The mass French return to work, often known as the “rentrée,” is usually marked by renewed social battle. This yr has been no exception because the summer season lull has given technique to one more battle over a recurrent nationwide obsession: How Muslim ladies ought to costume.
Late final month, with France nonetheless in trip mode, Gabriel Attal, 34, the newly appointed schooling minister and a favourite of President Emmanuel Macron, declared that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”
His abrupt order, which applies to public center and excessive faculties, banished the loosefitting full-length gown worn by some Muslim college students and ignited one other storm over French identification.
The authorities believes the position of schooling is to dissolve ethnic or spiritual identification in a shared dedication to the rights and obligations of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.”
Since then, organizations representing the nation’s massive Muslim minority of about 5 million folks have protested; some younger ladies have taken to carrying kimonos or different lengthy clothes to highschool as an example their view that the ban is bigoted; and a fierce debate has erupted over whether or not Mr. Attal’s August shock, simply earlier than college students went again to their lecture rooms, was a vote-seeking provocation or a needed protection of the secularism that’s France’s ideological basis.
“Attal wanted to look tough, and draw the political benefits, but this was cheap courage,” stated Nicolas Cadène, the co-founder of a corporation that screens laïcité in France, which is broadly the thought of a nondiscriminatory society the place the state upholds strict spiritual neutrality. “Real courage would be to tackle the lack of social mingling in our schools, leading to segregated development and separate ethnic and religious identification.”
France banned “ostentatious” spiritual symbols in center and excessive faculties virtually 20 years in the past. This, just like the Second Amendment within the United States, left a lot room for interpretation.
The difficulty has been whether or not the 2004 legislation took purpose equally at Muslim head scarves, Catholic crosses and Jewish kipas, for instance, or was in impact a way to focus on an Islam considered as more and more threatening. The abaya, a garment that typically displays Muslim spiritual affiliation however might merely quantity to the selection of modest apparel, had inhabited a grey space till Mr. Attal’s pronouncement.
In follow, “ostentatious,” as interpreted by faculty officers, has tended to imply Muslim. France’s concern over the fracturing of its secular mannequin, fueled by a sequence of devastating assaults by Islamist terrorists, has targeted on the perceived hazard that Muslims will shun purportedly common “Frenchness” in favor of their spiritual identification, and fanaticism in its title.
The niqab, the veil, the burkini, the abaya and even the pinnacle scarves worn by Muslim ladies accompanying youngsters on faculty journeys have all been pored over in France to a level uncommon in Europe — and far more so within the United States, which posits freedom of faith in distinction to French freedom from faith.
No French president would ever counsel that God bless France. The nation’s lay mannequin supplants any deity. A 2021 survey from IFOP, a number one French polling group, discovered that half of French folks determine as atheists, a far larger proportion than within the United States.
Over current years, laïcité, set out in a 1905 legislation that eliminated the Roman Catholic Church from public life, has hardened from a broadly accepted and little debated mannequin that permitted freedom of conscience right into a inflexible and contested dogma. It has been passionately embraced on the suitable, and supported by a large spectrum of society, because the French protection in opposition to every little thing from Islamist fundamentalism to American multiculturalism.
“This should have been done in 2004, and would have been if we did not have gutless leaders,” Marine Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigration chief, stated of Mr. Attal’s announcement. “As General MacArthur observed, lost battles can be summed up in two words: too late.”
The query is: too late for what? To ban the abaya from faculties, as Mr. Attal now calls for? Or to cease the unfold of inferior, understaffed faculties in ghettoized, drug-plagued neighborhoods on the outskirts of massive cities, the place the alternatives for kids of Muslim immigrants are diminished and the potential of radicalization elevated?
Here is the place France splits — not down the center, as a result of Mr. Attal’s ban has an approval stage of over 80 p.c, in accordance with polls, however in important methods for the nation’s future sense of itself.
Where some nonetheless see laïcité because the core of a supposedly colorblind nation of equal alternative, others see a type of hypocrisy that masks how removed from unprejudiced France has develop into, as illustrated by these troubled suburbs with massive Muslim populations.
Hence the explosiveness simply beneath the floor of French life.
Fury nonetheless lingers over the beheading by an Islamist extremist of Samuel Paty, a trainer who in 2020 confirmed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in school as an example how free speech works in a secular France.
At the identical time, the nights of violent rioting in June this yr that adopted a police officer’s taking pictures of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, demonstrated the pent-up rage stirred by the sensation that to be Muslim in France is to be at larger danger.
“The French government that invokes the laws of 1905 and 2004 to ‘protect the values of the Republic’ from an adolescent dress reveals its great weakness and lack of initiative in creating a peaceful form of living together that would ignore differences,” Agnès de Féo, a sociologist, wrote within the day by day Le Monde.
To which Éric Ciotti, a pacesetter of the Republicans, a center-right social gathering, retorted that “communautarisme” — or identification at the beginning with a non secular or ethnic identification — is “a leprosy that threatens the Republic.” Mr. Attal, he stated in an announcement, had given the suitable response.
The views of the Republicans are vital to Mr. Macron as a result of his Renaissance social gathering and its centrist allies should not have an absolute majority in Parliament, and their likeliest ally in passing laws might be Mr. Ciotti’s social gathering.
In this sense, Mr. Attal’s determination has a transparent political dimension. Mr. Macron governs from the middle however leans proper.
Mr. Attal took over one of the delicate of French ministries in July, after his predecessor, Pap Ndiaye, the primary Black schooling minister, was successfully hounded from workplace by a torrent of rightist abuse, with thinly veiled racism showing to lace a lot of the vitriol in opposition to him.
He was focused for his supposed importation into France of America’s “doctrine of diversity” and his “reduction of everything to skin color,” as Valeurs Actuelles journal, an extreme-right publication, put it this spring.
In June, simply earlier than he was ousted, Mr. Ndiaye rejected a sweeping ban on abayas of the type adopted by Mr. Attal and upheld by a prime French courtroom final week. He stated, “We are not going to edit a catalog of hundreds of pages with dresses of different colors and forms of sleeves.”
Rather, Mr. Ndiaye stated, choices about abayas needs to be left to the discretion of faculty principals.
Outside a highschool within the northern Paris commune of Stains, Sheik Sidibe, a 21-year-old Black instructing assistant, stated he had till not too long ago labored at a faculty the place the principal “showed a lack of respect” to Muslim college students, “putting in place checkpoints where she arbitrarily decided which students could enter and which not” and criticizing Muslim ladies who selected to put on head scarves on the street.
“We should focus on real problems, like lousy teachers’ salaries,” stated Mr. Sidibe, who’s Muslim. “We have students living in states of extreme precariousness and we marginalize them even more. Our mission should not be to police clothes.”
The political ramifications of Mr. Attal’s measure stay to be seen. What seems clear already is that in a restive French society, it has been extra polarizing than unifying, the declared purpose of laïcité.
“Laïcité must be a form of liberty, the equality of everyone whatever their convictions,” Mr. Cadène stated. “It must not turn into a weapon to silence or block people. That is not how you make it attractive.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle from Stains, France.
Source: www.nytimes.com