PARIS, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- Every morning for two years, Samira Makhlouf removed her head scarf before entering her public school in the southeastern French city of Lyon.
When she swapped her Islamic head cover for a modest black bandanna, the principal sent her home. Despite her good grades, Makhlouf was rejected from a special educational track -- in retaliation, she says, for her religious beliefs.
Finally, in frustration, the Algerian-born student dropped out at age 16, finishing high school by correspondence.
"Removing my head scarf was like tearing something away," said Makhlouf, now a 22-year-old theology student at Lyon University. "I felt my rights were being abridged. There were students who wore all black and were part of a satanic sect, but nobody bothered them."
Today, Makhlouf is championing the right of Muslim girls to cover their heads -- an option increasingly under siege in France - amid calls to ban head scarves in public schools.
At least four parliamentary bills have been drafted calling for outlawing veils and head scarves in public schools, along with other religious accessories, such as crosses and skullcaps. Similar laws already prohibit them for public school teachers and government employees. Now the government of French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is reportedly poised to introduce its own anti-veil legislation.
"The government must intervene," says Juliette Minces, a sociologist who has written a number of books on the veil and Islam. "Teachers have a hard time with these girls, who come to school wearing the veil, who refuse to attend gym or biology courses, who won't read Voltaire because he was a nonbeliever."
But advocates argue that banning schoolgirls from wearing the Muslim head scarf or veil -- the terms are used interchangeably -- would threaten basic French liberties, including the right to religious expression.
"If I wasn't convinced it was an obligation to veil, I wouldn't," says Noura Jaballah, 43, who heads a conservative association for Muslim women near Paris. "Life here would be a lot easier if I didn't."
The battle over the veil is playing out across Europe and the Middle East as well as in the United States, where a Florida judge barred a Muslim woman from obtaining her driver's license with a face-covering niqab.
Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, with tiny Muslim populations, have generally tolerated veiling. But women in Turkey and Tunisia, both overwhelmingly Muslim countries, are barred from wearing the veil in schools, universities and public workplaces, as part of larger crackdowns against Muslim fundamentalists.
Even in Egypt, women wearing niqabs or other coverall apparel can be harassed as suspected members of banned Islamic groups.
In France, home to about 5 million Muslims, one of Western Europe's largest Muslim populations, the veil issue weaves fears of growing fundamentalism with women's rights issues. It pits the country's fiercely secular creed against European human rights laws.
It illustrates, too, the sharp divide between a well-educated and upwardly mobile French Muslim minority and thousands of second- and third-generation immigrants who remain angry and isolated in the suburbs. Some have found solace in religion.
"The head scarf today symbolizes a defeat for the French government, which has failed to integrate these minorities," says Francoise Gaspard, a sociologist at the Advanced Group of Social Studies in Paris, who opposes a veil ban.
"I can't predict the future," she adds. "But banning the veil may lead to new Koranic schools. And it's unlikely they will teach French values of secularity. Or about equality between men and women."
France's veil battles began in 1989, when three girls were kicked out of a school in northern France for covering their heads. By the mid-1990s, educators were grappling with how to respond to thousands of veiled girls arriving to class. The cultural clash quickly took new dimensions.
"We began seeing girls and boys who wouldn't shake hands in the name of Islam," says Hanifa Cherifi, who handles veil issues at the Ministry of Education. "Boys would dispute the authority of female teachers. Girls would refuse to attend gym class."
The official answer -- murky rules permitting veils in school, so long as they were not ostentatious, and students did not proselytize -- was no answer, critics say. Even today, the French government appears divided on tougher rules, with President Jacques Chirac opposed to anti-veil legislation backed by members of his governing party, Union for a Popular Movement.
"If we want the school to remain a sanctuary, we cannot avoid creating a law," says UMP lawmaker Francois Baroin, who is championing anti-veil legislation in France's National Assembly.
School veil disputes have dropped radically in recent years. But the statistics are deceiving, experts say. In some cases, school administrators offer girls like Samira Makhlouf a stark choice: school or the veil. But in others, teachers work out compromises or look the other way.
Noura Jaballah's daughter Alaa, for example, began wearing a head scarf in high school without a hitch.
"I've never had problems," says the 19-year-old, wearing a gray scarf one recent afternoon. "My teachers and my friends look beyond my appearance."
France's veiling problem still touches only a small percentage of the country's Muslims. Indeed, a 2001 survey found only 20 percent of French Muslims -- many of them ethnic North Africans -- went regularly to mosque. More than a third described themselves as non-practicing. Nonetheless, experts say a growing number of Muslim women and girls are donning the veil.
"It's very obvious on the streets," says Cherifi, an ethnic Algerian. "It was rare to see women veiling 15 years ago. That's no longer the case."
Such signs of religious expression are being scrutinized with a wary official eye. This year, France's law-and-order interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, coaxed long-squabbling religious leaders to launch a representative Muslim council -- partly, he argued, to counter a budding, extremist-tinged "Islam of the cellars."
But the 5-month-old council is deadlocked on the head scarf issue, reflecting a larger split between moderate and conservative Muslims over the place of religion in France.
"Women should be allowed to wear what they want on the streets, but not in public schools, not in state institutions," argues Khadija Khali, head of the mainstream French Union for Muslim Women, who does not veil. "Wearing the veil is not a law in Islam -- it is negotiable."
On the other side of the debate sit women like Makhlouf, who heads an association supporting the rights of Muslim women in France. Or Jaballah, who is among the few women sitting on the country's newly created Muslim council.
Jaballah and her husband are members of the popular but controversial Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a coalition with alleged ties to Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood party.
"To me, veiling is a personal choice," says Jaballah, echoing arguments voiced by French human rights advocates and civil libertarians. "Islam is new in France, and I can understand the difficulties that can exist.
"But if we start by banning the veil in France," she asks, "where will we end?"
