Only a few days before the start of the school year, the debate on Islamic headscarves in schools will continue and this will be hardened by petitions to prohibit the burqa. But the discussions on these kinds of symbols could also get radicalized in the coming months, just as it seems that the traditional or fundamentalist versions of Islam sticklers are growing fast in Spain. A strange situation, the experts say, in contrast with the religious attitude and behavior that prevails among the urban middle classes in countries like Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan. This is the case of the Syrian president's wife, Asma al-Assad, who came to Spain in July. Perhaps impressed by the debonair and European looks of Asma, a woman who has modern looks, wears short dresses and trousers, swims and rides a bike, and seems the same as the president, a reporter asked if that that was normal in her country, which she replied to that it was "a mirror of Syrian society." 

Islam In Spain also differs. Judging from positions that we can read on Islamic groups' webs in Spain, the manner in which they responded to hijab or burqa bans or the attitudes of some imams, it doesn't seem that Asma al-Assad is the prototype of the female Muslim Spain. Even among Spanish converts (between 35,000 and 40,000 people practice a moderate Islam). "What is not clear," says Fernando Bravo, TEIM (International Mediterranean Studies Workshop) of the Autonomous University of Madrid, "is whether this apparent spread of a more traditional Islam, even a fundamentalist one, is due to an increase in religiosity or an attitude of claims arising from the feeling, stronger in Europe than in their countries, that their identity is threatened".