Salah Lamrani, Le Club de Mediapart, 22/9/2023
The author is a French literature teacher and union activist
France’s new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, launched the 2023 school year with a thunderous announcement: “I decided it will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school”, he said, in the name of a preposterous conception of secularism (or “laïcité”) adopted by President Emmanuel Macron. This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against. Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-years-old Gabriel Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.
What is an abaya?
The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time. As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown on TV several types of dresses to know if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and toke a side step, replying that “it depends on the context”. Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection do not depend on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and her presumed religion, which can only be determined on the basis of skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Gabriel Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them”.
A traumatic start to the school year
Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year,
with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle and high school girls being scrutinized,
hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, ordered to partially undress
or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono,
deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity.
This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent
of the colonial period. Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such
as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police”
enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do
not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.
“Aren't you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.
