Secondly, are you still talking about France?! Integration has always been seen in terms of nation and identity, right back to the beginning with politicians like the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre. You know, the whole “it’s okay to be a Jewish Frenchman but not a French Jew” thing? And this has been the case with waves of different immigrations from Armenians and West Africans after WWI to Eastern and Central Europeans in the 30s right up to the North and West Africans of late.

Of course the economic side was crucial, and various communities integrated with varying degrees of success. In terms of recent immigration, the French establishment has hopefully learned for future reference that lumping migrants in horrific housing estates away from employment and services is not the best idea for anyone concerned. Still, I would argue from my knowledge of the history of migrant communities in France that the French have historically approached immigration in terms of (and measured the success of integration on) acceptance of the nation and the national identity.

Nor is the 2004 Law a unique example in the history of the French Republic. Growing fears of the role of the Catholic church led to the 1905 Law that ended state funding for “official” religions and sought to return to the constitutional purity of absolutely no state involvement with religion. That too was controversial, not helped by government seizure of church property, but was deemed necessary if France should remain a truly laic state.

So in fact, rather than being a “new philosophy of citizenship”, the 2004 Law was an attempt to re-emphasise the traditional philosophy of citizenship, in which of course is tied equality of the sexes as we said and the contract of laïcité. And whilst concerns over Muslim integration should not be dismissed lightly (as they often were at the time), the Republic, if it was to remain faithful to its constitution, could not make the Muslims an exception to its own rules without seriously damaging itself.

Regardless, the rationale in Turkey is no different to the French model. The French model seeks to ban all religious symbols in public places, as does the Turkish. The French model additionally often sees the hijab as a cultural symbol of the repression of women, as does the Turkish. The French model acts without factoring in what the majority belief is, as does the Turkish. The principle is the same, and of course that is no coincidence if you consider that Turkish laïcité arguably is based to a large extent on the French.

The fact is, as in France, the ban applies in public places and is not just against Muslims, but all religious symbols, crucifixes, skull caps, the whole show. Turkey is a special case I guess because 60% or so of women wear the hijab, and because of this the pro-hijab camp argue that the ban precludes many women from a university education and government jobs. What the secularists argue is that the ban should remain to encourage women to remove the headscarf not as a “religious” symbol but as a symbolic assertion of gender equality enshrined in the constitution, just as women were in past decades encouraged to remove the veil. I would tend towards the secularists, because in Turkey, as in many Muslim communities in Europe including the UK, the hijab is often imposed from a young age to define a woman’s role in society, not to aid piety as is often argued.

The question of faith schools is tricky – the Turks found in the 30s and 40s that the Kemalist ban on religious instruction simply pushed religion “underground”, and the emergence of a number of radical Islamist groups from the 1960s is often seen as evidence of the failure of that policy. The state’s denial of a section of the population’s desire for a religion-based education caused problems. However, state-supervised faith schools that have existed since the 50s, with broad curricula covering both traditional religious instruction and the secular syllabus, have managed to some extent to reconcile religious Muslims to the secular Turkish Republic.

In the UK there are only a tiny number of official Muslim faith schools within the state education system, but there are many hundreds of unsupervised medresses attached to mosques and community centres; perhaps before introducing a blanket ban that would not eradicate unofficial religious instruction anyway, it would be preferable to better integrate and regulate such institutions within the wider state education system?