AMMAN, 15 January 2004 — At least 30,000 Jordanian women have signed a petition addressed to French President Jacques Chirac urging him to revoke the law banning Muslim female students from wearing headscarves at French schools, the Islamic Action Front said yesterday.

The female members of the Islamic Action Front prepared the petition, an IAF deputy said.

“We have set an appointment with French Ambassador Jean-Michel Casa to hand him the memorandum on Thursday,” a member of the lower house of Parliament, Hayat Massimi, said.

She urged other European countries not to enact similar bans, saying, “Such a move will jeopardize ties between their states and Islamic peoples”.

Chirac last month backed a move by the French government prohibiting Muslim schoolgirls from wearing headscarves at state schools. He also recommended banning religious insignia notably the Jewish skullcap and large crucifixes.

Chirac said he wanted the ban incorporated into law by the start of the next school year.

“It (the petition) is a show of solidarity with Muslim women in France and a call on the French government not to deprive its citizens of their guaranteed rights to freedom of expression and practice of religion,” Massimi said.

Muslim women cover their heads as part of a “built-in component of the Islamic creed and cannot be compared to the Jewish skullcap and crucifixes”, Massimi added.

“It is a strict Islamic teaching provided for in the Holy Qur’an and not a luxury,” she said.

Muslim clerics and intellectuals through out the Islamic world slammed the French decision, dubbing it as part of a Western “crusade” targeting Muslims and their religious identity. Civic society institutions in Jordan protested the ban in a variety of forms and urged the French government to recede from “this biased action”.

Jordan Unfazed

by Iraqi Plans

The Jordanian government is unconcerned by Iraqi plans to sue individuals and companies from Arab countries, including Jordan, a government spokeswoman said in remarks published yesterday.

The government has not been informed of such plans and “has nothing to do with it,” Asma Khodr told the Jordan Times.

“The law will have the final word anyway,” she said, adding that the accusations made Tuesday in Baghdad by Iraq’s interim Trade Minister Ali Allawi were clearly aimed at private companies.

Iraq was Jordan’s top trading partner before the US-led war in March that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein’s, with more than 20 percent of Jordanian exports sold in Iraq.

Allawi said the new Iraqi leadership was preparing criminal cases in both Iraqi and international courts against individuals and companies, which sold goods to the previous regime at “highly” inflated prices and under dubious contracts.