The row that has erupted at Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela school in north London highlights the difference in how Britain and France confront Islamic conservatism in education and wider society.

Birbalsingh has displayed courage in imposing a blanket ban on all ritual prayer in the school, but nonetheless in France such displays of religiosity have been outlawed for more than a century.

Initially this was to curb the influence of the Catholic church, but in recent decades it has been Islam attempting to undermine the secularism of French schools. It began in the autumn of 1989 when three teenage girls arrived at their school in a suburb of northern Paris wearing headscarves. They were sent home. The furore that followed made global headlines, particularly in the West, still disorientated by the more radical Islam that had emerged from the Iranian Revolution a decade earlier.

In excluding the three girls from his school in Creil, the headmaster, Ernest Chenieres, told reporters that ‘patience has its limits…I will not permit these three young girls to continue to disrupt this school’.

The majority of French intellectuals and politicians, whatever their political persuasion, supported the school’s position. The health minister in Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist government, Claude Evin, said that ‘wearing veils is a reduction of freedom’ and it was the duty of the state to give this freedom to Muslim girls ‘who do not find it in their own family’.

There was a minority of left-wing organisations which sided with the three girls. Harlem Desir, the leader of the anti-racism group SOS Racisme, said that ‘banning things is to fall into a trap set by fundamentalism…blue jeans will eventually win over the head scarf.’

Thirty-five years later the battle between blue jeans and headscarves continues. The French state is winning, but only by the strict enforcement of Laïcité (secularism) in its schools. As recently as last September, there was another attempt by Islamists to impose their will on France, this time in the wearing of the full-length abaya.

The reaction of many politicians and media commentators in the Anglosphere has been to accuse France of ‘Islamophobia’. In doing so they reveal their ignorance of what is at stake. In 2013 the then Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, rejected the concept of ‘Islamophobia’, describing it as the ‘Salafists’ Trojan Horse’.  Successive governments have maintained this line and now the only party that cleaves to the idea of Islamophobia is the far-left La France Insoumise, which recently had one of its politicians describe Hamas as a ‘resistance movement’.

The rest of France understands that ‘Islamophobia’ is essentially an unofficial blasphemy law, a means of silencing anyone who dares question any aspect of Islam. Emmanuel Macron experienced this first hand in October 2020 when, following the brutal murder of a schoolteacher in France, he declared that the country would continue to exercise its right to free speech, whoever might be offended. In response Imran Khan, the then PM of Pakistan, accused Macron of ‘encouraging Islamophobia’.

Britain, on the other hand, has been cowed into fear by the tyranny of ‘Islamophobia’. After a spate of Islamist terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May said Britain needed to have ‘embarrassing conversations’ about how to deal with Islamic extremism. These were not forthcoming. On the contrary, there was a doubling down on the cult of Islamophobia.

In 2018 the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims published a policy guide in which they defined Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ To victimise someone because of their religion is wrong; to criticise aspects of a religion is not. A 2015 poll found that 52 per cent of British Muslims disagreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain. Is it Islamophobic to challenge this?

The tyranny of Islamophobia has emboldened extremists in Britain because they know that politicians and police chiefs are too frightened to stand up to them. Look at how a teacher was driven out of a Yorkshire school after showing a cartoon of Mohammed, with barely a murmur of protest from the establishment; look at the marches on the streets of London with their virulent anti-Semitism; and look at how a school could be forced to shut over bomb threats because it has been judged ‘Islamophobic’.

As Fraser Nelson writes in the Telegraph, all this has been allowed to happen under 14 years of Tory rule because the party ‘have been confused on this for years, not sure whether to pose as champions of diversity or enemies of identity politics.’

There will be no such ambiguity if Labour wins the next election. Last year one of their MPs, Naz Shah, said the party was ‘committed to tackling Islamophobia’ and once in power they would ‘introduce a landmark Race Equality Act to tackle structural racism across society.’

What form might this Act take? Ed Miliband gave a glimpse in 2015 when he was the Labour leader. If he became PM, he told Muslim News, ‘Islamophobia’ would be a crime. ‘We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police, to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime,’ he vowed.

Britain is not ‘Islamophobic’, and nor is France. Both countries face the threat from Islamic extremism. Where they differ is in their response. France confronts it but Britain capitulates.