French School Deems Teenager’s Skirt an Illegal Display of Religion
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — A secondary school in northeastern France has sent a 15-year-old student home twice in the last two weeks for wearing a long skirt that the principal judged was “an ostentatious sign” of the girl’s Muslim faith. The case has lit up social networks in France and infuriated many of the country’s Muslims, who see the school system’s censure of the girl as discriminatory. A law adopted in 2004 forbids elementary and secondary school students to wear visible signs of their religious affiliation to school, including skullcaps for Jews, noticeable crosses for Christians and head scarves for Muslims. School officials, though, are increasingly construing the ban to apply to articles of clothing like long skirts and headbands, in ways that appear to vary from school to school. “It’s a huge problem,” said Elsa Ray, a spokeswoman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. The principal at the Léo Lagrange school in Charleville-Mézières decided that the black maxiskirt the girl wore ran afoul of the rules and wrote to the girl’s parents that their daughter had been sent home to change into more appropriate attire. Ms. Ray called it “really an excessive interpretation” of the law. The collective has documented 130 similar cases across France since January 2014, and Ms. Ray said they were becoming more frequent. The cases often involve skirt length, she said, but schools have also objected to sweaters or to headbands that they say are too broad and are meant to evoke head scarves. Because the girl in Charleville-Mézières is a minor, she has been identified in French news reports by only her given name and initial, Sarah K. Her case points to the difficulty in enforcing the French policy of laïcité — roughly, secularism — which strives to keep religion strictly out of government and the public sector. It has been invoked in recent years to restrict the places where Muslim women can wear clothing concealing their bodies or faces. The case also illustrates the gap between the ways French officials and Muslims have understood the secularism rules. Sarah’s mother told the French magazine L’Obs in an interview posted online Wednesday that although the family is observant, the parents never asked Sarah to wear a head scarf, and that several of her five older sisters did not wear one. “About a year ago, she started to wear a veil, as I do,” the magazine quoted the mother as saying. “But every morning when she gets to school, she takes it off because she knows it’s forbidden.” The French use the word “veil” to refer both to head scarves and to garments such as the niqab. Sarah wore a head scarf. Muslims see removing their head scarves before going to school as demonstrating their willingness to abide by the rules. But French officials linked the remainder of Sarah’s modest outfit to the head scarf she had been wearing before she entered the school building and concluded that the long skirt still signified that she was a Muslim. “It is a sign of identity,” said Patrick Dutot, the education director for the Ardennes, the French department that includes Charleville-Mézières. “The question isn’t how long the skirt is,” Mr. Dutot said. “They come with an outfit that shows an affiliation that we respect. But once at school, you have to return to a republican and secular space — but they only remove the veil.” He said that several other girls had gone to the school similarly clothed and had been sent home to change without incident and that only Sarah and her family had made a fuss. Sarah told a local newspaper, L’Ardennais, on Tuesday that the long skirt, one of two she and her mother bought at Kiabi, a well-known discount clothing chain, was not a religious symbol or a backdoor attempt to get around the ban. “The skirt was really nothing special,” the paper quoted her as saying. “It was very simple. There was nothing ostentatious about it.” A photo of Sarah that appeared in Le Monde, the national daily, shows a warmly smiling girl in a black and white head scarf, a long black skirt that does not cover her shoes, a closefitting white shirt and a pale pink sweater over it. Without the head scarf, it would be hard to pinpoint her attire as typically Muslim, and even less so if the skirt were the gray model rather than the black. The school was having none of it, though. The note that the principal wrote to Sarah’s parents included an implied threat of expulsion, telling them to “rectify her clothes if you want her to continue her schooling.” As the matter attracted wider attention in the news media on Wednesday, Mr. Dutot and the higher education authorities for the region said there had been no talk of expelling Sarah. The authorities said in a statement that they expected to resolve the issue through “mutual understanding” with her and her family. Still, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France said it was asking the minister of education “to put a stop to what is happening and to make sure to provide concrete directives to the schools” on how to properly and fairly interpret the ban. |