“I decided that we could no longer wear the abaya at school, announced Gabriel Attal during the “20 hours” of TF1, Sunday August 27. When you enter a classroom, you should not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them. “The Minister of National Education had already issued a firm instruction to the rectors, whom he had met on Thursday: “Where the Republic is tested, we must unite. »
The abaya (Arabic word meaning “toga”, “cloak”) is a covering garment, often loose and light, which is worn from the shoulders to the feet, similar to the djellaba in North Africa or the qamis in West Africa. the West.
You can add a scarf or a veil, the abaya does not cover the face, unlike the burqa. Feminine clothing, it can be worn by men, even if the cut differs.
Often neutral in hue, it also developed as a more vibrantly colored fashion garment.
It is very difficult to distinguish an abaya from other fairly similar clothes.
The djellaba, of Berber origin, is distinguished by usually brighter colors and richer ornamental patterns. The qamis, often considered the male equivalent of the abaya, has notably straighter and tighter lines.
On X (ex-Twitter), the former Minister for Territorial Equality and Housing Cécile Duflot had fun asking if a long covering dress was an “attack on secularism”, by sharing a photo of a luxury piece from Gucci. It can be difficult to distinguish a full-coverage robe from an abaya.
According to a note from the State services, of which Le Monde has had a copy, reports of attacks on secularism in schools have been increasing for a year (4,710 in 2022-2023, against 2,167 the previous year), and more than 40% of monthly returns now concern outfits that can be both cultural and religious – such as the qamis or the djellaba for men or the abaya for women. These reports concern approximately 150 establishments, out of several thousand colleges and high schools.
Some perceive this as a breach of the 2004 law, which prohibits “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly manifest a religious affiliation”. The previous Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, had published a circular in November 2022, while leaving the freedom to the heads of establishments to decide on the religious character or not of these outfits. A position deemed too measured, even lax, by the right-wing and far-right opposition.
This is one of the main questions of the national education staff.
The abaya is first and foremost a traditional garment. In his Detailed Dictionary of the Names of Arab Clothing (1845), the Dutch orientalist Reinhart Dozy defined it as “the characteristic Bedouin dress of nearly all times”. Simple and rustic, it spread in the Persian Gulf and its surroundings.
Short or colorful abayas were accepted in Saudi society until the late 1970s. After fundamentalist rebels took hostage in Mecca in 1979, King Khal Aziz Al Saud gave these defenders of one of the most literalist and rigorous visions of Islam. Among the landmark laws, the wearing of the black abaya becomes compulsory for women, who also lose many freedoms. The garment therefore imposed itself in Saudi Arabia, becoming a marker of Salafist Islam in the Western imagination.
Seen from France, where the Wahhabi current gained influence in the 2010s, the abaya can appear as a sign of religious affiliation. An interpretation disputed by the French Council of Muslim Worship, which, through the voice of its vice-president Abdallah Zekri, simply described it as “a kind of fashion”.
As it stands, the assessment of the religious character of the abaya by the heads of establishments is mainly based on the context and the intention attributed to the wearer. The vade-mecum on secularism at school, published in 2021 by the Ministry of National Education, specifies that “a sign or an outfit which is not, strictly speaking, religious, can thus be prohibited s ‘it is worn to conspicuously manifest a religious affiliation’. The provocative, repeated character or even the refusal to remove it are considered signs of religious value.
France is the first Western country to announce that it wants to ban the abaya at school. But the first country to have done so is… Saudi Arabia, which, under the impetus of Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, has undertaken a liberal turn in recent years. Since 2022, the Wahhabi kingdom has banned the wearing of the abaya for women during exams. It is one of many measures aimed at modernizing the society of the oil monarchy, such as the lifting of the driving ban for Saudi women.
