French Citizen Denied Driving School for Wearing Muslim Veil

Back in July, it was the story of Faiza Silmi that gripped and embarrassed France. Silmi is a Moroccan who's been living with her husband and children in a Paris suburb since 2000. She's been applying for French citizenship since 2004. She's been refused every time. The reason: Silmi wears a niqab, the full-body veil, behavior the French government considers "incompatible with the fundamental values of the French community, specifically regarding the equality of the sexes."

That sort of bigotry has a way of trickling down to more innocuous nooks and crannies of communities willing to tolerate them. So it has.

France's non-profit Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People (Movement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples, or MRAP), reports that on Sept. 10, Sabeh Kadi, a 26-year-old French citizen of Maghrebi origin, and mother of three, headed off to a driving school to complete her enrollment in the suburb of Pavillons-sous-bois, immediately northeast of Paris, only to be told by the administrator there that "the veil doesn't cut it here" ("Le tchador ne passe pas ici") and "veiling is forbidden here" ("le foulard ici est interdit").

The administrator had no statutory authority to forbid Kadi's enrollment, nor has any kind of Muslim veil (or non-Muslim veil, for that matter: there are plenty to go around for various cultures and religions) ever been connected with hampering driving, making the denial explicitly bigoted with the next suggestion: Kadi was welcome to apply to a driving school elsewhere.

One somewhat notorious case in Florida in 2003 involved an American convert to Islam and her refusal to remove the veil to be photographed for a driver's license. A federal judge denied her claim that she had a right to keep the veil on, even for that moment's photograph (an altogether silly claim, considering that even in Saudi Arabia, even in Afghanistan when it was controlled by the Taliban, exceptions against photographs, and without veils, were and are made for such things as passport photos.)

Kadi's case in France is nothing so prosaic. It's provincial discrimination, nothing more, nothing less. But it's also what happens when the state at its highest level decrees with equally provincial idiocy that the wearing of the veil may be forbidden in public schools (as it is in France and Turkey), or that the wearing of the veil may be grounds for denying a perfectly law-abiding individual the right to citizenship. Stupidity trickles down, and as the administrator at that driving school proves, stupidity has its enthusiasts. They're only too eager to step out of the closet, given the opportunity.

MRAP is pursuing the case.