Each year, the start of school in France coincides with reports of Muslim girls kicked out of school for wearing the hijab, or head scarf.

This year was no exception. In the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, two sisters who insist on covering their heads and necks were expelled from a public high school because of a policy prohibiting obvious displays of religious affinity.

But the Muslim community has responded with an alternative. Spurred by a similar expulsion of 19 Muslim women from a state school in south Lille in 1994, the first Muslim high school in France opened its doors in September. And it is reenergizing a debate about the status of religion in a secular state.

For the center-right government of President Jacques Chirac, the school is an experiment aimed at meeting the demands of France's second biggest religion, after Roman Catholicism, while preserving the state's secular identity and containing the threat of fundamentalism.

The goal of the Lycée Averroés, named after a 12th-century Spanish Arabian philosopher, is to offer Muslim youths an alternative to state education, something Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have enjoyed for many years.

The creation of a Muslim school financed by the state like other private religious schools, will help to integrate France's 5 million Muslims, say supporters. But there is concern, even among Muslims, that it could isolate and radicalize Muslim students.

"We [France] are a democracy and they [Muslims] have the right to open a school, like anybody else," says Jacqueline Costa- Lascoux, an expert on French secularism and a member of a state commission studying the issue. "But democracy is weak in the face of fundamentalism."

The authorization of the school follows the election of the French Council for the Muslims in April this year, an initiative by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to "give the country's Muslims a voice." Protestant and Jewish groups have had similar councils for 100 years.

Mr. Sarkozy also reinvigorated debate about the hijab this year when he insisted that Muslim women appear uncovered in national identity photographs.

President Chirac subsequently appointed the state commission to recommend by the end of the year whether a law to impose secularism is necessary.

The controversy is not limited to France. A recent constitutional court judgment in Germany, which has a smaller Muslim community of mainly Turkish immigrants, ruled that a Muslim teacher was unfairly dismissed for refusing to remove her headscarf at work.

Situated on the third floor of the Al Imane Mosque, the French school is in the heart of a largely Muslim area that has been the scene of violent clashes between Muslims and police in the past.

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