INTERNATIONAL REPORT: “Spurning Secularism, Many French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools,” by Katrin Bennhold, New York Times, 30 September 2008.

Olivier Roy is the best European scholar on Islam in its globalizing form. In his last book, which I use in Great Powers, he posits that Islam in the West has the option of remaining unreformed and spiritually isolated within a secular society in the manner of Catholicism: you accept that your private sphere/religious beliefs posit a tighter rule set than that allowed by the society within which you live. Good example: I don’t believe in abortion (my private sphere Catholicism), but I don’t believe the government should ever tell me what to do with my body unless we’re talking a clear and imminent threat spreadable to others (contagion), and so I extend that political right to women on the question of reproductive rights. So I keep those two spheres separate. I admit to the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. Roy always says, watch France because its firm laicite (secularism) means Islam there must adapt or fight back openly (like in the Parisian ghettos). One way, as Roy argues, is simply to avoid the fight, like most Evangelicals do here in the U.S., focusing on social issues but by and large avoiding the political sphere (despite the fabulous reputation, the religious Right in this country is more apolitical than ever—meaning they don’t view politics as the answer per se). So this story speaks of how many Muslims, desiring a non-secular education, are going to Catholic schools in France. Why so fascinating? Common schools, or what we today call public schools, were first created in the 18202-1830s in America in response to the perceived threat of the “Muslims” of that age—the arriving immigrant Roman Catholic Irish. Notice how those “parochial” schools still thrive, in part by providing refuge for all manner of religious types (many non-Catholic) who desire a spiritual separatism on the question of education. And I say that after putting my first-born daughter through 8 years of Catholic grade school, with three more currently in attendance. The piece says:

The quiet migration of Muslims to private Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long France’s tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity.

It’s promise of secularization, perhaps, but I don’t get the argument on losing the battle regarding equal opportunity. I mean, that’s hardly been the case here in the States. According to a former grand mufti (French citizen):

Laicite has become the state’s religion and the republican school is its temple. It’s ironic, but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of—and knowledgeable about—Islam than the French state.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I say. Naturally, Muslim girls can wear their head scarves in Catholic schools. We have a lot history of females covering their heads too. But here’s the larger, downstream reality: without the scarves, half wouldn’t show up at first, but most stop wearing them by the end of the education. Catholic schools are good for that, too.