Bye Bye, Abaya

The government touched off another cultural controversial by banning the loose-fitting dress worn by some Muslim teenage girls for violating the nation's rules around secularism.

As if France’s overworked educators didn’t have enough on their plate to get ready for a new school year, a French minister decided to toss another obligation on their shoulders:

Fashion police.

In late August, French Education and Youth Minister Gabriel Attal, who at the age of 16 is the youngest cabinet official in the nation’s history, apparently rolled out of bed in a mood and announced that the abaya would no longer be permitted to be worn by teenage girls at school.

Just kidding. Attal is really 34, and reportedly almost old enough to shave.

“The school of the Republic was built around strong values, secularism is one of them. … When you enter a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the religion of pupils,” Attal said in a TV interview. “I announce that [pupils] will no longer be able to wear abaya at school.”

Attal is referring to the nation’s core value of laïcité: a strict separation of public and religious life. Of course, there is the overarching principle of laïcité. And then there is the question of how that ideal is interpreted and practically enforced.

The official government laïcité website notes:

Secularism implies the separation of the State and religious organizations. The political order is based solely on the sovereignty of the people of citizens, and the State – which does not recognize or sponsor any religion – does not govern the internal functioning of religious organizations. From this separation is deduced the neutrality of the State, local authorities and public services, not of its users. The secular Republic thus imposes the equality of citizens in the face of administration and public service, whatever their convictions or beliefs.

The French often act like laïcité is an absolute, unbreakable tenant of French culture and politics. However, it apparently is flexible enough to allow the state to heavily subsidize more than 7,200 Catholic schools that educate about 16.9% of all French students. Or for the state to maintain several obscure Catholic holy days as national holidays.

But I digress…

Over the past few decades, laïcité has increasingly been interpreted to mean no religious symbols — crosses, yarmulkes, headscarves — in schools. Because that’s where students are indoctrinated taught the values of the Republic. Those items were expressly banned from schools under a 2004 law.

Ok, but is the abaya expressly religious?

Attal and many on the right say yes, absolutely. His abaya ban is technically a clarification of that previous law.

“Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” he said and the abaya is “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must be.”

Indeed, many on the right see the abaya as an effort to weaken that famous French secularism while promoting Islam to unsuspecting students. As Macron’s government has steadily crept to the right since he was first elected in 2017, cracking down on any signs of religious separatism, cultural and religious issues have been a favored way of gaining more favor with conservatives.

"Communitarianism is a leprosy that threatens the Republic. I welcome this decision, which proves us right,” said Eric Ciotti, president of Les Républicains, France’s right-of-center-right party, proclaimed.

However, French sociologist Kaoutar Harchi wrote that such bans are less about protecting secularism and more about the misguided fear that these teenage girls are somehow promoting an Islamic agenda.

“It is no longer so much a question of banning a long, loose garment to free young women from the grip of the Muslim patriarchy as about protecting other students from the proselytizing threat that these abaya-wearing adolescents could present. These girls are now seen as school-going envoys of global Islamism.”

Meanwhile, Muslim groups have denounced the latest ban as yet another attempt to scapegoat them in a way that promotes Islamaphobia. France's Council of Muslim Worship said earlier this year in a statement that the abaya is a cultural garment, not necessarily a religious one.

"Any item of clothing is not a religious sign in itself," the group said in a statement. "You only have to travel through Muslim-majority countries to realize that the citizens of these countries, of all faiths, are indistinguishable based on the clothes they wear.”

The ban was also denounced on the French left, notably by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, self-styled demagogue and leader of the left-leaning NUPES coalition.

“Sad to see the return to school politically polarized by a new absurd entirely artificial religious war about a woman's dress,” Mélenchon tweeted. “When will there be civil peace and true secularism that unites instead of exasperating?”

Joining the condemnation was the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Chair Abraham Cooper said the ban was a "misguided effort to promote the French value of laïcitë." He added:

"France continues to wield a specific interpretation of secularism to target and intimidate religious groups, particularly Muslims. While no government should use its authority to impose a specific religion on its population, it is equally condemnable to restrict the peaceful practice of individuals' religious beliefs to promote secularism."

Of course, the French will insist that Westerners in general, and Americans specifically, don’t “get” laïcité. The U.S. promotes freedom OF religion. France promotes freedom FROM religion.

Subsequent to Attal’s announcement, some associations challenged the ban in court, but France's State Council, the highest administrative court, dismissed the complaint, finding that wearing an abaya “follows the logic of religious affirmation."

Bad habits?

Obviously, the abaya represents an epidemic of the highest order that had to be addressed. As The Local’s John Lichfield wrote: “On the first day of the explicit ban on Muslim robes in French state schools, 298 pupils turned up for class improperly dressed. That amounts to 0.002 percent of all kids in the state education system.”

As the school year started earlier this month, Attal disclosed that he had identified 513 schools “as potentially concerned by this question at the start of the school year.” Attal said that indeed about 300 girls showed up on the first day of classes wearing an abaya. While most changed, 67 were sent home because they would not.

Of course, some students found ways to protest. At the Antoine-Bourdelle high school in Montauban, apparently, several young women wore long pink dresses including tunics and wide pants, and others wore kimonos. Others removed their abayas in dramatic fashion as news cameras rolled, according to Le Parisien.

The newspaper also observed that: “After the wide open gate, all the students advance in line under a white marquee, under the eye of the principal, Marie-Thérèse De Ona, her two assistants and a host of supervisors. In the background, the ‘Values of the Republic’ (VDR) team, two men in suits, observe the young people entering.”

You might have a hard time coming up with something that sounds more Orwellian than a “Values of the Republic” team.

Meanwhile, Attal, brimming with grand ideas, has also announced plans to experiment with school uniforms this year. This is another favorite cause of the right, which lusts for a return to old French values, whatever those may have been.

Attal said he didn’t think school uniforms would be a miracle for what ails France’s schools. But: "I am very much in favor of a trial so that it can advance the debate. The best way to get an idea is to test things out in schools."

School kids, no doubt, will be thrilled.

Chris O’Brien

Le Pecq