It would be so awesome if Fauja Singh keeps going strong and gets the chance to run into the Olymic stadium as the torch bearer in London 2012!!!

i hope to be him when i grow up…just the female version.

Sikhs in the City? This guy is hard-kaur!

Harmander describes Fauja as “weedy” for his height of 5ft 11in – he weighs only 52kg, around 8st. “He eats very, very little. For breakfast, he will have an energy bowl – itÂ’s like loads of pistachio nuts and seeds ground up. It is full of nutrition. He will have one of those with a cup of tea.”

First off, remember that France is ruled by a conservative government right now, especially in the realm of immigration and multiculturalism. The 2002 elections basically ended up a choice between right and extreme-right, and the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, won out over his far-right National Front adversary, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The fact that Le Pen was even one of the top two candidates tells you something about the French political atmosphere. The goal of the National Front party is to “strengthen the French family” by literally “reversing the flow of immigration” – basically, if you are not white, Catholic and have a big nose, then you get to go back to where you came from. Never mind that your family has been in France for three or four generations and you’re actually a citizen; you’re not “Français de souche” and therefore it’s on a boat to Algeria/Senegal/Vietnam with you.

Seventeen percent of the French populace voted for this man in the first round of the election, and eighteen percent in the final round.

I spoke with a French woman living in the United States a few months ago, and we were having a great conversation about things French: cheese, wine, music, literature… then we turned to politics and the conversation went sour. “Islam is a religion of lies,” she spat. “The Muslim clerics make women wear the headscarf, and banning the veil in the schools will save them from the fundamentalism they learn at the mosque. We must do this, because we have more and more Muslims living in France every day, and if we are not careful, we could end up living under Sharia law.”

There’s your context.

The current mindset of French society is such that no one complains about the “conspicuous religious symbol” ban as long as a somewhat decent explanation is given – “we are liberating teenage girls from the conservative views of their parents and church leaders!” gets a lot of credibility, ironically enough. And they really couldn’t get away with banning the foulard without including the Sikh turban, the yarmulke, etc. (And note that you never hear one word about nuns’ habits in the debate.) The fact of the matter is that the people in power are NOT fans of multiculturalism in the least, and “assimilation” means divesting yourself of the manners and religion of your former country and fitting in to the mainstream catholic-to-atheist crowd in the new one. So I can’t really give a good answer to “what SHOULD the French government have done in this case?” because they did, logically, exactly what they were expected to.

Here’s another quote from Q magazine to think about : If this ban comes into effect, France would be driving determined Muslim students who wear headscarves into the hands of religiously sponsored institutions, where notions of mutual tolerance are unlikely to be a central focus. In effect, as FranceÂ’s blunt Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, argued,the law would only intensify the problems it is trying to resolve.

Honestly, does it make any sense for a government to ban religious expression, and then expect not to have religious people lash out against that? Anyone remember the huge to-do here in the US last Christmas when the religious right perceived that they were being persecuted when they weren’t allowed to have Nativity scenes at City Hall? Now imagine that times fifty years of being told “your religion is irrelevant now that you are in this country, and if you choose to practice it you are not really welcome here.” Such places are where resistances are born, and the same treatment over and over again leads to desperation, which leads to violence. Not a pretty situation.

For a closer look at life in the French banlieue, I recommend Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine. You should be able to find it at independent video stores.

“When the Stasi commission first convened, most of us were against the legislation which as we thought would create unnecessary problems. However, we listened to a number of testimonies that worried us. Islamist groups were forcing young girls to wear the veil, causing clashes within the classroom. The classroom should be a place for young people to learn and be imbued with a strong sense of citizenship. An explicit divide was developing between the veiled girls, Christians, Jews and atheists. Everytime a salafist imam seized power in a mosque, we found problems developing at schools. Muslim kids started refusing to sit at the same table as ‘the kuffarÂ’.

We had to break this trend. This completely contradicts the purpose of schooling. Not because of the veil itself, of course, but because of the process at work behind it. The classroom is not for the development of religious identity.”

What do you guys think of this reasoning? I hadn’t heard that viewpoint in ANY of the mainstream media. Back home in the U.S., I know schools cite uniforms as improving behavior and removing class distinctions in areas with a big divide between rich and poor. Why not the same for banning religious wear that serves to incite and divide peers?

Obviously Muslim extremists aren’t the same as Sikhs, marathoners or otherwise, but how SHOULD the French have dealt with the problem?