Headscarf ban and Muslim ghettoes?

I just think that this is a good illustrative article. Showing the secularist case on religious diversity but also showing that it is in fact a 'hegemonic discourse'. Of course I'm sympathetic to the call to try to avoid a ghettoised public culture but the solution is to force everyone to kowtow to the secularist veiwpoint at potentially critical [or crucial!] points. The nub of the argument seems to be this: " The aim has been to create a secular public space where individuals renounce part of what she calls their "personal particularity", while the right to religious expression is guaranteed in their private lives. A flourishing multicultural society, the French insist, needs spaces where different races and religions can meet as equals."

The difficulties become apparent there: the contestation is precisely about this 'private lives' thing. What if you do not, on the basis of your spiritual viewpoint, recognise that spiritual or religious expression must end at the borders of a state-defined private life? Most of us who claim some kind of holistic faith can't do so. It is tactics on my part that leads me to 'give' space to other viewpoints: I think that my perspective, broadly speaking is true and right but I recognise [as part of my viewpoint] that othe people have other points of view and ways of being and that legislating for many of mine would not serve the aim of winning hearts and minds [quite the reverse] or probably, for the same reason, the common good.

The writer doesn't realise that he is actually proposing to impose a viewpoint on me and others like me, not creating a supposedly neutral space for us all to meet together: it is a space where he is priviledged and I am barred from assuming my full 'identity'.

Of course it would be easier to create tolerance if we made people more like one another by levelling them all down towards a common denominator [for this is what the French state does]. However, the real trick in a globalised society is how to promote it not by levelling at all. It is, of course, far harder to do that and will require constant negotiation and renegotiation as well as challenge and critical but goodwilled questioning of others and ourselves, but it is the only way that we can proceed that tries to recognise all that we and others bring to the 'public domain' without imposing a single idealogy on it. Laicity is a nice idea but one that is ideologically loaded in ways that we cannot presume will will for all social actors, most significantly those who hold to a theistic faith.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Stuart Jeffries: I'd rather see a headscarf ban than Muslim ghettoes