PARIS: French authorities are to ban the wearing in school of abaya dresses worn by some Muslim women, the education minister said Sunday, arguing the garment violated France’s strict secular laws in education.

“It will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” Education Minister Gabriel Attal told TF1 television, saying he would give “clear rules at the national level” to school heads ahead of the return to classes nationwide from September 4.

The move comes after months of debate over the wearing of abayas in French schools, where women have long been banned from wearing the Islamic headscarf.

The right and far-right had pushed for the ban, which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties.

There have been reports of abayas being increasingly worn in schools and tensions within school over the issue between teachers and parents.

“Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” Attal said, describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.

“You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them,” he said.

A law of March 2004 banned “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” in schools.

This includes large crosses, Jewish kippas, and Islamic headscarves.

Unlike headscarves, abayas — a long, baggy garment worn to comply with Islamic beliefs on the modest dress — occupied a grey area and had faced no outright ban until now.

But the education ministry had already issued a circular on the issue in November last year.

Mixed reaction

Approached by head teachers’ unions about the issue, Attal’s predecessor as education minister Pap Ndiaye replied that he did not want “to publish endless catalogues to specify the lengths of dresses”.

At least one union leader, Bruno Bobkiewicz, welcomed Attal’s announcement Sunday.

“The instructions were not clear, now they are and we welcome it,” said Bobkiewicz, general secretary of the NPDEN-UNSA, which represents head teachers.

But Clementine Autain of the left-wing opposition France Unbowed party denounced what she described as the “policing of clothing”.

Attal’s announcement was “unconstitutional” and against the founding principles of France’s secular values, she argued — and symptomatic of the government’s “obsessive rejection of Muslims”.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2023