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| Muslim Students’ Robes Are Latest Fault Line for French Identity | Muslim Students’ Robes Are Latest Fault Line for French Identity |
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| The mass French return to work, known as the “rentrée,” is often marked by renewed social conflict. This year has been no exception as the summer lull has given way to yet another battle over a recurrent national obsession: How Muslim women should dress. | The mass French return to work, known as the “rentrée,” is often marked by renewed social conflict. This year has been no exception as the summer lull has given way to yet another battle over a recurrent national obsession: How Muslim women should dress. |
| Late last month, with France still in vacation mode, Gabriel Attal, 34, the newly appointed education minister and a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron, declared that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.” | Late last month, with France still in vacation mode, Gabriel Attal, 34, the newly appointed education minister and a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron, declared that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.” |
| His abrupt order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. | His abrupt order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. |
| The government believes the role of education is to dissolve ethnic or religious identity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.” | The government believes the role of education is to dissolve ethnic or religious identity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.” |
| Since then, organizations representing the country’s large Muslim minority of about five million people have protested; some girls have taken to wearing kimonos or other long garments to school to illustrate their view that the ban is arbitrary; and a fierce debate has erupted over whether Mr. Attal’s August surprise, just before students went back to their classrooms, was a vote-seeking provocation or a necessary defense of the secularism that is France’s ideological foundation. | |
| “Attal wanted to look tough, and draw the political benefits, but this was cheap courage,” said Nicolas Cadène, the co-founder of an organization that monitors laïcité in France, which is broadly the idea of a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality. “Real courage would be to tackle the lack of social mingling in our schools, leading to segregated development and separate ethnic and religious identification.” |