Lhe law of March 15, 2004 prohibits the wearing of conspicuous signs and clothing by which students show a religious affiliation. It is under this law that the Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, has decided that“we could no longer wear the abaya at school”. If the emergence of this garment had been reported as early as 2010 in a few schools in Seine-Saint-Denis, it is only recently that its wearing has spread significantly.
In order to avoid falling under the law, students have developed a rhetoric that wearing this robe has no religious significance. Their argument claims that it would be a “single dress”that she would be “cultural and non-cultural”. Who do you think you are deceiving like this? These young girls, formatted with well-rehearsed speeches and elements of language identical to Lille, Nice or Toulouse, only repeat Islamist speeches whose intention is to undermine the school of the Republic, which represents for political Islam a danger, because it offers access to individual freedom through knowledge.
Not religious, wearing the abaya? Online stores offering “islamic clothing” Or “for muslim women” suggest otherwise. In fact, the abaya is commonly worn in order to conform to religious norms requiring women to be “respectable”SO “modest”. This conception demeans the woman, guilty by nature and summoned to conceal her forms – as the veil conceals her hair – from the gaze of men, at the risk of triggering contempt, anger, even violence from the latter.
The situation of Iranian or Afghan women reminds us of this every day. This is how the control of women’s bodies and a clothing policy are put in place, but also how Islamism is gradually dragging Islam towards rigorous standards, making a part of French youth believe that certain practices are Muslim when they are actually Islamist.
Community belonging
Wearing the abaya is part of this logic, because it is indeed a political gesture that is more the wearing of a uniform than a banal coquetry: this dress allows you to distinguish yourself, therefore to recognize yourself, by submitting to rules of conduct whose philosophy is foreign to that of the school of the Republic. It thus marks a community belonging and, if it is difficult for some to remove it, it is because they would break these rules, sometimes understood as absolute. Besides, a “single garment” could it give rise to the outburst which, on social networks, accompanied the announcement of the ban?
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