France will ban youngsters in public colleges from carrying the abaya, a loosefitting, full-length gown worn by some Muslim ladies, the federal government stated this week. It stated the measure was essential to stem a rising variety of disputes in its secular faculty system.
However critics known as the ban a discriminatory policing of youngsters’ clothes, fueling yet one more debate in France over the best way Muslim ladies costume, which has turn out to be a recurring flashpoint within the nation’s relations with its Muslim minority.
Since 2004, center and high-school college students in France have been barred from carrying “ostentatious” symbols which have a transparent non secular which means, like a Catholic cross, a Jewish skullcap or a Muslim head scarf. Since 2011, it has additionally been unlawful to put on a face-covering veil in public in France. French folks broadly agree with these guidelines.
The abaya, nonetheless — a protracted costume that covers the legs and arms, however not the arms, toes or head — falls right into a grey space. Whereas it’s widespread within the Gulf and in some Arab nations, it doesn’t have a transparent non secular significance.
In France, it’s principally worn by Muslim ladies who wish to comply with the Quran’s teachings on modesty. Headmasters had voiced concern over the previous 12 months that they wanted clear directions from the federal government on the right way to take care of a small however rising variety of college students coming to class carrying abayas.
This week, the federal government responded.
“The abaya has no place in colleges,” Gabriel Attal, the schooling minister, stated on Monday.
Mr. Attal stated assaults on the precept of laïcité — France’s model of secularism, which ensures freedom of conscience but in addition the neutrality of the state and of some public areas — had “elevated significantly” in French colleges.
“Whenever you enter a classroom, you shouldn’t be in a position to distinguish or determine the scholars’ faith by taking a look at them,” Mr. Attal advised the TF1 tv channel on Sunday.
Laïcité applies to quite a few public establishments — public hospital workers, as an illustration, can not put on non secular clothes — and there’s robust cultural aversion to public expressions of religion.
However colleges have traditionally been the focus of debates across the situation.
Laïcité got here out of the Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century however was additionally the results of a centuries-long battle to reject the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in colleges, which at the moment are broadly seen as impartial areas that forge citizenship and the place college students might be shielded from non secular influences.
“Colleges are nonetheless an emblematic battlefield,” stated Anne-Laure Zwilling, an anthropologist specializing in faith on the CNRS, France’s nationwide public analysis group. “Tensions round laïcité are stronger there.”
France was not too long ago scarred by the killing of Samuel Paty, a trainer who confirmed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in school for instance free speech, which led to his beheading in 2020 by an Islamist fanatic.
However a nationwide abaya ban was like “utilizing a bulldozer to crush a fly,” Ms. Zwilling stated, as a result of it introduced disproportionate consideration to a posh situation affecting few college students.
“The identical habits can have a very completely different which means relying on the individual and on the context,” she stated.
Official statistics present the variety of incidents associated to laïcité reported by faculty officers has elevated, to anyplace between 200 to 900 per thirty days over the previous 12 months, amongst a middle- and high-school scholar inhabitants of almost 6 million.
Unions representing faculty administration officers welcomed the ban, arguing the matter shouldn’t have been left to the various interpretations of headmasters scattered throughout roughly 10,000 center and excessive colleges. Instructor unions had been extra circumspect.
Sophie Vénétitay, the top of one of many primary trainer unions, known as the ban a “political maneuver” by President Emmanuel Macron to curry favor with the correct. However, she added, abayas had been an actual situation that ought to neither be “overestimated nor underestimated.”
“There’s could be nothing worse than for these pupils, by means of provocation, misunderstanding or frustration, to show away from state colleges and go to denominational or personal colleges,” Ms. Vénétitay stated at a information convention.
The French Council of the Muslim Religion, an umbrella group of Muslim organizations, stated that the abaya was not non secular in its nature, however an ill-defined garment tied to Arab tradition. The federal government shouldn’t determine what’s non secular or not, it stated.
“Until all lengthy clothes are banned altogether in colleges, for college students and academics, no matter their religion, it is going to be not possible to use a measure particularly focusing on the abaya with out falling into the lure of discrimination and arbitrariness,” the Council stated in a assertion.
Opposition events on the correct praised the ban, however the left was divided.
“How far will the clothes police go?” stated Clémentine Autain, a lawmaker for the leftist France Unbowed social gathering, saying the ban exemplified an “obsessive rejection of Muslims.”
However Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist lawmaker, stated that if abayas had been worn as an ostentatious non secular image, they clearly violated the legislation. “It isn’t a clothes police however a policing of proselytizing in class,” he stated.
In November, Mr. Attal’s predecessor, Pap Ndiaye, stated headmasters might ban clothes even when it didn’t have any inherent non secular significance, like lengthy skirts or bandannas, if officers believed that they had been worn “to ostensibly categorical a spiritual belonging.”
However Mr. Ndiaye — an instructional of Senegalese and French descent who was changed after months of vitriolic criticism from the correct and much proper — had refused to situation a nationwide ban, arguing that he didn’t wish to “publish countless catalogs specifying costume lengths” that could possibly be circumvented or challenged in courtroom.
Ismail Ferhat, a professor on the College of Paris-Nanterre who has studied laïcité in colleges, stated college students usually wore abayas towards their dad and mom’ will and famous that components like social media fads or the teenage want to problem faculty authority additionally performed a job.
However France has grown extra secular over the previous few a long time, Mr. Ferhat stated, and what may need been disregarded up to now was now being flagged as critical.
“The road between religiously acceptable and unacceptable has modified,” he stated. “And the academic institution might be harder on the problem than earlier than.”
