how vague and unprecie they are. France is a grand land of ideas, principles and concepts - but when it comes time for practical applications, things tend to get much more obscure. Everybody knows how a public school is supposed to work, and what principles it should follow, but nobody was ever exactly said HOW to do it, and most of the time, individual school and school directions have to just deal in their own way with what the government and the state requires of them. With the abaya ban, what everybody praised was that a specific and easy to follow protocol was given. If a student arrives at school with an abaya A) Let her inside the school. You cannot just leave a student in the street just because she wears a forbidden piece of clothing. B) Do not let her in class however. While an abaya-wearing student can stay within the school, she cannot attend classes until she removed her abaya. C) If such a case happens, ask for the student to remove her abaya, and if she refuses, have a complete, thorough and calm talk with her about why this ban was installed and the reasons behind the abaya problematic nature. D) If the student still refuses to remove her abaya, even after being explained why she should do it, call for the parents and see about sanctions.

A point that should be kept in mind is that, the backlash against the ban of the abaya mostly came from... foreign countries. I said before that the great imams and the Council of the Muslim Cult did criticize and debate the ban of the abaya, but they did not create any backlash or true opposition to it. If you see my previous post, you'll see they simply pointed out how it is a situation based on deep misunderstandings and that it will not solve the deeper problem behind it. There was on social media a true backlash and infuriated posts by the same influencers that promoted the abaya - but we'll see more about them below. And the rest? Outside influences, foreign influences. I opened this series of posts talking about the heavy anti-France campaign that came from Turkey and flooded the social media with accusations of France being islamophobic, racist and colonialists. But no need to go that far for seeing those interferences: just take a look at England. A British woman openly declared and made a whole case about her opposition to the abaya ban in France, and even went as far as to publicly promise to pay the fees that would be inflicted on the family of girls that refused to remove their abayas. Why would she do that? Not because she is an activist, oh no. Because she is a fashion designer, and she is about to release in England a line of abayas, and she used the ban in France as a marketing communication tool, to promote her own line of clothing.

To conclude this whole situation and put it all behind us, I will simply end with what is actually going on, with the first day of school under the abaya-ban. I evoked the outraged influencers before - French young women and French teenage girls that were furious about the ban of the abaya, and on TikTok and Instagram an Snapchat and the like openly expressed their disdain and anger at such a decision. And they all incited and demanded for their followers to all arrive at school wearing abayas. Their plan was for a massive, France-wide protest against this "hateful law", and they wanted to flood French schools with abayas, that you had to wear whether you were Muslim or not, in sign of support for your fellow Muslim women, to truly "break down the system". Well we have the numbers today. In total, upon the millions of students in France, only roughly three hundred girls arrived to school with abayas - and a good part of them actually never wore abayas before, and just wore one for the first time in their life as a sign of protest. All these three hundred girls, by the protocol described above, were let inside and talked to, asked to remove their abaya with all the explanations that came with it. On the three hundred girls, only sixty-seven refused to take off their abayas, all the others did and went to class. And on the sixty-seven girls that had their parents summoned and (maybe) received sanctions, only one case resulted in a particular negative result. It is currently talked about on every news channel in France: the father of this one girl threatened the headmaster of the school because he wanted his daughter to remove her abaya. It wasn't just any random threat, oh no, it was a death-threat involving cutting off the man's neck. Given the case of Samuel Patti's murder had been evoked by the president earlier this week, and the Turkish diffamation campaign online has also been reusing this case, let's just say that hearing a man threaten to cut off a headmaster's head has been very badly received.

I will let you take your own conclusions from all I presented to you. Good evening.

[mask131]

The French abaya situation simply explained by someone who doesn't give a fuck about all that (2)

[But not giving a fuck doesn't mean you can't educate and inform yourself about the situation]

Let's continue:

So, social media. One of the reasons abaya became such a big thing in France is because they became a new trend, a true fashion, on social media. You have lots of influencers promoting the abaya, the same way in French youth there is a true passion and fashion of all things coming from the Muslim countries, and it has been a phenomenon not unique to France or these recent years (already in 2016, Dolce and Gabbana had created a luxury line of abayas and hijabs). The problem however lies within the fusion the social medias created between pure fashion and religious influencing. A lot of the same young influencers and socila-media-teenage stars that promote the abaya will do so invoking wrong arguments such as "This is what a true Muslim woman shall wear" or "This is a piece of clothing that is part of Islam". Many social media accounts and so-called "teenage experts" will claim that the abaya is a perfect replacement of actual "religious clothing" for Muslim people, and this fueled an entire warped view by French youth of the abaya as a symbol of their faith.

This is actually the result of a vague coupling with the rise of extreme Muslim beliefs and practices in France - it is no news that ever since the terrorist attacks of the 2010s in France, Muslim extremists, terrorists and fanatical groups have been gaining power and influence on French territory. Everybody heard about the case of a small town which got so controlled by Muslim religious figures that they managed to forbid toy shops from sellng dolls with faces, and enforced a "no-face dolls" policy. It was a religious ban, not a government one, and yet everybody acted as if it was the actual law. And the influence of this more extreme and sterner, more forceful form of Islam is very open on social media, especially when it comes to young teens. There is a lot of TikTik videos and Instagram accounts and Snapchat circles centered for around around "hacks" and "tips" designed for Muslim kids and teens to practice their religion inside a public school. This ranges from videos and tutorials telling you how to perform your prayers and rites hidden from view in remote corners of schools, to "hacks" and "tips" about hiding burkas inside your bags so you can put them on when inside the school's ground. Somehow, the idea of wearing your religion upon you is treated as a fashion, and a new trend for kids is to do what looks like here as a religious resistance or religious offensive against laicity and secularism. And that is the very sad thing with social-media fed youths. They do not understand laicity and secularism - they do not understand how it works or why it is here. They do not see that as a way to keep the government neutral and to prevent a religion from taking control and crushing all of the others, the way Catholicism massacred all Protestants back in Renaissance, or the way the collaborationist government of WW2 used "Catholic" religious arguments to help the Nazis kill Jews. No, they see laicity as a personal attack on their faith, and as a way to crush their religion and to ban Islam as a whole (and only Islam, because of course, those same influencers insist that only Islam is discriminated by laicity, and that Christians and Jews are in league with the oppressors). For them, to be able to show and practice their religion in their home, in their mosques, in the street is not enough - they need to have it everywhere, including school, hospital and government. A very revealing census made people discover recently that more than half of the underage Muslims today believed that the law of the Coran was above any law of the Republic, and that they had the right to do illegal things if it was within their "religious right". This is very worrying because France works on the very reverse system, where the law of the Republic is supposed to come above and before the law of any religious text. If the law says for example that gay marriage is legal or that abortion is legal, no Biblical, Talmudic or Coranic argument should be stronger than this. That's how France is supposed to work, but a lot of kids do not understand that anymore, and cannot get in their heads that you can have religious freedom assured by a government that refuses all religion.

Edit: I checked back the census, and it was 57 percent of the young Muslims of France.

As a side note before going forward: know that all I talk about applies to PUBLIC schools. There are private schools that are religious in nature, oh yes. You have Christian schools, and Jewish schools, and Muslim schools all around France. But they are PRIVATE schools, who do not receive money from the government, and are not provided with teachers by the state. If you want to become a religious institution you can, but you have to cut tie with all public oganizations and all government-affiliated bodies. Once more, this is the essence of laicity: you can have private schools belonging to any kind of friggin religion (including the Star Wars religion if you want), as long as you stay within the law and do not do any illegal thing.

Ultimately, I believe that the opinion and reaction of the French Council of the Muslim Cult, and the words of the great imams of the largest French cities ill speak for themselves enough. In a first time, they objected to the interdiction of the abaya on a very simple ground: the abaya is a cultural outfit, not a religious one. In fact, they were very keen on reminding people that, by the canonical Muslim law, there is no actual true religious sign or religious clothing. You do not need to wear anything to be a Muslim, and they insisted on presenting the abaya as a fashion and a trend that came from Africa, and more precisely from the Maghreb. They also pointed out that maybe some women wore it out of a misguided religious sense, but that most of the time it was because of their body complex and because of dysmorphic reasons - they saw a lot of young women who preferred large, covering clothes such as those worn in Muslim countries because they wanted to hide their bodies or their perceived "flaws". And these people are of course right on all that, and you cannot deny what they say. However, in a second time they added a concession that is a very needed and important nuance: some of the great imams publicly added on television that, indeed, a part of the problem of the abaya is those that wear them. They explained that the young people who wore and promoted the abaya as a symbol of Muslim faith or as an emblem of Islam were clearly people who had a very lacking knowledge or misguided appreciation of Islam, and that a lot of non-expert, non-practicing Muslims actually said a lot of nonsense when involving themselves within the abaya debate. Of course, for religious experts such as themselves, banning the abaya is idiotic because the abaya is not religious. But, in a second time, they had to admit that there was also a lot of ignorant Muslims who treated the abaya as religious, and thus added fuel to the fire, or more exactly were the symptom of a deeper and bigger problem which is the misunderstanding and misteaching of the Muslim religion.

(Again, I have a few final points to highlight, so there will be a third and final post to this series)

[ibonoco]

1905 or freedom of thought

(Réédition) ” L’école n’est pas la mosquée ou l’église, elle est le lieu du savoir et de l’esprit critique.” Élisabeth Badinter, née Bleustein-Blanchet, le 5 mars 1944 , est une femme de lettres, philosophe, féministe et femme d’affaires française. “The school is not the mosque or the church, it is the place of knowledge and critical thinking.” Élisabeth Badinter, née Bleustein-Blanchet, le 5…

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[ibonoco]

1905 or freedom of thought

1905 or freedom of thought

” L’école n’est pas la mosquée ou l’église, elle est le lieu du savoir et de l’esprit critique.” Élisabeth Badinter, née Bleustein-Blanchet, le 5 mars 1944 , est une femme de lettres, philosophe, féministe et femme d’affaires française. “The school is not the mosque or the church, it is the place of knowledge and critical thinking.” Élisabeth Badinter, née Bleustein-Blanchet, le 5 mars 1944 ,…

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[lejournaldupeintre]

Charlie versus Mediapart Is laicity used as a weapon against Muslims in France ? www.artepsy.com ------ - ----- ---- ------

[ways-of-darkness]

A Tale of Two Secularisms

Last time I talked about the evils of secularism, however, at the time, I was conflating two types of secularism. Additionally, in light of relatively recent events - such as the murder of a French Catholic priest by ISIS in France, within France’s borders, and the forceful suspension of a Catholic congregation with the intent of bulldozing a Church, I feel the need to talk about the two types of secularism that are to be contrasted: the American model and the French model.

Exhibit A: American-style Secularism.

Although I call it “American-style Secularism”, ever since the forceful legalization of Gay “Marriage” in the USA, the USA has been converting towards the French model of secularism, with the fining of Christian bakers and all that.

But anyway, the American model of secularism is when the Church and the State coexist peacefully, each do their thing, and leave each other alone. The Church is given the role of spiritual guidance, which allows it to retain influence and exist in the public sphere.

Additionally, even though the Church and the State are separated and Freedom of Religion is guaranteed, the primacy of a certain religion may be recognized and lip-service may be paid to it.

Overall, it’s a working system: the State and the Church do their own things, and don’t try to force stuff down each other’s throats. Unfortunately, the USA has started abandoning American-style secularism in favor of French-style secularism with the advent of Gay Marriage and the suing of Christian bakers.

Exhibit B: French-style Secularism

The French model of secularism was born during the French Revolution, and has been refined until it gained its present shape in 1905.

During the French Revolution, there was widespread repression of religion (think of something akin to the Soviet repression of Christianity) in the name of “Equality, fraternity, liberty”, and religion was all but forced into the shadows and alleys.

After all the turmoil in the 19th century with France’s form of government constantly changing from Kingdom to Empire to Republic and back and forth, they finally decided to settle for a Republic in 1870, and in 1905, they put forth the uniquely French concept of Laïcité, which roughly translates to “laicity” in English.

But what does Laïcité really encompass?

We could debate the dictionary definition all day long and end up with nothing *cough* Feminazis *cough*, so I am just going to give a practical definition: in the French model of secularism, or Laïcité, the State makes it 100% clear that the Church is the State’s bitch. That’s all there is to it. The State does its thing, and the Church either likes it or gets to suffer from repression by the State.

The Church and the State do not coexist peacefully, because the paranoid State views the Church as its rival. Religion - especially the demographically dominant religion - is virtually banished from the public sphere and forced into the shadows of privacy. This may be followed by pandering to minority religions *cough* Islam *cough*, attempts to establish secular cults *cough* SJWism *cough*, and so on...

Basically, it’s the State constantly demonstrating the fact that the Church is the State’s bitch. And that’s no good.

A much lighter variant of Laïcité however exists in Turkey - or rather, historically existed in Turkey, no thanks to you Erdoǧan - where Islam was kept at bay, radical Islam was persecuted, but moderate Islam was not only accepted but in fact promoted (fun fact: during the 18-year reign of the secularist Atatürk, more mosques were built in Turkey than under the entire 600-year lifespan of the Ottoman Empire. No joke.).

In all honesty, I think the historical American model of secularism is the most optimal. The French model of Secularism is just as bad as outright Theocracy - in fact, it’s basically a Theocracy turned inside out, just like how modern-day Germany’s elite as “reverse nazis” (extremist politicians who consider native Germans Untermenschen, foreigners - especially Muslims - Übermenschen, and want to give them Lebensraum in Germany).