The Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal announced, on Sunday August 27, the ban on the abaya at school, a traditional covering garment from the Gulf countries, considering that it is akin to an ostensibly religious sign. . Immediately, environmentalists and rebels denounced the stigmatization of Muslims, most arguing that the abaya would not be a religious outfit. “How far will the clothing police go?” thus wondered about X (formerly Twitter) the rebellious deputy Clémentine Autain. For essayist and feminist Tristane Banon, author of Peril God (the Observatory), “this measure has nothing to do with Muslims, the majority of whom would not even think of sending their children to school in an abaya! It only concerns a radical fringe of practitioners of Islam. Not to recognize it is to reinforce the clichés and play into the hands of the communitarians”. Interview.
L’Express: What do you think of the decision of the Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal to ban the abaya at school?
Tristane Banon : I am more than in favor of it! What some think is a debate between Parisian journalists in need of subjects is in fact a serious problem for all those involved in education. I was very shocked, last January, by the response of the former Minister of National Education Pap Ndiaye to Apolline de Malherbe, who asked him if the abaya was an ostensible religious sign. He replied that it was not he who went “every morning, look at photographs of clothes and decide if it is religious or not”. At the time, already, many headteachers were worried about this problem, and were waiting for an answer from above, a course, a way out. Pap Ndiaye refused to give them to them. This decision by Gabriel Attal seems to me to be a signal that the supervisory authority has understood the discomfort of teachers, and intends to enforce secularism in schools.
Some will say that there is more urgent – there is always more urgent. But with 4,710 reports of attacks on secularism in schools in 2022-2023, we are not talking about problems on the margins. It is now a question of enforcing this evidence: in France, children go to the school of the Republic to learn to think, to open their minds, to become independent in their thinking. They are being prepared to be free citizens. They do not have to be influenced by the manifestation of a religion, must not undergo any proselytism. Nothing must interfere with their ability to become adults free to choose their beliefs, or their disbelief for that matter.
One of the key arguments of the detractors of this decision consists in recalling that the abaya would be a cultural and not a religious garment. How to distinguish?
Especially over time. Yes, in theory, the abaya was a cultural garment. In the Quran, there is no exact description of the cloth that is supposed to hide the woman, nor is it given a specific name. Each Muslim culture has therefore come to adapt the rules of the text. Nowadays, we do not wear the abaya without religious motivations. However, we legislate not on the basis of the history of a garment but on its current use.
Moreover, it is neither for believers nor for religious authorities to decide what is or is not religious in the context of the management of our collective life and the application of laws that guarantee secularism. It’s up to the executive and the legislature. Otherwise the 2004 law, to name but one, would be inapplicable. It would be enough, for the kippah, the veil, the ostensible cross or other, that a religious authority says that the thing is cultural to leave the field of application of the law. That’s not how it happens.
Proof of the hypocrisy of some: those who refute the religious character of the abaya are the same ones who see in Gabriel Attal’s decision a decision… anti-Muslim. We cannot at the same time judge that this garment is cultural and not religious and point to an anti-Muslim decision! Moreover, secularism and the various decisions that refer to it according to the problems that French society may encounter, are not “anti-Muslim”. The rule is the same for everyone: I would be equally in favor of such a measure if very traditional Catholics came to school with huge crosses or Jews with a yarmulke. If it weren’t obvious to everyone that an overly visible cross or a yarmulke are conspicuous manifestations of religion, then I would expect the Minister of Education to state this clearly.
Still, part of the left castigates anti-Muslim relentlessness. Clémentine Autain even wrote on X that “Macronie is already trying to take the RN from the right”…
For several years now, the question of the separation of religious life from that of the city has arisen with regard to a radical fringe of the Muslim religion. This does not mean that the Muslim religion is inherently problematic. This amalgam abused by the far left, between Muslims and radicals, is also disturbing: this measure has nothing to do with Muslims, the majority of whom would not even think of sending their children in abaya at school ! It concerns only a radical fringe of practitioners of Islam. Not to recognize it is to reinforce the clichés and play into the hands of the communitarians. In doing so, shouting all the time that they are fighting the RN, these political figures, often to the left of the left (including Clémentine Autain), are making a boulevard on the far right, and that worries me a lot.
“Last year it was the ban on the crop top which was announced on September 12, 2022. This year, it’s the abaya. Social control over the bodies of women and young girls, always”, published Sandrine Rousseau on X on August 27. Does the parallel seem relevant to you?
This rhetoric according to which there would be a clothing police in France is at the same time improper, unworthy and absurd. What is interesting in this decision is not that it concerns clothing, it is that it concerns an attack on secularism at school. Left to do in authoritarianism, Madame Rousseau would have been better inspired to speak of the police of secularism. But she prefers to use the Islamist vocabulary, which thanks her for that. The proof is: in a tweet, the news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran used the term “clothing police” from Sandrine Rousseau to condemn Gabriel Attal’s decision. In Iran, there is indeed a clothing police. Women are killed for not having worn this or that Islamic dress. What is happening there now requires a minimum of decency. To lend France this same expression is despicable. Especially since the veil like the abaya are clothes which, in France or elsewhere, mark an inequality between women and men. I don’t understand how women who call themselves feminists, and I want to believe them, can defend things that go against secularism but also against women.
Most of these clothes are designed to inferiorize women. That said, no one says that a woman cannot dress as she wants, in an abaya or not, outside the school environment (and places of the Republic). Unlike the RN, I want women to be able to continue to wear the veil or the abaya in the street if they wish. But today, we are talking about public school, which we must remember is free, secular and compulsory.
Moreover, to answer Sandrine Rousseau, defending the cause of women, isn’t this precisely leaving them the choice to dress as they wish, including from a very young age? Including allowing them, if necessary (except to fantasize that these cases do not exist), to evade the religious obligations imposed by the entourage, once past the school grounds?
The MEP and executive vice-president of the Republicans François-Xavier Bellamy estimated for his part that “part of the left is making a pact with Islamism”.
We come back to it: the problem of the flirtation made by a certain left to the communitarian vote, is that it plays into the hands of the extreme right. Before the controversy over the abaya, the rapper Médine, who has always rubbed shoulders with Islamism, was extolled by Europe Ecologie – Les Verts et les Insoumis… It makes you wonder how far this extreme left (which is not all left) is able to go into its belly dancing number by electoral calculation. Their excesses make it increasingly important to show that we can both defend secularism and fight the far right. It’s a crest line, but it’s essential to force yourself to hold it. These debates cannot be reduced to an extreme versus extreme divide. The French cannot be reduced to choosing between the communitarian far left and the xenophobic far right. On the contrary, it is necessary to measure. The extreme left does not seem to have understood this. Meanwhile, many citizens, tired by its excesses, continue to switch to the extreme right… The former are the useful idiots of the latter.
Gabriel Attal promised to train “300,000 staff per year in secularism issues until 2025” and all 14,000 management staff “before the end of the year”. What are these issues in your opinion?
The Minister has not yet outlined these issues. It is therefore difficult for me to comment on this announcement. But I can say what I know for having observed it many times during my interventions in the school environment. Most teachers and school principals tell me that they don’t know how to talk to students about secularism, because they are sometimes not trained, but also because they fear reprisals – Samuel Paty paid a lot for having approached this current topic. According to them, it is preferable that these questions be addressed by an outside person who leaves once his intervention has been carried out. Thus, they do not have to justify themselves, for example, to disgruntled parents. The students are sincerely curious to understand what secularism is, even those who grow up in very religious families. I have seen it often. But still it is necessary to bring them answers: the answers that we do not give them, the young people will find them elsewhere, with the big brother, the parents, or in a place of worship…
“In 95% of cases, these situations are resolved through dialogue: it prevents these students from leaving public school to go to private confessional,” pointed out the Snes-FSU teachers’ union on France Inter. What do you think ?
That it is preferable to dialogue with a young woman who arrives at school dressed in an abaya is obvious. But it is still necessary to have the means for this dialogue. To do this, the supervisory authority had to set a course. Let me explain: if the headteacher or the teacher can’t support his arguments with a serious backing, why would the young girl listen to him? If, on the contrary, the latter can refer to the government’s decision, then they can then start a dialogue, explaining that it is not against the young girl, but out of respect for secularism and perhaps even opening the discussion on the issues of this secularism.
In July, Gabriel Attal also said he was in favor of experimenting with school uniforms. “Can we imagine that it would be a magic solution to solve all the problems? I don’t believe in it,” he added to Free lunch. Do you think it could be a lever to enforce secularism at school?
I think it’s still worth trying. Perhaps not in the English way, where the uniforms are very strict, but by imagining, why not, a more flexible, easier system (jeans-sweatshirt-tee-shirt for example), which would move the cursor away from the problems of religion , obviously, but would also, at the same time, erase certain adolescent complexes relating to brands and the financial capacities of parents. It probably wouldn’t significantly increase school performance, but it would free the students’ minds, it would open them up to thinking about something else. This is trying!