France: Is it Islamophobic to ban abayas in school?
France has finally decided to fully enforce its secularism laws, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator (U.K.). Starting this school year, girls may not wear the abaya, a robe associated with conservative Islam, to class. The abaya is a new phenomenon in schools. My wife, a French schoolteacher, tells me she never saw one until last spring, when suddenly “thousands of pupils” began dressing in them. It was a TikTok trend, of course, but not a benign one: The Islamic “radicals who were said to be behind it” were taking aim at French secularism. On the first day of school last week, about 300 girls showed up in abayas, and about 1 in 5 refused to change and were sent home. Leftist politicians “were outraged,” and a few schools threatened strikes—but why? A 2004 French law barring religious insignia in schools has already been applied to ban the Islamic headscarf, Christian cross necklaces, and Jewish yarmulkes from classrooms. How is the abaya different?
It isn’t, said Jérôme Leroy in Marianne (France), and the fact that leftists object is baffling. Secularism is how our French Republic “remains a republic: by relegating religion to the private sphere.” When the principle was first enshrined back in 1905, the goal was to separate the Catholic Church from the affairs of state, including education, and back then leftists were leading the charge. Now they cry Islamophobia? French Muslims are still free to wear what they wish at home, as are Catholics and Jews. School, though, is not the place to show religious affiliation—as the overwhelming majority of French people agree.
The French are frustratingly blind to their own bias, said Nada Hoteit in AlQuds Al-Arabi (U.K.). That 2004 law they pretend is so neutral came as part of a wave of post-9/11 Islamophobia, and it was aimed specifically at the hijab, with the other religious symbols but a fig leaf. A few years later came hysteria over the niqab, the full-face veil worn by fewer than 300 Muslim women in all of France. And then we had “burkini mania,” when French officials took issue with conservative dress at beaches and pools. In 2016, police in Nice actually “forced a Muslim woman who was relaxing at the seaside to take off some of her clothes,” claiming she wasn’t respecting secular values. It would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating. French secularism is merely a “tool for racial discrimination.”
That’s not at all fair, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial.
The 2004 law banning religious symbols in public schools came about at the request of French Muslim girls and women themselves, who said they were being pressured by their extremist families to veil. In the years since, we have seen more of such extremism, including “the terrible series of terrorist attacks” that killed hundreds of French from 2012 to 2016, and the hideous beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist radical in 2020. No wonder French teachers were alarmed at seeing abayas in schools and called for the ban. Some of them fear for their very lives. There’s a “fragile balance” between secularism and freedom; France is doing its best to find it.