La France insoumise announced Tuesday its intention to attack before the Council of State the “cruel” decision of the Minister of National Education to ban the wearing of the abaya in schools, underlining the divisions on the left on the secularism.
This ban will “result once again in discrimination against young women and in particular young women of the Muslim faith and I think that we do not need that in our country”, declared the coordinator by LFI Manuel Bompard on France 2.
The decision to seize the highest administrative court will be submitted to the LFI parliamentary group, he said.
“The religious authorities of the Muslim faith say that the abayas are not a religious outfit and therefore I am attached to the defense of secularism, (…) I do not see why it should be banned”, a- he argued, emphasizing expecting “something else from the Minister of National Education than going to stir up fears and fantasies”.
The decision announced on Sunday by the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal to proscribe in schools these long dresses of Middle Eastern tradition which are worn over clothes, has been approved by the right and the far right.
But it is the new symbol of the frictions that cross the left, between on the one hand the rebels who denounce an “Islamophobic” decision, the ecologists who condemn a “stigmatization”, and on the other many elected representatives of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, who approve of Gabriel Attal’s decision, in the name of secularism.
Barely out of the controversy around the rapper Medine, and while relations were strained in the summer on the question of a common list for Europeans, the partners of the left union once again express their disagreements.
“Fabien Roussel can say what he wants, what matters to me is what is good for the country”, replied Manuel Bompard to the position taken by the boss of the PCF in favor of the ban on the abaya, believing that seeking to regulate women’s outfits amounts to working a “Pandora’s box”.
“There is a risk, through the words they use there, of questioning the 2004 law, and that would be disastrous”, warned for his part on franceinfo the socialist deputy of Essonne Jérôme Guedj about the position of the rebels and environmentalists.
The 2004 text, which prohibits conspicuous religious signs at school, had at the time made it possible “to calm, to pacify situations”, and this “without major difficulty”, added the parliamentarian, very attached to the school as “a space of neutrality, construction of free will and judgment to emancipate young people in training”.
At the PS, which had voted almost unanimously for the 2004 text, neither the leader of the party, Olivier Faure, nor the boss of the deputies, Boris Vallaud, have so far commented on Gabriel Attal’s decision, while the leader of the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced “a new absurd war of religion entirely artificial about a female dress”.
On France Inter, the new general secretary of the CGT Sophie Binet tried a position of balance by insisting on the need for “clear rules for the educational teams”. “Since (the abaya) is considered a religious sign, obviously it must be banned, like the others, but the problem of making a political comeback on the subject (as Gabriel Attal did , Editor’s note), it is that it instrumentalizes the phenomenon”, she argued.
“The more we stigmatize a religion, the more we insist on this or that religious sign, the more we are witnessing the increase in the phenomenon,” she warned, highlighting her experience as a senior education adviser.
29/08/2023 17:10:55 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP