Ban on Muslim Dress in Schools Stokes Culture War in France

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NICE, France—Nawel Moumen, a 13-year-old French Muslim, was taken aside last spring by the dean of her middle school. The robe-like dress she had on was inappropriate, Moumen recalled the dean saying, because he considered it a religious garment. He warned her she would face detention if she wore it again.

NICE, France—Nawel Moumen, a 13-year-old French Muslim, was taken aside last spring by the dean of her middle school. The robe-like dress she had on was inappropriate, Moumen recalled the dean saying, because he considered it a religious garment. He warned her she would face detention if she wore it again.

France is expanding the definition of what kinds of clothes are unacceptable under the rules of laïcité, the country’s strict separation of religion and state. For nearly two decades, public schools have barred students from wearing a visible Christian cross, a Jewish kippah, a Muslim headscarf or any other religious symbol deemed ostentatious by school officials.

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France is expanding the definition of what kinds of clothes are unacceptable under the rules of laïcité, the country’s strict separation of religion and state. For nearly two decades, public schools have barred students from wearing a visible Christian cross, a Jewish kippah, a Muslim headscarf or any other religious symbol deemed ostentatious by school officials.

But the abaya—a long, cloak-like covering—was a gray area until recently. The garment doesn’t cover the head or face, but Muslim women in parts of North Africa and the Middle East traditionally wear it with a headscarf. In France, female students began wearing the abaya—without a headscarf in the classroom—as an extra layer of clothing because it covers their arms and legs, in compliance with what they say are Muslim teachings.

With the new school year about to start, President Emmanuel Macron’s education minister stepped in and banned the abaya, ratcheting up France’s long-running culture war over how far the government should go in enforcing laïcité rules in a country that is home to one of Europe’s biggest Muslim minorities—estimated to be around 9% of the French population. Muslim leaders said the very definition of what constitutes an abaya is vague, opening the door to discrimination against Muslim students.

Picking what to wear in the morning for school has become a headache for Moumen. She didn’t consider the robe-like dress that drew the warning to be an actual abaya, which she wears outside of school. She worries her preference for any loosefitting clothes will draw a rebuke.

“I don’t feel like going to school anymore,” Moumen said.

The principal at her school in a low-income neighborhood in Nice said the start of the academic year went smoothly, without elaborating. He said the dean in question wasn’t authorized to respond to requests for comment.

The Macron government says it is responding to what it considers an alarming increase in the number of teenagers wearing religious outfits in junior high and high schools after watching videos on social media encouraging them to challenge the rules of laïcité.

“We are not stopping them from believing in a religion, but there is no place for these symbols at school,” Macron said last week.

Laïcité grew out of the centurieslong battle with the Roman Catholic Church over the influence it once wielded in public life, particularly the public school system. More recently, French secularism has collided with the religious practices of generations of Muslims, many of whom were born in France or in its former North African colonies. Tensions boiled over with the 2020 murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher, who was beheaded after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class on free speech.

Religious leaders say the ban on abayas goes too far. The French Council of the Muslim Faith, or CFCM, said the abaya isn’t a religious symbol. The garment is hard to distinguish, the council said, from a long dress of any stripe, meaning a Muslim student might be barred from wearing something that a non-Muslim wouldn’t.

“It’s fashion,” CFCM Vice President Abdallah Zekri said on French TV. “It has nothing to do with religion.”

Opposition lawmakers say the move is a veiled attempt to court right-wing voters. Macron has struggled to govern the country since his pro-business party, Renaissance, lost last year the commanding majority that defined his first term in office. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom Macron defeated in the final round of the 2022 presidential election, proposed banning the Muslim headscarf in public, describing the garb as an instrument of Islamist ideology.

Still, Macron’s government has the support of a wide majority of those polled. A recent Ifop poll of 1,003 people found that 77% of respondents were against allowing children to wear abayas or other loosefitting traditional outfits in public schools.

The government first warned last year of an increase in the number of violations of laïcité rules at school. Children refused to attend biology, history or music classes for religious reasons, teachers said. Some parents forbid their daughters from participating in swimming classes or going on field trips. But the majority of cases reported by school officials concerned children wearing abayas and other outfits that could be considered religious, French authorities said.

Pap Ndiaye, then education minister, said it was up to school officials to decide which outfits should be banned, depending in part on the child’s behavior.

Moumen said she started wearing an abaya and a Muslim headscarf in the summer of last year after TikTok began recommending her videos of Muslim women urging teenage girls not to drink and smoke. The videos also instructed teenage girls to “preserve” themselves, Moumen said, by concealing their bodies.

One day, she secretly entered her mother’s room, grabbed a black headscarf and walked out of the apartment with her elder sister.

Her mother, Nora Belmahi, said she was very surprised to see her daughter come home wearing one of her headscarves.

“She’s so young, I didn’t expect it so soon,” Belmahi said. “But I prefer seeing her like that rather than going to nightclubs.”

In July, Macron shuffled his government, replacing Ndiaye with Gabriel Attal, his former budget minister, who pledged to take a firmer approach to laïcité.

“When you enter a classroom, you should not be able to distinguish or identify the religion of the students by looking at them,” Attal recently said on national TV, adding that he was banning the abaya and the qamis, a long tunic that is less commonly worn by Muslim male students.

Most school officials welcomed the measure.

“We no longer wanted to be alone at the front line,” said Didier Georges, a Paris junior-high principal. “Now that there’s a clear decision, it helps us decide.”

However, in Stains, a Paris suburb, some teachers went on strike last week to protest against what they called an Islamophobic policy.

“We shouldn’t have to police children’s clothing,” the teachers said in a statement.

For the start of the school year on Sept. 5, some 298 girls went wearing an abaya, according to Attal. After they refused to change, 67 of them were sent home, he added.

The following day in Clermont-Ferrand, a city located in a highland region in central France, a man called the principal of his daughter’s high school and threatened to kill him, according to the local prosecutor. The principal hadn’t allowed the man’s daughter to attend school because she was wearing an abaya and refused to change, the prosecutor added.

Like several other Muslim students, Moumen removes her headscarf just before walking through the school gates.

“I don’t understand how you can prohibit girls from wearing a headscarf and an abaya, and allow ripped jeans and miniskirts,” her mother said.

Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com

Ban on Muslim Dress in Schools Stokes Culture War in France

Ban on Muslim Dress in Schools Stokes Culture War in France

Ban on Muslim Dress in Schools Stokes Culture War in France

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