A total of 298 female students were dressed in abayas to school on Monday, the first day of the course in France for 12 million students. This garment, characteristic of Muslims, covers the body of women from head to toe and has been banned in French schools. The Government of Emmanuel Macron argues that the abaya stigmatizes people of the Muslim faith and "represents a threat to their fundamental rights on a social level."
The Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, explained yesterday that the educational centers carried out "a phase of explanation, of pedagogy, of dialogue" with the 298 girls. “A large majority conformed to the norm,” he said, but 67 of the students decided to keep their clothes and go home. Although they will have to return to the centers, the minister said in statements to the BFM channel "because they have to be educated, and there it will be seen if they conform to the norm or not."
Attal has signed a letter for families to "explain that secularism is not a coercion." The government understands the abaya to be a religious symbol worn by female students to identify themselves as Muslim, and France in 2004 banned the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols in schools.
Macron insisted that the school must remain neutral. "I don't know what your religion is, you don't know what mine is," he reasoned on a well-known YouTube channel, and alluded to the high school teacher murdered in October 2020 in an act of Islamist terrorism for showing a cartoon of Muhammad. in a class on freedom of expression: "We can't pretend we haven't had the murder of Samuel Paty."
In this context, the French president was against the use of any "eccentric" garment in public schools and stated that the Government is going to experiment with uniforms or unified dress codes.
It is a recurring debate for decades in a country where the uniform has never been mandatory. As explained to Afp by the historian of education Laurence De Cock, the novelty is that until now this debate was the prerogative of a very conservative right. “We must not underestimate the political dimension of this announcement [the abaya ban]: bringing down the extreme right, the main promoter so far of the debate on uniforms,” he says. In this sense, in January the National Assembly rejected a bill by the far-right RN in favor of making uniforms compulsory in public schools.
For its part, the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM) announced legal action if the application of the veto on the abaya gives rise to forms of discrimination, and ensures that this garment "has never been a religious garment or prescription." Along these lines, the Council of State, the highest administrative judicial instance, began yesterday to examine the petition of the organization Action for the Rights of Muslims (ADM), which demands the suspension of the law.
