Tolerating Intolerance.

Like most of Western Europe, Germany considers itself a secular democracy. Article Four of its Constitution guarantees equal treatment of all religions. But that hasn't kept the governments of Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg and five other German states from drafting laws that treat different religions very differently indeed. Effective this fall, schoolteachers will be banned from wearing Muslim head-scarves--but not crucifixes, yarmulkes or even nuns' habits. The ban was necessary, the Bavarian government claims, because the scarf has become "a symbol of fundamentalism and extremism" that cannot be tolerated at public schools. By labeling it a "political" and not a religious symbol, the authorities believe they have gotten around the strictures of Article Four. More of Germany's 16 states are likely to follow.

Germany is not alone in grappling with the headscarf issue. In France, a commission appointed by President Jacques Chirac recently recommended forbidding not just teachers but also students from wearing religious symbols, except for small tokens of faith worn around the neck. The ban, says commission president Bernard Stasi, aims to preserve France's strict secularism and counter "forces trying to destabilize the country," a thinly veiled reference to Islamic activists. To devout Muslims--including fundamentalists--scarves, veils or burqas for women are an obligation under God. To many Europeans--as well as many secular Muslims--they are symbols of a newly aggressive anti-women, anti-Western ideology.

At least the French regulations are applied evenhandedly. In Germany, however, there appears to be huge public support for singling out Muslims for special treatment. The furor over headscarves is thus a microcosm of just how resistant Germany still is to its immigrant community. Germany has 3.3 million Muslims, 200,000 Jews and millions more who don't subscribe to any faith at all. Yet the Justice minister of Baden-Wurttemberg, for example, doesn't even bother with Bavaria's tricky legalisms in skirting Article Four. Headscarves are different from crosses, Corinna Werwigk-Hertneck explains, because "our children have to learn the roots of Christian religion and European culture."

At bottom, such attitudes have little to do with fundamentalism. As much as anything, they reflect Germans' continuing rejection of what they call "over- foreignization." Like the blood-based citizenship laws that until a few years ago made it difficult for anyone but ethnic Germans to become citizens, a law to promote "the roots of Christian religion" can have no other effect than to divide "true" Germans from later arrivals. Unlike France, whose strict secularism has in the past helped assimilate religious and ethnic minorities, Germany often pretends as if it were still the (almost) homogenous Christian country it once was. Muslim and Jewish leaders have decried the pretense. But so far, only one major "German" politician has done so. That was Johannes Rau, Germany's figurehead president, who is himself the son of a Protestant preacher. "If the headscarf is forbidden, then it's going to be hard to defend the monk's robe or the crucifix," Rau said in his traditional New Year's speech--for which he was rebuked by much of the German political spectrum.

All this comes just as Germany's Muslims are becoming increasingly visible. Vowing to "take Islam out of the back alleys," newly self-confident Islamic groups have launched a veritable building boom to construct prominent and visible mosques, minarets and ...