France has announced a ban on Muslim women/girls wearing the Islamic abaya to school, declaring the garment breached France’s strict secular laws in education.
Breitbart “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them,” Education Minister Gabriel Attal told France’s TF1 TV, adding: “I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools.”
The debate on Islamic symbols has intensified since a Chechen Muslim refugee beheaded teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown students caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, at his school in a Paris suburb in 2020.
More recently the debate has centred on the wearing of abayas — a long, baggy head-to-toe garment worn to comply with Islamic beliefs on modest dress — in French schools, where women have long been prohibited from wearing the Islamic headscarf, AFP reports.
Opponents had pushed for the ban which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties. “Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” Attal countered, describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.”
Millions of Muslims currently reside in France, and many of them took to the streets in protest after a law banning face-covering Islamic veils in public went into effect in 2011.
In 2010, France banned the wearing of full face veils in public which provoked furious protests across France’s five million-strong Muslim community.
Statistics from the French government revealed a significant increase in disputes related to religious and secular conflicts in schools, with reports surging to 4,710 cases in the 2022-2023 academic year, more than doubling the previous year’s count. A substantial portion of these disputes centered around ‘abaya’ and ‘kameez’ (traditional attire for Muslim men).
Pray Hard says
Note: I’m not holding my breath that this will actually be enforced. The French pull this bait and switch behavior all the time.
indusmississippi says
Good. The woman-hating trappings of traditionalist Islam have no place in the halls of institutions of learning here in the enlightened, civilized, egalitarian West. I only wish our very own US of A would do the same, braindead liberals will be the death of us. This kind of insanity is exactly what makes me think about voting for Trump for the second time in three elections (voted for him the first time but not the second) despite being an independent. Biden seems particularly SJW-ey and Islamophilic too, that’s a hard no from me for a second term.
The Tasmanian Devil says
Park your cars in the garage frogs, here come the angry Muslims!
The Woke Ender says
Watch the Muzzies start chimping out (for the umpteeth time!) about a law in a historically non-Muzzie nation they should have never set foot in if the desired outcome is Sharia.
ME Infidel says
Two words stand out from the video: “immigrant community”. Wtf?! Weren’t we told ad nauseum by their lying Leftist enablers that these illegals would be of benefit the host countries? If that’s the case, when are they going to assimilate and actually contribute to OUR culture? The answer is, of course, they ain’t plannin’ on it!