Schoolgirls who refused to change out of the loose-fitting robes have been sent home with a letter to parents on secularism.
French public schools have sent dozens of girls home for refusing to remove their abayas – long, loose-fitting robes worn by some Muslim women and girls – on the first day of the school year, according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal.
Defying a ban on the garment seen as a religious symbol, nearly 300 girls showed up on Monday morning wearing abayas, Attal told the BFM broadcaster on Tuesday.
Most agreed to change out of the robe, but 67 refused and were sent home, he said.
The government announced last month it was banning the abaya in schools, saying it broke the rules on secularism in education that have already seen headscarves forbidden on the grounds they constitute a display of religious affiliation.
The move gladdened the political right but the hard left argued it represented an affront to civil liberties.
The 34-year-old minister said the girls refused entry on Monday were given a letter addressed to their families saying that “secularism is not a constraint, it is a liberty”.
If they showed up at school again wearing the gown there would be a “new dialogue”.
He added that he was in favour of trialling school uniforms or a dress code amid the debate over the ban.
Uniforms have not been obligatory in French schools since 1968 but have regularly come back on the political agenda, often pushed by conservative and far-right politicians.
Attal said he would provide a timetable later this year for carrying out a trial run of uniforms with any schools that agree to participate.
“I don’t think that the school uniform is a miracle solution that solves all problems related to harassment, social inequalities or secularism,” he said.
But he added: “We must go through experiments, try things out” in order to promote debate, he said.
‘Worst consequences’
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris before the ban came into force said Attal deemed the abaya a religious symbol which violates French secularism.
“Since 2004, in France, religious signs and symbols have been banned in schools, including headscarves, kippas and crosses,” she said.
“Gabriel Attal, the education minister, says that no one should walk into a classroom wearing something which could suggest what their religion is.”
On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron defended the controversial measure, saying there was a “minority” in France who “hijack a religion and challenge the republic and secularism”.
He said it leads to the “worst consequences” such as the murder three years ago of teacher Samuel Paty for showing Prophet Muhammad caricatures during a civics education class.
“We cannot act as if the terrorist attack, the murder of Samuel Paty, had not happened,” he said in an interview with the YouTube channel, HugoDecrypte.
An association representing Muslims has filed a motion with the State Council, France’s highest court for complaints against state authorities, for an injunction against the ban on the abaya and the qamis, its equivalent dress for men.
The Action for the Rights of Muslims (ADM) motion is to be examined later on Tuesday.
I was initially torn on this, but as long as it's for all religions, I support it. I firmly believe that I shouldn't know your religion unless I ask. Religion is toxic.
I do think you should have the freedom to wear religious signifiers as an adult. I just don't approve. But I don't want to stop you. Children in school? This is the same (to me) as requiring them to leave their phones at home.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread
Yea they made it so nobody could wear religious cultural clothes but there's only one religion that includes wearing those clothes as a belief.
Would you also support a policy that nobody named @some_guy should be allowed to talk, no matter who they are.
there are multiple such as Islam and Sikhism to give two examples. This law is just an example of religious persecution against religions that don't fit in with the French idea of which religions a French person should have
Your right should have said there's multiple religions it was discriminating against just highlighting how it lines up with Frances history of Islamophobia.
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"Just assimilate to Christian culture, Muslims. I'm anti-religion of all kinds, btw."
You are too caught up in liberal abstraction to allow yourself to understand the material reality.
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Pure reactionary sophistry. They are not made to go to church, but they still get the Christian Sabbath off but not Muslim Jumu'ah (their equivalent, midday prayer) on Fridays. France is "secular" but it just so happens that the laws of its "secularism" cut in a direction that wildly favors Christianity.
You claim to be a communist, don't you? You should know this quote:
-- Anatole France
As I said, liberal abstraction that obscures the deliberate material impact of the laws.
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I was taking an opportunity to demonstrate a point with what you said, not suggesting that all bread stealing should be legalized.
Your ideology is a joke. "Surely, some girl wearing too baggy a dress will hamper education and heighten religious differences. No, we must teach these children tolerance by socializing them in an environment where we have eliminated any visible deviations from the dominant (liberal Christian) culture. Then, when they go out on the street and see people who look different, they will in fact be more tolerant of people with traits alien to how they were socialized."
Every word you say is just laundering reactionary bullshit under a veil of virtue.
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How can you be so far gone that you don't see the Islamophobia all over France as being connected to Christianity?
can't believe you just said "facing persecution for your religious faith simply don't be a member of the religious minority being persecuted"
Wow. So literally saying they should just assimilate, so much for that whole "they have to respect our culture because we respect theirs"
Also yea the third point was stupid, it was to illustrate how dumb your argument was.
Bit then you just came out and admitted to being a bigot and leapfrogging my point.
I am bigoted against religion. I otherwise accept everyone for who they are. I have no shame in taking this stance.
Yea bigots generally aren't shameful about their bigotry they just usually try to tap dance around the word bigot, good for you for being honest I guess.
The point people are trying to make is that it’s not the religion that’s being targeted, but the minority non white culture, and it’s being done in a way to hide its true intent, which you are supporting based on its appearance.
This has nothing to do with secularism and everything to do with punishing and invalidating nonwhite culture
I suspect that you're right and if that's the case, that's terrible. I would support removal of religion from schools simply on the basis that it's the source of most of the world's wars. In the US, I think we should take the gloves off and churches should pay taxes. I detest that it causes people to vote and behave irrationally and is used as a smoke screen to excuse bad behavior. My support for kicking religion out of schools is based in that and does not apply as a tool to suppress non-western peoples.
It's unfortunate that what you're suggesting is probably the real reason. Put me in charge and it really will be because I'm sick of religion in a completely colorblind fashion.
You may have a leg to stand on in terms of premodern history, but for the last 150 years most wars have been due to capitalism, not religion. You are not exactly incorrect, but you are in my view taking symptoms as the disease, when we really need to zoom out, religion itself isn't the base level problem, its authoritative structures not derived from the consent and for the betterment of the people, religion is but a powerful historical tool
You're right. I have no argument with your statement other than to say that religion has justified violence on a non-war scale. Take all the violence that has been influenced by religion that isn't a war and factor that in with the wars.
Yes, capitalism is destroying lives, the world, etc. Absolutely.
The thing that I was thinking about last night is if I had one wish that would come true, what would it be? I hate that there are people unhoused. I hate that there are people who are abused. I hate that there is hunger. But to cure all terrible things, I think erasing religion would be the greatest step to removing barriers in finding consensus. I think it's the thing most responsible for dividing people. Tribalism will still exist, but if you removed this all-present motivation from personal interactions and people's sense of morals, I think we'd make progress on all other fronts.
Capitalism is positive to no one’s lives but a vanishingly small % of the smallest % of the world, and does great harm to all others
Religion is integrated into a number of oppressive systems that largely prop up capitalism, but is also neutral for many people.
I definitely don’t disagree that humanity has moved past the need for religion as we have now, and it’s destruction would definitely be a net positive.
The thing is though, destroying capitalism and bringing about communism would also destroy organized religion as it now exists, but the opposite is not true, deleting religion from the world would do almost nothing to change anything for most people.
Palestinians would still be getting genocided by Israel, because it’s not religion that is the cause of that, it’s just a tool for the messaging of the Israeli state, not the actual reason, for one concrete example
Sure, it would probably make the world a better place, but it would not advance humanity much towards a brighter future
We’d just have the current world but instead of division along religious lines, it would be more explicitly along economic or racial/ethnic lines
US Evangelical Christian’s wouldn’t suddenly become good nice people, they’re still vicious racist monsters, the way they talk about the people they hate and dehumanize would simply be slightly different words
Organized religion like Catholicism is an undebatably malignant social entity, but religion in general? I think Marx has it completely right:
When he calls it "the opium of the people" he doesn't mean "they do it recreationally and it kills them," he means "though it hampers them, it anesthetizes pain inflicted on them from without". If you want humanity to be free of religion rather than merely having an atheistic upper class be free of needing to see the rabble practice religion (by persecuting the latter), then the primary answer is not to legislate against religion but to legislate against the problems that, in turn, drive people to religion. It can be difficult to accept, but whether it matches your personal experience or not, religion serves useful social functions, just as opium serves useful medical functions (whatever else we may rightly say about both). If you want to get rid of religion, you need to do the good that it does better than it. If you want the oppressed creature not to sigh, end its oppression. To simply stifle its sigh is to strangle it.
Great response. I'd counter that fear of death will still provide a gateway to religion, but there's nothing else with which I'd quibble. Cheers!
Well if we look at the Romans, Assyrians, British, French, and Germans and their wars it's abundantly clear that most of their wars were for the aquisition of wealth. The vast majority of wars even in the middle ages were openly about arguments between noble families over land
You're discounting the Protestant Reformation and Crusades, not to mention all other wars for religion. Yes, people fight for territory and resources. People also fight for a fictional man in the sky.
yeah if you discount all the secular motives behind the wars of the reformation as well. The French have basically always been trying to keep Germany down as Germany's large population worries them financially and militarily. Henry the 8th didn't convert for religious reasons he converted because he needed a strong male heir to keep the plantagenots at bay and the pope wouldn't let him annul his marriage to Catharine of Aragon who kept having stillbirths
This is false. It was used as the pretext for most of the world's wars, just as secular equality is used as the pretext for this law, but the actual cause of those and virtually all wars lies in material motivations (land, resources, etc), just as the true objective of the law is to forcibly assimilate minorities.
LOL
What the fuck I thought Christopher Hitchens died
Dawkins and Harris yet live, unfortunately
My North African grandfather lost a leg to untreated necrosis defending that gallic shithole from nazism, they can go assimilate his rotted leg
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In the Americas there were schools for native American children where they forced them to dress, eat, speak, and behave "properly" and not practice their religion. The goal was to eliminate their culture and make them homogeneously American or Canadian. (They also killed a fucking ton) This sort of nationalism has generally been looked back on as a mistake and a horrible atrocity. Why should it be acceptable towards other religious groups?
These kids aren't being taken from their families. They aren't being forced to give up their religion in their homes. These are not the same. This isn't about "other religious groups." It's all religions while at school, and I'm fine with that.
The goal is to replace religion with nationalism, which isn't an admirable goal. They may not literally say it out loud, but it's pretty obvious.
I'm not in support of nationalism. I don't know if what you said is accurate or not. I simply approve of keeping religion out of schools.
This is like the democrats who applaud gun control even when it is used with surgical precision to prevent black communities from defending themselves from police violence. "I don't support police violence, I simply approve of gun control".
you can't just leave religion and culture at the door and freedom of conscience isn't a right only adults are entitled to nor is it comparable to playing on your phone
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arguably not but you could also make that argument in favour of all children being forced to wear islamic dress.
yes religious parents put their finger on the scale of the kids decision but so do non-religious parents with regards to their kids religious views that's just how raising children within a culture works. It's not a lifetime commitment the same freedom of conscience that means they have a right to practice their faith also means they have a right to abandon it if once they are older they change their minds.
school uniforms are a good thing but exemptions to uniform rules on religious grounds have been a long recorded tradition. When the British forced sepoys to use cartridges that meant they had to partially consume beef and pork fat were the Indians wrong to compain or were the British merely removing cultural differences between the Muslims, Hindus, and British.