France announced a ban Sunday on Muslim women wearing the Islamic abaya to school, declaring the garment breached France’s strict secular laws in education.
“When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them,” Education Minister Gabriel Attal told France’s TF1 TV, adding: “I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools.”
He said he would give “clear rules at the national level” to school heads ahead of the return to classes nationwide from September 4.
The debate on Islamic symbols has intensified since a Chechen refugee beheaded teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown students caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, near his school in a Paris suburb in 2020.
More recently the debate has centred on the wearing of abayas — a long, baggy head-to-toe garment worn to comply with Islamic beliefs on modest dress — in French schools, where women have long been prohibited from wearing the Islamic headscarf, AFP reports.
Opponents had pushed for the ban which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties.
“Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” Attal countered, describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.”
A law of March 2004 banned “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” in schools.
In 2010, France banned the wearing of full face veils in public which provoked furious protests across France’s five million-strong Muslim community.
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