Schoolgirls who refused to change out of the loose-fitting robes have been sent home with a letter to parents on secularism.
French public schools have sent dozens of girls home for refusing to remove their abayas – long, loose-fitting robes worn by some Muslim women and girls – on the first day of the school year, according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal.
Defying a ban on the garment seen as a religious symbol, nearly 300 girls showed up on Monday morning wearing abayas, Attal told the BFM broadcaster on Tuesday.
Most agreed to change out of the robe, but 67 refused and were sent home, he said.
The government announced last month it was banning the abaya in schools, saying it broke the rules on secularism in education that have already seen headscarves forbidden on the grounds they constitute a display of religious affiliation.
The move gladdened the political right but the hard left argued it represented an affront to civil liberties.
The 34-year-old minister said the girls refused entry on Monday were given a letter addressed to their families saying that “secularism is not a constraint, it is a liberty”.
If they showed up at school again wearing the gown there would be a “new dialogue”.
He added that he was in favour of trialling school uniforms or a dress code amid the debate over the ban.
Uniforms have not been obligatory in French schools since 1968 but have regularly come back on the political agenda, often pushed by conservative and far-right politicians.
Attal said he would provide a timetable later this year for carrying out a trial run of uniforms with any schools that agree to participate.
“I don’t think that the school uniform is a miracle solution that solves all problems related to harassment, social inequalities or secularism,” he said.
But he added: “We must go through experiments, try things out” in order to promote debate, he said.
‘Worst consequences’
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris before the ban came into force said Attal deemed the abaya a religious symbol which violates French secularism.
“Since 2004, in France, religious signs and symbols have been banned in schools, including headscarves, kippas and crosses,” she said.
“Gabriel Attal, the education minister, says that no one should walk into a classroom wearing something which could suggest what their religion is.”
On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron defended the controversial measure, saying there was a “minority” in France who “hijack a religion and challenge the republic and secularism”.
He said it leads to the “worst consequences” such as the murder three years ago of teacher Samuel Paty for showing Prophet Muhammad caricatures during a civics education class.
“We cannot act as if the terrorist attack, the murder of Samuel Paty, had not happened,” he said in an interview with the YouTube channel, HugoDecrypte.
An association representing Muslims has filed a motion with the State Council, France’s highest court for complaints against state authorities, for an injunction against the ban on the abaya and the qamis, its equivalent dress for men.
The Action for the Rights of Muslims (ADM) motion is to be examined later on Tuesday.
The kids aren’t being made to attend church on Sunday. They’re being made to be part of a secular society, one that takes its secularism more seriously than many other countries do.
Pure reactionary sophistry. They are not made to go to church, but they still get the Christian Sabbath off but not Muslim Jumu’ah (their equivalent, midday prayer) on Fridays. France is “secular” but it just so happens that the laws of its “secularism” cut in a direction that wildly favors Christianity.
You claim to be a communist, don’t you? You should know this quote:
– Anatole France
As I said, liberal abstraction that obscures the deliberate material impact of the laws.
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I was taking an opportunity to demonstrate a point with what you said, not suggesting that all bread stealing should be legalized.
Your ideology is a joke. “Surely, some girl wearing too baggy a dress will hamper education and heighten religious differences. No, we must teach these children tolerance by socializing them in an environment where we have eliminated any visible deviations from the dominant (liberal Christian) culture. Then, when they go out on the street and see people who look different, they will in fact be more tolerant of people with traits alien to how they were socialized.”
Every word you say is just laundering reactionary bullshit under a veil of virtue.
This is an impasse. You look at French culture and see a liberal Christian one, I see a liberal secular one. When Christianity infects schools you don’t get dress codes you get much more overt and disgusting propagandizing, like what’s being pushed in Florida right now.
How can you be so far gone that you don’t see the Islamophobia all over France as being connected to Christianity?
hear me out: that just might be, really far stretch I know, but it just might be because the western weekend formed out of the Jewish Sabbath, which was adopted by Christianity. However it is not anymore the justification for having it. The only reason Saturday and Sunday are the weekend is because nobody bothered moving the date after the religious meaning was largely lost on the general population. Religion in Europe is in steep decline, unlike in certain other parts of the western world.
France has a population of ~40% Atheist/Agnostics. If you seriously think Christianity dictates the laws in France you are delusional.