PARIS (Dispatches) -- France will ban Muslim students from wearing the abaya, a full-length robe worn by many Muslim women, in state-run schools, the country’s education minister has said ahead of the start of the new academic year.
“I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools,” Education Minister Gabriel Attal said in an interview with the French TV channel TF1.
He described the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the Republic towards the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.”
Attal’s decision was condemned by some members of the opposition, with Clementine Autain of the left-wing France Unbowed party criticizing the “policing of clothing.”
She said Attal’s announcement was “unconstitutional” and accused the government of harboring an “obsessive rejection” of the country’s estimated five million Muslim population.
The announcement was the first big move by Attal since being promoted in the summer to handle the hugely contentious education portfolio.
Activists and rights groups have long expressed concern that an intense focus on the hijab - often under the guise of policies prohibiting religious symbols was a symptom of normalized Islamophobia in some EU countries.
France, which has enforced a strict ban on religious signs in state schools since 19th-century laws removed any traditional Catholic influence from public education, has struggled to update guidelines to deal with its Muslim minority.
In 2004, France banned “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” in schools. This ban included large crosses and Jewish kippas as well as Islamic headscarves.
In 2010, it passed a ban on full-face veils in public, angering many of its five million-strong Muslim community.
In 2019, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found that France’s niqab ban violated human rights.
Unlike headscarves, the abaya - a garment worn to comply with Islamic beliefs on modest dress - occupied a grey area until last November.
The Education Ministry issued a circular at the time including the abaya in a group of data-x-items of clothing which could be banned should they be donned “in a manner as to openly display a religious affiliation.”
The French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM), a national body encompassing many Muslim associations, has said data-x-items of clothing alone were not “a religious sign”.
Defending secularism is a rallying cry in France that resonates across the political spectrum, from left-wingers to far-right voters seeking a bulwark against the growing role of Islam in French society.