Muslim Students’ Robes Are Latest Fault Line for French Identity

The mass French return to work, referred to as the “rentrée,” is commonly marked by renewed social battle. This 12 months has been no exception because the summer season lull has given solution to yet one more battle over a recurrent nationwide obsession: How Muslim girls ought to gown.

Late final month, with France nonetheless in trip mode, Gabriel Attal, 34, the newly appointed schooling minister and a favourite of President Emmanuel Macron, declared that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”

His abrupt order, which applies to public center and excessive colleges, banished the loosefitting full-length gown worn by some Muslim college students and ignited one other storm over French id.

The authorities believes the function of schooling is to dissolve ethnic or spiritual id in a shared dedication to the rights and obligations of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.”

Since then, organizations representing the nation’s massive Muslim minority of about 5 million individuals have protested; some women have taken to sporting kimonos or different lengthy clothes to high school as an instance their view that the ban is unfair; and a fierce debate has erupted over whether or not Mr. Attal’s August shock, simply earlier than college students went again to their school rooms, was a vote-seeking provocation or a vital protection of the secularism that’s France’s ideological basis.

“Attal wanted to look tough, and draw the political benefits, but this was cheap courage,” stated Nicolas Cadène, the co-founder of a corporation that screens laïcité in France, which is broadly the thought of a nondiscriminatory society the place the state upholds strict spiritual neutrality. “Real courage would be to tackle the lack of social mingling in our schools, leading to segregated development and separate ethnic and religious identification.”

France banned “ostentatious” spiritual symbols in center and excessive colleges virtually twenty years in the past. This, just like the Second Amendment within the United States, left a lot room for interpretation.

The situation has been whether or not the 2004 regulation took purpose equally at Muslim head scarves, Catholic crosses and Jewish kipas, for instance, or was in impact a way to focus on an Islam seen as more and more threatening. The abaya, a garment that typically displays Muslim spiritual affiliation however could merely quantity to the selection of modest apparel, had inhabited a grey space till Mr. Attal’s pronouncement.

In follow, “ostentatious,” as interpreted by faculty officers, has tended to imply Muslim. France’s concern over the fracturing of its secular mannequin, fueled by a collection of devastating assaults by Islamist terrorists, has centered on the perceived hazard that Muslims will shun purportedly common “Frenchness” in favor of their spiritual id, and fanaticism in its identify.

The niqab, the veil, the burkini, the abaya and even the pinnacle scarves worn by Muslim girls accompanying youngsters on faculty journeys have all been pored over in France to a level uncommon in Europe — and way more so within the United States, which posits freedom of faith in distinction to French freedom from faith.

No French president would ever counsel that God bless France. The nation’s lay mannequin supplants any deity. A 2021 survey from IFOP, a number one French polling group, discovered that half of French individuals establish as atheists, a far larger proportion than within the United States.

Over current years, laïcité, set out in a 1905 regulation that eliminated the Roman Catholic Church from public life, has hardened from a broadly accepted and little debated mannequin that permitted freedom of conscience right into a inflexible and contested dogma. It has been passionately embraced on the proper, and supported by a large spectrum of society, because the French protection in opposition to all the things from Islamist fundamentalism to American multiculturalism.

“This should have been done in 2004, and would have been if we did not have gutless leaders,” Marine Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigration chief, stated of Mr. Attal’s announcement. “As General MacArthur observed, lost battles can be summed up in two words: too late.”

The query is: too late for what? To ban the abaya from colleges, as Mr. Attal now calls for? Or to cease the unfold of inferior, understaffed colleges in ghettoized, drug-plagued neighborhoods on the outskirts of massive cities, the place the alternatives for youngsters of Muslim immigrants are diminished and the potential for radicalization elevated?

Here is the place France splits — not down the center, as a result of Mr. Attal’s ban has an approval degree of over 80 p.c, in accordance with polls, however in vital methods for the nation’s future sense of itself.

Where some nonetheless see laïcité because the core of a supposedly colorblind nation of equal alternative, others see a type of hypocrisy that masks how removed from unprejudiced France has grow to be, as illustrated by these troubled suburbs with massive Muslim populations.

Hence the explosiveness simply beneath the floor of French life.

Fury nonetheless lingers over the beheading by an Islamist extremist of Samuel Paty, a instructor who in 2020 confirmed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in school as an instance how free speech works in a secular France.

At the identical time, the nights of violent rioting in June this 12 months that adopted a police officer’s taking pictures of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, demonstrated the pent-up rage stirred by the sensation that to be Muslim in France is to be at larger danger.

“The French government that invokes the laws of 1905 and 2004 to ‘protect the values of the Republic’ from an adolescent dress reveals its great weakness and lack of initiative in creating a peaceful form of living together that would ignore differences,” Agnès de Féo, a sociologist, wrote within the day by day Le Monde.

To which Éric Ciotti, a pacesetter of the Republicans, a center-right get together, retorted that “communautarisme” — or identification firstly with a spiritual or ethnic id — is “a leprosy that threatens the Republic.” Mr. Attal, he stated in an announcement, had given the suitable response.

The views of the Republicans are essential to Mr. Macron as a result of his Renaissance get together and its centrist allies should not have an absolute majority in Parliament, and their likeliest ally in passing laws might be Mr. Ciotti’s get together.

In this sense, Mr. Attal’s determination has a transparent political dimension. Mr. Macron governs from the middle however leans proper.

Mr. Attal took over one of the crucial delicate of French ministries in July, after his predecessor, Pap Ndiaye, the primary Black schooling minister, was successfully hounded from workplace by a torrent of rightist abuse, with thinly veiled racism showing to lace a lot of the vitriol in opposition to him.

He was focused for his supposed importation into France of America’s “doctrine of diversity” and his “reduction of everything to skin color,” as Valeurs Actuelles journal, an extreme-right publication, put it this spring.

In June, simply earlier than he was ousted, Mr. Ndiaye rejected a sweeping ban on abayas of the type adopted by Mr. Attal and upheld by a high French courtroom final week. He stated, “We are not going to edit a catalog of hundreds of pages with dresses of different colors and forms of sleeves.”

Rather, Mr. Ndiaye stated, choices about abayas must be left to the discretion of college principals.

Outside a highschool within the northern Paris commune of Stains, Sheik Sidibe, a 21-year-old Black instructing assistant, stated he had till lately labored at a college the place the principal “showed a lack of respect” to Muslim college students, “putting in place checkpoints where she arbitrarily decided which students could enter and which not” and criticizing Muslim girls who selected to put on head scarves on the street.

“We should focus on real problems, like lousy teachers’ salaries,” stated Mr. Sidibe, who’s Muslim. “We have students living in states of extreme precariousness and we marginalize them even more. Our mission should not be to police clothes.”

The political ramifications of Mr. Attal’s measure stay to be seen. What seems clear already is that in a restive French society, it has been extra polarizing than unifying, the declared purpose of laïcité.

“Laïcité must be a form of liberty, the equality of everyone whatever their convictions,” Mr. Cadène stated. “It must not turn into a weapon to silence or block people. That is not how you make it attractive.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle from Stains, France.