PARIS, 8 October 2003 — France’s five million Muslims do not enjoy the same rights as the country’s other citizens and might need positive discrimination efforts to reach an equal footing, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday.
French Muslims, mostly of North African Arab origin, face prejudice at work and a shortage of mosques and other religious services in comparison to other religions, he told an official committee reviewing the law separating church and state.
“If you’re named Mohammed, your resume isn’t the last to be thrown into the waste basket,” he remarked, adding there were almost no Muslims in any senior positions in France.
“It’s a fact that our compatriots of the Muslim faith do not have the same rights as believers in the other great religions.”
Sarkozy, who last year helped Muslim organizations found a national council to represent their interests, broke a French taboo by suggesting that positive discrimination might help integrate Muslims more fully into French life.
“The term ‘positive discrimination’ doesn’t scare me,” he said, arguing that favoring Muslims might be the only way to create role models for the community. France has traditionally shunned anything that smacks of ethnic profiling.
Paris created the commission to consider how to integrate Europe’s largest Islamic minority at a time when young Muslims — sometimes encouraged by fundamentalists — appear to identify more with their faith than their French citizenship.
Sarkozy said Muslims did not have enough mosques, places in public cemeteries and chaplains in schools, often because officials from the mostly Catholic majority in this country of 60 million used the law to discriminate against them.
Noting that many towns refused building permits for mosques on technical grounds, he remarked: “We’ve spent more energy using zoning laws to block the building of mosques than we have to protect our seashores.”
Muslims also had no schools in France to train imams, or prayer leaders, forcing congregations to recruit men abroad who often speak no French and sometimes preach extremism.
Sarkozy also criticized French intellectuals who single out Islam for discriminating against women, saying this was a problem in all religions. “I don’t see a lot of women in the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in France,” he observed.
The minister told the committee that a tougher law that would bar women and girls from wearing traditional Muslim headscarves when they attend school or work in a state office was “neither necessary nor useful nor opportune.”
The current law, which dates back to 1905, already rules out the wearing of religious symbols in public offices and schools, he said, and a tougher new one would only isolate Muslims and encourage them to take a more radical stand.
Police statistics showed there were now far fewer cases of girls refusing to take off their headscarves in state schools than a decade ago, he said, citing figures of 1,123 such cases in 1994 compared to only a few hundred now.
