2023-08-29 20:23:31

Gabriel Attal “decided that we might no longer wear the abaya at school”. So he decided last Sunday, on the set of the 8 p.m. newspaper on TF1.

The Minister of Education by deciding on the wearing of this outfit, did not fail to provoke the anger of part of the left.

An “Islamophobic controversy” according to the Insoumis, for whom this decision is to evacuate the subjects, the fact that national education is in pain”.

For the Insoumis MP Thomas Porte, interviewed on BFM TV on the morning of August 28, the Minister of Education is creating a diversion by banning the abaya. A position shared by most of the troops of La France Insoumise like the deputy Antoine Léaument who affirmed on X that “Attal launches this Islamophobic controversy so that we avoid looking at his balance sheet at the start of the school year”?

The president of the Insoumis group in the Assembly Mathilde Panot for her part castigated what she considers to be an attack once morest Muslims and likened the minister to the president of the Republicans Éric Ciotti.

Clémentine Autain denounced a decision “symptomatic of the obsessive rejection of Muslims”. The elected environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau has opted for a convergence of struggles, recalling that in 2022, it is the “crop top” which had been banned, these measures aiming according to her to exercise “social control over the body women and girls”.

The abaya, religious “sign” or “dress”?

The 2004 law refrains from drawing up an inventory of the “signs” and “clothing” prohibited in establishments. However, an application circular issued in May 2004, a few weeks following the law came into force, identified three “signs” allowing students to “immediately have their religious affiliation recognized”, which should therefore to prohibit: the Islamic veil, “whatever the name given to it”, the (Jewish) yarmulke and crosses, if they are “obviously excessive in size”.

The circular implied that this list was not exhaustive. François Fillon, the Minister of Education at the time, had thus taken care to recall that the law had been drafted “in such a way as to respond to the appearance of new signs, even to possible attempts to circumvent [du texte] ».

Considering that the wearing of the abaya by students of the Muslim faith was “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the Republic to the secular sanctuary that the school must constitute”, Gabriel Attal underlined the determination of the French government to be “firm on this subject”.

“You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them”, hammered the minister in his televised intervention.
The Minister did not indicate a specific date for applying this ban.

He just expressed the wish to meet with school officials “from next week” to implement his theory.

“A form of fashion, not a religious dress”

“The abaya is not a religious outfit, it’s a form of fashion,” said Abdallah Zekri, vice-president of the French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM), in reaction to the ban on wearing the abaya at school, announced by Minister of Education Gabriel Attal, Sunday evening.

Abdallah Zekri answered a question posed by a journalist from BFMTV, just following the intervention of the French Minister of Education.

“I think the minister might have exchanged, asked the opinion of religious leaders. For me, the abaya is not a religious outfit, it’s a form of fashion”, hinted the vice-president of the CFCM .

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