France: Hijab and the City

Being French and Muslim doesn't mean a girl can't have fun.

Olivia SnaijeSeptember 1, 2010 06:12Updated September 5, 2010 07:48

Mariame and Khadija Tighanimine, founders of the webzine "Hijab and the City," in Paris. (Courtesy of Nadia Benchallal, Contact Press Images)

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PARIS, France — The youngest of six children, all born in France to Moroccan parents, Mariame Tighanimine was in her last year of high school when the 2004 act was passed prohibiting the "conspicuous" display of religious symbols (including the veil) in French state schools.

“There were four of us who had to make a decision," Tighanimine, who had been wearing the veil for several years, said. "We decided to respect the law and [instead] wore bandanas that we bought at Zara.”

The current debate in French society over the burqa recalls the brouhaha over the headscarf that began at least 10 years ago. At the time, Le Figaro magazine famously asked the question: “Who has to adapt, Islam or France?”

On July 13, the French parliament voted to ban full-length veils in public. The vote underlines once again Europe’s discomfort with issues of immigration, religion and ethnicity that have come to the fore in countries such as France, which has grudgingly become a melting pot.

But many young French Muslims can’t see what all the fuss is about.

“France is a land of immigration,” said Tighanimine, now 23 and co-founder of a French-language women’s webzine called "Hijab and the City."

"I’ve never known anything but France. Everything that I’ve ingested has been French. I support secularism and don’t impose my religion on anyone else," she said.

Tighanimine’s parents came to France from southern Morocco in the early 1970s and settled in the Paris suburbs.

Tighanimine passed her baccalaureate and went on to get a university degree in sociology and economics. Her older sister, Khadija, who had studied architecture and urbanism, in the meantime could not find a job.

“She was basically told that if she took off her head scarf then she would be hired,” Tighanimine said.

“We’re in a country where we constantly have to prove ourselves. Other countries focus on the environment or social issues. Here they focus on something as simple as a veil.”

All of Tighanimine's five sisters wear a head scarf. It would not have been a problem for her parents if she hadn’t wanted to wear one, she said, but it seemed like a natural continuity.

“I hadn’t anticipated the problems this would cause in France,” she said.

Khadija and Mariame decided that if no one would hire them, they would go into business themselves.

"Hijab and the City," a webzine for “French women of Muslim culture,” went live in May 2008 and has been steadily attracting readers.

The tongue-in-cheek combination of the word Hijab, a broad word for head coverings, with the Candace Bushnell-inspired TV series, is intended to underline that “we are Western Muslims, who live our religion while remaining women.”

Tighanimine likes to say, “We are more than just walking veils.”

The site’s clean and simple design covers such broad topics as cooking, fashion and beauty, single and married life, psychology and spirituality.