But laicite’s influence also has created a kind of identity crisis among younger generations of Muslim immigrants because they are raised in Muslim homes yet are exposed to a secular humanist environment, said Gracie Couloir, a Southern Baptist missionary from Virginia who has served in France for the past 17 years.

The biology teacher at St. Mauront has been challenged on Darwin’s theory of evolution, and history class can get heated during discussions of the Crusades or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Muslim students shocked the staff by showing glee, Mr. Chamoux recalled.

the church teaches muslims evolutionary science!

But, as noted earlier, Kemalism was not the sharp break with the ‘past’ it attempted to be or is thought to be:

Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it.

Plus, Anderson notes:

Kemalism did not so much separate religion from the state as subordinate it to the state, creating ‘directorates’ that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams, administration of pious foundations – in effect, turning the faith into a branch of the bureaucracy.

The article also touches on Kemal, the man:

Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have something of the glazed look of a worn roué: a general incongruously reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of 57.

(Via Angry Arab.)

The line may be fuzzy but as each case has shown the law has roughly come out on the side of fairness and proportionality. It works. And the faithful may not even like it, in the case of Shabina Begum for example, but it is entirely right that some governing body decides whether a student is taking the mickey or not. An absolute rule would be counter-productive.

Although he draws attention to this point, I think Sunny skirts around the real issue (probably not intentionally; he is fighting other battles in his Comment is free post). I do not think this is about judges deciding whether or not the individual is ‘taking the mickey’. That is a purely subjective view of these sorts of cases, and I don’t think the law can judge a case like this on that sort of basis.

Let me quote this again from Talal Asad (my emphasis):

Secularism as a political doctrine I see as being very closely connected to the formation of religion itself, as the “other” of a religious order. It is precisely in a secular state - which is supposed to be totally separated from religion - that it is essential for state law to define, again and again, what genuine religion is, and where its boundaries should properly be. In other words, the state is not that separate. Paradoxically, modern politics cannot really be separated from religion as the vulgar version of secularism argues it should be - with religion having its own sphere and politics its own. The state (a political entity/realm) has the function of defining the acceptable public face of “religion”.

Shabina Begum or Lydia Playfoot do not represent an acceptable face of religion in Britain, and especially not in the current social and political climate (as some Catholics and Jews in the past did not represent an acceptable face in Europe; and some Catholics, Jews, Mormons and ‘black religions’ in the US did not, and perhaps some of them still do not).

SSRC has some commentary on the AKP.