Fatemah Anvari, a grade 3 schoolteacher in Chelsea, Quebec, was recently removed from her position at Chelsea Elementary School because she wears hijab. The decision to remove Anvari came as a result of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21, which passed in 2019. Bill 21 formally bans state employees from wearing religious symbols in order to reinforce the state’s position of neutrality towards religion.

Anvari’s removal prompted a swift outcry of protest from Quebeckers seeking justice. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has championed this response, emphasizing the need for an active civil society to create change in state institutions. “The challenge we have on this one is making sure that people understand that fundamental rights need to be defended,” Trudeau told C.B.C. “Governments can and should defend [fundamental rights] and have a role in it, but our fellow citizens can also be standing up for each other.”

Although the law is currently being challenged at the provincial court level, it seems unlikely that the federal government will intervene. C.B.C. reports that Prime Minister Trudeau has not intervened in the matter of Bill 21 and hesitates to do so. The law was democratically voted on and continues to boast support from a majority of the province, which sees Bill 21 as the provincial government’s response to the resurgence of violent extremism associated with ISIS and its affiliates from 2014-2018.

After passing similar bills in France, President Emmanuel Macron has made statements saying that “Islamic separatism” has led to increased religious extremism. This so-called “separatism,” French conservatives claim, is worsened by blatant displays of religion, such as the hijab.

(Analysts from N.P.R. say that the most recent of these bills, an amendment banning anyone under the age of 18 from wearing hijab in public, is a merely an attempt by conservatives to win back voters from Marine Le Pen’s far right party before the French presidential election next year.)

While Trudeau’s support for active civil society is certainly commendable, critics are worried that a lack of federal intervention merely upholds and institutionalizes Bill 21’s racist undertones. Others worry that a federal intervention could undermine the same fundamental rights that many protestors are trying to defend. However, the increasing Islamophobia targeted at Muslim Canadians is deeply concerning. Six Muslims were killed at a Quebec City mosque in 2017, and a premeditated vehicular attack was committed against a Muslim family in Ontario earlier this year. Bill 21 is part of a developing pattern of xenophobia that is being marketed as the preservation of secular values.

In order to place Anvari’s case into context as part of this pattern, it is most appropriate to look to France, which, like Canada, is a predominantly Christian, secular country. According to the McGill Journal of Political Studies, Quebec is a Canadian province which identifies both linguistically and culturally with France, especially after a resurgence in French pride during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960’s, when a Liberal government nationalized the economy and the province’s identity. With this revival in the province’s French identity also came the reinstatement of French ideals, the most of prominent which was the ideal of laïcité. First conceived during the Age of Enlightenment as the right to “write, speak, and print,” the concept of laïcité has evolved in meaning and is now considered to be the state-granted freedom of expression and religion. In the French Republic, this laïcité system developed into the “Loi de séparation” (Law of Separation), which enforces religious neutrality in regard to state authority. French secularism is largely called on to protect French unity, but Quebecois secularism pointedly upholds the rights of the province in the federal political arena.

The French laïcité system has been the center of many conversations surrounding religious symbols and their place in the public sphere, especially in the classroom. Laïcité is a foundational part of the French Constitution and French culture, and can be thought of as the fraternal twin to the American principle of separation of church and state. While both forms of secularism promise state neutrality in regard to religion, each holds different opinions as to how visible those religions should be, specifically within state-operated spaces. For example, the U.S. protects citizens’ rights to both freely practice any religion and to do so visibly in public – at least on paper. The laïcité system, on the other hand, claims to uphold religious neutrality by removing all visible hints of religion from the public sphere.

However, the concept of secularism has been misappropriated in all mentioned cases to target Muslim communities and reinforce Islamophobia. There is room to critique the approaches which both French and American versions of secularism take to address the roles that race, privilege, and socioeconomic status play in a person’s relationships to religion and political power. As such, secularism laws such as these often come down hardest on religious minorities; hence, the underlying commonality of Islamophobia within many secular (and predominantly, Western) countries. Researcher Rim Sarah Alouan told N.P.R. that what we are seeing in these countries is the “weaponization of secularism.”

Secularism has become a tool which politicians harness in order to gain partisan support while further isolating communities of religious minorities by making them scapegoats in a political game. The public’s outrage at the cases of Fatemah Anvari and other Quebecois Muslims creates hope that the province will hold a follow-up vote to reverse Bill 21. However, the violence perpetrated against Muslims at the societal level will not cease until governments stop turning their Muslim citizens into scapegoats simply to justify their secular policies.