Since the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal announced to the TF1 newspaper on Sunday August 27 that he intended to ban the abaya on school premises, a laziest controversy has emerged, where elements of automatic language are carried into the public debate: quickly exposed, little debated. Let us stop, however, on the main argument of the Insoumis, drawn up as one man against the banning of abayas in schools, which would amount, they say, to creating “a clothing police”.
The expression was used by MPs Clémentine Autain and Thomas Portes on Twitter (renamed X), then widely taken up in the media. However, the argument is quite weak, even in bad faith. Because what is the abaya in the end? An ample and long “overrobe”, hiding the skin of women, who, according to a certain conception of Islam, would be required to cover themselves completely in order not to arouse the desire of men (note that this prescription is debated within of Islam).
Isn’t that precisely what the “clothing police” is all about? And isn’t it precisely the role of secularism to prevent, within the confines of the school, the ostentatious manifestation of a religious prescription? The idea, let us remember, is not to force young girls to show their calves or their arms if they do not wish to, but to prohibit at school the wearing of clothing which has been designed to meet a religious requirement. Whether this prescription is sexist – because it is – is not the issue here.
France defends the freedom to believe or not to believe
The ace ! The Rogue pretend not to see him. Worse: by clientelism, they denounce, like Mathilde Panot on Twitter, an “obsession” of the government towards “Muslims” and “more precisely, Muslim women”. First, let’s say it again, this way of systematically amalgamating “Muslims” and “Muslim women” with the practices and conceptions of only some of them is harmful in public debate. Then: there is, in the growing wearing of abayas at school (4,710 reports were made during the 2022-2023 school year, compared to 2,167 in 2021-2022, according to a note from the State services ) a desire, assumed on social networks, to test secularism. To show that religious prescription can make its way into establishments, against a backdrop of legal vagueness and daily intimidation. Need we remind you that the beheading of Samuel Paty four years ago generated lasting and understandable fear among many principals and teachers, panicked at the idea of finding themselves stuck in the “bad loops”, on social networks ?
The left was once more clairvoyant. One example, among a hundred. In the debate which opposed him to Jules Guesde, in Lille, in 1900, Jean Jaurès had these words that some – who nevertheless happily claim their credit for him – seem to have forgotten: “It is the duty of the socialists, when republican freedom is at stake, when intellectual freedom is at stake, when freedom of conscience is threatened, when the old prejudices which resuscitate racial hatreds and the atrocious religious quarrels of past centuries seem to be reborn, it is the duty of the socialist proletariat to walk with that of the bourgeois fractions which does not want to go back.I am really surprised to have to recall these elementary truths, which should be the heritage and the rule of all socialists. […] We socialists are with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and with the bourgeoisie against the squires and the priests.
At the time, the political injunctions of religion came above all from Christianity, the thing is understood. But the mechanisms do not change. France defends the freedom to believe or not to believe; it defends religious freedom, freedom of worship and non-discrimination between religions. But she does not want political injunctions from religions – whatever they are – in her public life. At school, she wants to protect her future citizens. This is why she created secularism. Once upon a time, the left knew how to defend it.