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29-08-2023
PARIS: French Education Minister Gabriel Attal said that the country is to stop women from wearing abayas in schools as they are violating the strict secular laws of the country, regarding the attire worn by some Muslims as a “religious gesture,” as the decision triggered mixed reactions from observers.
Attal told TF1 television: “It will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school.
He further said that he would give “clear rules at the national level to school heads ahead of the return to classes nationwide from September 4.”
According to media, the right and far-right had pushed for the ban, which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties.
The decision comes months after a long argument over the wearing of abayas in schools, where women have not been allowed to wear the headscarf.
There have been reports of abayas being increasingly worn in schools and tensions within schools 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.”
He maintained: “You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them.”
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 a 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.
It described the abaya as one of a group of items of clothing whose wearing could be banned if they were “worn in a manner as to openly display a religious affiliation”. The circular put bandanas and long skirts in the same category. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
