This article analyses the debate about the Islamic headscarf in France and Turkey, with particular reference to the law passed in France in 2004. It aims to bring out the spatial dimension of the secular: first, by underlining how the issue of the veil collapses spatial scales, from the individual (female) body to global geopolitical tensions; second, by looking at the specific place granted to schools as the primary focus of the political rows; and third, by teasing out some of the implicit assumptions about the `location', in both France and Turkey, of the threat to secularism. It concludes that in France, at least, the debate had less to do with religion as such than with the place, both physical and metaphorical, granted to the Other in French society.