Is there a loophole in the law of 2004? Despite the law banning religious symbols in schools, more and more schoolgirls are walking through the doors of educational institutions wearing abayas, an Islamic garment, reports BFM TV on Wednesday June 7. Education Minister Pap Ndiaye has summoned stakeholders in the school system to take stock of the situation, while the wearing of this long and loose dress is on the rise in a number of schools, in contravention of the 2004 law banning the wearing of religious symbols in schools.
Nevertheless, a certain unease about this issue exists: in November last year, Pap Ndiaye had refused to draw up a list of what was allowed or forbidden in the school: “We would move into an extremely precarious terrain,” he had said. “From a legal point of view, the abaya is not easy to define and we would be tricked the next week by a certain length of dress, a collar shape or this or that accessory, which would prolong the problem from week to week and force us to write more circulars,” he said.
However, for her colleague Sonia Backès, Secretary of State for Civil Rights, the law is extremely obvious, explaining on franceinfo a few months ago that abayas are “naturally religious markers […] Do you wear abayas if you don’t belong to the Muslim religion? The answer is ‘no’,” the secretary of state claimed.
Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that the number of violations of the secular nature of the school increased again in the spring, with between 400 and 600 cases reported, depending on the month. Half of the cases are related to the wearing of religious clothing or signs, which include abayas.
Translation: We are in the midst of an unprecedented social crisis, a massive attack on freedoms under Macron, an extremely early drought and a looming food war.
Yet the Parisien reports on Muslim women’s clothing on its front page.
For this newspaper, as for many others, Islamophobia sells well.