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Young veiled women chant slogans as hundreds of Muslims gathered in Paris on Jan. 17 to protest t

About 200 protesters circled Wilshire Boulevard in front of the French consulate Saturday to protest French President Jacques Chirac’s support of a proposal banning religious headscarves and other religious symbols from France’s state schools.

The two-and-a-half hour afternoon protest featured speakers and was attended mostly by students from surrounding high schools, colleges and universities. Nearly every woman present at the demonstration was wearing a headscarf, known as a hijab.

Numerous Muslim-affiliated organizations sponsored the demonstration, which charged the French government with supporting “religious intolerance.”

According to the event’s organizers, the protest was part of an international day of protest ostensibly designed to pressure the French government into discarding the controversial proposal.

The hijab controversy stems from a recommendation by a committee of French experts last December who recommended banning “conspicuous” religious insignia – including the hijab, the Jewish kippa, or skullcap, and large crucifixes – from France’s state-sponsored schools, which are secular.

Later, in a Dec. 17 speech to the French parliament, Chirac came out in favor of the ban, which he wants written into law by the start of the next academic year. Chirac also said in a televised speech that religious symbols were contradictory to France’s long-established secular traditions.

Since then, protests have taken place throughout Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike.

Although the Westwood protest was largely peaceful, Sgt. Lally of the Los Angeles Police Department said there was a minor incident when one of the protesters placed his picket sign against a passing motorists’ window.

“It was a little scuffle. We didn’t even make a report,” Lally said.

Wearing a hijab, Mariam Jukaku, a third-year computer science student and president of UCLA’s Muslim Student Association, said the use of hijab confers upon Muslim women a sense of dignity and self-respect.

“It’s a symbol of modesty. Dressing modestly ensures one is accepted for who you are and not for what you look like,” she said.

Mohammad Mertaban, a fifth-year psychobiology and French student and former MSA president, said the proposed hijab ban denies Muslims the free exercise of their religious duties.

“Especially for our Muslim women, because they are obligated to wear the hijab, in a sense, they are denying them their right to observe their religious practices,” he said.

“They are not respecting individual freedoms,” Mertaban said.

In the face of international outcry, there is some variance within the Muslim intellectual community whether the hijab is a mandate in the Koran, the Islamic holy text.

Gamal Banna, an internationally known Muslim intellectual and author of several works on the rights of Muslim women, was firm in arguing against any religious mandate concerning the hijab.

“The headscarf is not an obligation,” he told the Agence France Presse news wire service.

“Neither the Koran, nor the Hadith (the sayings of the prophet Mohammed) require women to wear a headscarf,” the writer said. “An erroneous interpretation of the Koran leads one to believe that women are obliged to cover their head.”

Mertaban, Jukaku and other students plan to present the French consulate deputy general a petition with 10,000 signatures protesting the proposed ban next week.

With reports from Daily Bruin wire services.