French Education Minister Gabriel Attal, centre, attends a meeting at the Bourbon high school in Saint-Denis-de-la-Reunion on the first day of school on the French overseas island of La Reunion, on Aug. 17.RICHARD BOUHET/AFP/Getty Images
La rentrée, as the back-to-school season is known in France, is starting off with yet another divisive civics lesson after the government’s move to prohibit a traditional Middle Eastern robe that had become a fashion statement among some Muslim high-schoolers.
Education Minister Gabriel Attal’s decree of a ban on the abaya – a toga-like full-length dress with Persian Gulf origins – comes almost two decades after France officially outlawed the wearing of religious symbols in public schools in 2004. Forced to remove their hijabs, many Muslim girls had started wearing the abaya to class during the 2022-23 school year, some as an act of protest, others simply because the dress had suddenly become trendy.
Confusion about whether the abaya qualified as a “religious symbol” under the 2004 law had left individual teachers and schools to make their own determinations. Mr. Attal’s predecessor, Pap Ndiaye – a left-leaning professor appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in 2022, in part to build bridges with minorities – had refused to intervene.
Alas, Mr. Macron last month turfed Mr. Ndiaye, replacing him with Mr. Attal, an intensely ambitious 34-year-old who has climbed the French political ladder with record speed. Like Mr. Macron, he is a former Socialist who strongly defends secularism as a cornerstone of French republicanism. Mr. Ndiaye had more in common with progressives for whom diversity trumped secularist doctrine, making him a prime target of conservative attacks.
The ministerial switch was emblematic of Mr. Macron’s efforts to court opposing political constituencies as he strives to bind his caucus of right- and left-wing politicians formerly aligned with one of France’s traditional political parties. By putting Mr. Attal in the education portfolio, Mr. Macron sought to course correct. He may have ended up overcorrecting.
“When you enter a classroom, you should not be able to identify pupils’ religion just by looking at them,” Mr. Attal stated in announcing the abaya ban on a Sunday news broadcast. “Wherever the Republic is tested, we must stand together.”
It is doubtful that a floppy garment worn by a few thousand Muslim teenagers poses much of threat to the 230-year-old French Republic. What is beyond doubt is that banning the abaya has French Muslims once again feeling targeted and stigmatized for political purposes.
The abaya ban comes only two months after France was set aflame after a teenager of North African descent was killed by a police officer in a Paris suburb, leading to the worst riots to rock the country since 2005. For Muslims who already feel rejected by French society, the abaya ban only hardens their cynicism toward the political establishment.
The most immediate consequence of the abaya ban (given that most French students will not be returning to class until next week) has been to split members of leftist NUPES coalition that has become the biggest obstacle to Mr. Macron’s legislative agenda since it won the second-largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly last year, after the President’s Renaissance Party.
Socialist and Communist deputies belonging to the NUPES coalition have come out in support of the ban, while members of the far-left France Unbowed and Green Party have denounced it as right-wing pandering by Mr. Macron. Their public bickering could lead to an outright implosion of the NUPES coalition in advance of next spring’s European elections, a development that would more than suit Mr. Macron.
France Unbowed has vowed to launch a constitutional challenge of the abaya ban, though its chances of success would not appear to be overwhelming.
In June, France’s Conseil d’État upheld the French Football Federation’s ban on female players wearing the hijab during soccer matches, ruling that the federation’s obligation to uphold religious neutrality and order in the provision of public services justified the ban. The same body last year struck down a municipal ordinance in Grenoble that authorized the burkini in public swimming pools for the same reason.
While the French Council on the Muslim Faith has insisted that the abaya is not a religious symbol, the former secretary-general of the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s top court, has countered that it most certainly is one according to the definition in the 2004 law.
“To reduce the abaya to a ‘cultural’ fad or chalk it up to an adolescent crisis is to deny that it is a manifestation of adherence to a political form of Islam that continues its hegemonic project,” Jean-Éric Schoettl wrote this week in a op-ed in Le Figaro. “While girls in Iran put themselves in danger by showing their hair in the street, other girls film themselves in abayas coming out of school. We must put an end to this scandal. The Republic must refuse to be mocked in the very place where it is supposed to be fashioning little republicans.”
It is not hard to predict where this is all headed.