TORCY, FRANCE -- Noura Jaballah pours tea and passes Turkish cookies in her spotless living room, just a few miles from Disneyland Paris. She lives in a leafy Paris bedroom community that could be any U.S. suburb where young mothers push strollers down neat blocks of look-alike houses.
Jaballah is a French soccer mom spinoff, who shuttles her three children from home to school to shopping mall in a lime-green family van.
But her role is not one of coaching neighborhood teams. Tunisian-born Jaballah is championing the right of Muslim girls to cover their heads -- an option increasingly under siege in France, as calls grow to ban head scarves in public schools.
At least four parliamentary bills have been drafted calling for outlawing veils and head scarves in public schools, along with other religious accessories, such as crosses and skullcaps. Similar laws already prohibit them for public school teachers and government employees. Now the government of French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is reportedly poised to introduce its own anti-veil legislation.
"The government must intervene," says Juliette Minces, a sociologist who has written a number of books on the veil and Islam. "Teachers have a hard time with these girls, who come to school wearing the veil, who refuse to attend gym or biology courses, who won't read Voltaire because he was a nonbeliever."
But Jaballah and other advocates argue that banning the veil in school would threaten basic French liberties, including the right to religious expression.
"If I wasn't convinced it was an obligation to veil, I wouldn't," says Jaballah, 43, whose eldest daughter donned a head scarf several years ago. "Life here would be a lot easier if I didn't."
The battle over the veil is playing out across Europe and the Middle East as well as in the United States, where a Florida judge barred a Muslim woman from obtaining her driver's license with a face-covering niqab.
Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, with tiny Muslim populations, have generally tolerated veiling. But women in Turkey and Tunisia are barred from wearing the veil in schools, universities and public workplaces, as part of larger crackdowns against Muslim fundamentalists. Even in Egypt, women wearing niqabs or other cover-all apparel can be harassed as suspected members of banned Islamic groups.
