France will bar kids in public colleges from sporting the abaya, a loosefitting, full-length gown worn by some Muslim girls, the federal government stated this week. It stated the measure was essential to stem a rising variety of disputes in its secular faculty system.
But critics known as the ban a discriminatory policing of youngsters’ clothes, fueling one more debate in France over the best way Muslim girls gown, which has change into 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 sporting “ostentatious” symbols which have a transparent spiritual 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, nevertheless — an extended gown that covers the legs and arms, however not the fingers, ft or head — falls right into a grey space. While it’s in style within the Gulf and in some Arab nations, it doesn’t have a transparent spiritual significance.
In France, it’s largely worn by Muslim girls who need 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 how one can cope with a small however rising variety of college students coming to class sporting abayas.
This week, the federal government responded.
“The abaya has no place in schools,” Gabriel Attal, the training 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 “increased considerably” in French colleges.
“When you enter a classroom, you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal advised the TF1 tv channel on Sunday.
Laïcité applies to quite a few public establishments — public hospital staff, for example, can’t put on spiritual clothes — and there may be robust cultural aversion to public expressions of religion.
But colleges have traditionally been the focus of debates across the challenge.
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 are actually broadly seen as impartial areas that forge citizenship and the place college students may be shielded from spiritual influences.
“Schools are still an emblematic battlefield,” stated Anne-Laure Zwilling, an anthropologist specializing in faith on the CNRS, France’s nationwide public analysis group. “Tensions around laïcité are stronger there.”
France was just lately scarred by the killing of Samuel Paty, a instructor who confirmed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in school as an instance free speech, which led to his beheading in 2020 by an Islamist fanatic.
But a nationwide abaya ban was like “using a bulldozer to crush a fly,” Ms. Zwilling stated, as a result of it introduced disproportionate consideration to a fancy challenge affecting few college students.
“The same behavior can have a totally different meaning depending on the person and on the context,” she stated.
Official statistics present the variety of incidents associated to laïcité reported by faculty officers has elevated, to wherever between 200 to 900 per thirty days over the previous 12 months, amongst a middle- and high-school scholar inhabitants of practically 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. Teacher unions have been extra circumspect.
Sophie Vénétitay, the top of one of many predominant instructor unions, known as the ban a “political maneuver” by President Emmanuel Macron to curry favor with the appropriate. But, she added, abayas have been an actual challenge that ought to neither be “overestimated nor underestimated.”
“There’s would be nothing worse than for those pupils, through provocation, misunderstanding or frustration, to turn away from state schools and go to denominational or private schools,” Ms. Vénétitay stated at a news convention.
The French Council of the Muslim Faith, an umbrella group of Muslim organizations, stated that the abaya was not spiritual in its nature, however an ill-defined garment tied to Arab tradition. The authorities shouldn’t determine what’s spiritual or not, it stated.
“Unless all long dresses are banned altogether in schools, for students and teachers, regardless of their faith, it will be impossible to apply a measure specifically targeting the abaya without falling into the trap of discrimination and arbitrariness,” the Council stated in a assertion.
Opposition events on the appropriate praised the ban, however the left was divided.
“How far will the clothing police go?” stated Clémentine Autain, a lawmaker for the leftist France Unbowed get together, saying the ban exemplified an “obsessive rejection of Muslims.”
But Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist lawmaker, stated that if abayas have been worn as an ostentatious spiritual image, they clearly violated the legislation. “It is not a clothing police but a policing of proselytizing in school,” he stated.
In November, Mr. Attal’s predecessor, Pap Ndiaye, stated headmasters might ban clothes even when it didn’t have any inherent spiritual significance, like lengthy skirts or bandannas, if officers believed that they have been worn “to ostensibly express a religious belonging.”
But Mr. Ndiaye — an instructional of Senegalese and French descent who was changed after months of vitriolic criticism from the appropriate and much proper — had refused to challenge a nationwide ban, arguing that he didn’t need to “publish endless catalogs specifying dress lengths” that might be circumvented or challenged in courtroom.
Ismail Ferhat, a professor on the University of Paris-Nanterre who has studied laïcité in colleges, stated college students typically wore abayas towards their mother and father’ will and famous that elements like social media fads or the teenage need to problem faculty authority additionally performed a task.
But France has grown extra secular over the previous few many years, Mr. Ferhat stated, and what might need been dismissed prior to now was now being flagged as critical.
“The line between religiously acceptable and unacceptable has changed,” he stated. “And the educational establishment is probably tougher on the issue than before.”
Source: www.nytimes.com