The schoolgirls and sportswomen resisting France’s abaya ban

This story is taken from the winter 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.

On September 5, 2023, Aisha* woke up and put on a floaty, sleeveless dress for her second day back to school after the summer holidays. It was a week since a memorandum had been sent out by the French minister of education and youth, Gabriel Attal, banning pupils from wearing the abaya (a long, loose-fitting dress) or qamis (a long, loose-fitting men’s shirt) in state schools.

A few hours after Aisha arrived at her high school in Lyon, she was called to the chief educational advisor’s office in the middle of class. Suspecting something was wrong – at 15 years old, she already has a keen sense for such things – she immediately began recording on her phone.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here,” he said.

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Use your imagination.”

Aisha asked him to spell it out for her. “You can tell me – it’s you who called me here,” she replied. Through the recording, I hear her unwavering voice – steadfast, though polite.

After a couple of minutes of back and forth, the chief educational advisor got to the point.

“Don’t treat me like an imbecile. We’re obliged to ban you from entering the high school in that outfit. So you have two options. You either adapt your outfit to what I tell you to–”

“What type of outfit is this?”

“–and you place yourself in conformity with other students by wearing something without a religious connotation. Or you can go home.”

“It’s not an abaya, it’s got no sleeves.”

“It’s just so you can assimilate,” a female staff member said.

That same day, Sihem Zine appeared before the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court. Zine, who founded Action Droits des Musulmans (ADM) to protect Muslim citizens’ rights after the French government declared a state of emergency in response to the Paris terror attacks in 2015, had filed the motion to seek an injunction against the ban on the abaya and qamis. Despite being the only woman to speak among a court of men, she didn’t seem fazed; Zine has been interrogating the exclusion of Muslim women and girls from French public life since the state began to purge all religious signs from its institutions through legislative action over the course of a few decades. But this was a new kind of case: the abaya has no religious value (unlike the hijab, which is already banned in French state schools), and so Attal’s memorandum seemed to be banning modest clothing altogether. “You have introduced two new words here – ‘abaya’ and ‘qamis’,” Zine argued before the judge. “Why didn’t you write the French word robe [dress] so we know what exactly is forbidden?” Since the French government’s memorandum only defined the abaya and qamis as outfits “which ostensibly manifest a religious belonging in the school setting”, Zine reasoned that this would force school personnel to ascertain what was an abaya, maxi dress, boot skirt or kimono by racially profiling students to establish who was wearing a long dress for the purposes of ‘religious belonging’ and who was wearing it for fashion. She argued this would result in girls from ethnic minorities being denied their right to education. As Zine stood before the judge, proof that her fears were founded was emerging: Attal appeared on television reporting that already 298 schoolgirls had been asked to change out of their abayas, and 67 had refused and been made to go home.

But the Conseil d’État did not accept the case being presented by ADM. The judges, echoing the arguments of the Ministry of Education, found that anything which ostensibly manifests a religious affiliation is prohibited at state schools, and that items could become a religious garment “due to the behaviour of the student”. The judges also noted that the memorandum was circulated as a result of “attacks on secularism” in the previous academic year, during which 1,984 reports had been made about alleged breaches of school dress code, largely pertaining to the abaya and qamis.

When I speak to Zine after the decision, she is incensed. “The concept of secularism in this country is misguided, and has been turned into an exclusionary secularism,” she says. “The general principle of secularism is the freedom to believe or not to believe, which means that the state and its officials have to be neutral. But for several years, it is the individuals as users of public services who see themselves neutralised. The definition of secularism right now is so broad that it means we are eternally reopening the discussion on the place of ethnic minorities and Muslims in society.” When I ask her if she saw any rationale behind the ban on the abaya and qamis, Zine is clear that she sees no legal justification – only a political one. “The only reason for this is that the extreme right likes it,” she says. “If you ask a person on the street what they think of the abaya, they won’t even know what it is. They won’t know it’s sold in Mango.”

“The media portrays a version of us that doesn’t exist. You have to explain to every single person you meet that you don’t put your hijab on because you were forced to” Sarah Bennani

While Zine was left reeling after the Conseil d’État’s decision – “The judge didn’t address our arguments and the decision wasn’t well reasoned,” she says – another lawyer was preparing his case. Aisha, forced to miss out on a day of school and humiliated in front of her classmates, had called Nabil Boudi, a human rights lawyer, crying. “They treated her like a dog,” he tells me.

Boudi is busy devising a new legal strategy. “The Conseil d’État is not independent,” he says, “and France is a very bad student when it comes to implementing international human rights law, even after UN human rights bodies made clear the extent to which the ban on hijab and other religious clothing in France is a violation of women’s human rights. As for the European Court of Human Rights, they’ve decided to give France a wide margin of appreciation – they’re not very brave.” He seems frustrated but mostly animated, excited to rise to the challenge. “What’s that Mel Gibson film? We need more Bravehearts in Strasbourg [the seat of the European Court of Human Rights].”

Boudi is now taking the case to the criminal court, arguing that Aisha suffered discrimination at the hands of the staff in her school. I asked him whether he himself needs a bit of Braveheart, in his own words, to do this work. “Of course. I often receive death threats because of my work,” he says. “The worst I’ve received was from a neo-Nazi who sent a letter to my office with a Kalashnikov bullet in it. But this work makes me strong.”

Due to its association with the revolution, the concept of secularism (laïcité) is venerated in French culture. But recent debate around the word has become divisive; to question its nuances is to be accused of questioning the essential foundations of modern France. Discussions on secularism therefore often descend into nonsense claims that France is under existential threat. And yet, the 1905 French law that entailed the separation between church and state did not mention secularism: it was only much later – a 1989 government ruling, 1994 ministerial decree and a 2004 law – that secularism was interpreted to entail ‘neutrality’, namely, a ban on any non-discreet sign of religious affiliation within state institutions. This flurry of action was sparked by what is now known as the ‘Creil affair’, when three girls of north African descent were expelled from their high school in Creil, just outside Paris, for refusing to take off their headscarves in class. The increasingly extremist interpretation of secularism has gained pace as the Muslim population in France has grown from roughly 1 per cent in 1990 to 8.8 per cent of the population in the last census in 2016, to 10 per cent in 2019-20 according to Insee, the country’s national statistics bureau. In many ways, the modern interpretation of secularism in France is a story of Muslims’ place in French society.

“We’re still going to fight, we’re not going to let it go. We have more and more girls that join us every day. This is just the beginning” Hawa Doucouré

Loubna Reguig is president of the Étudiants Musulmans de France (EMF), which supports students of all backgrounds through university and advocates on their behalf. When asked why she feels that secularism has singled out Muslim women, she responds by locating the French state’s efforts to stop women from wearing the hijab and modest clothing perceived to be associated with Islam at the “complex intersection of colonial legacies, entailing racism, Islamophobia, and gender-based discrimination”. Her political analysis, referencing scholar Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and sociologist Hanane Karimi, is devastating to the French political class, who champion a form of modern secularism to the detriment of Muslims. She argues that “regulating bodies” is part of the state’s efforts to “maintain social stability”, and draws a direct line between secularism as interpreted today and the French colonial administration of the 1930s. She mimics the rhetoric of republics past, raising the spectre of the French military’s régime du sabre in Algeria: “If we want to impact Algerian society in its entirety and in its ability to resist, we must first gain control over the women – we must seek them out behind the veil in which they conceal themselves and in the households, where men hide them.”

Policing women’s bodies results in much more than policing their religious affiliation: it reinforces the assumption that all of society has a right to map its interests onto the bodies of the most marginalised. Reguig, through the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en Europe, received testimony from a schoolgirl whose headmaster demanded he verify if she was wearing an abaya. “She was wearing a skirt,” Reguig explains, “so this was perplexing, as wearing a shirt and skirt over an abaya doesn’t make sense. The girl lifted her shirt to demonstrate that she wasn’t wearing an abaya underneath, but the headmaster insisted on her lowering her skirt further. In her fear, she complied and brought her skirt down to her knees.”

Boudi has also, through decades of representing Muslim women and girls who have allegedly fallen foul of laws on secularism, found that many schoolgirls decide to wear modest clothing not due to religious affiliation but rather as a result of anxiety surrounding their body image. Women’s lack of bodily autonomy is a kind of inescapable maze: women, out of fear they do not conform with beauty standards, are shamed into wearing certain clothes, only to be told to take them off again.

And yet, restrictions on clothing are often shrouded in the false consciousness that banning modest clothing perceived to be affiliated with Islam is emancipatory rather than oppressive. I return to Lila Abu-Lughod’s book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and her observation that to “construct the [...] Muslim woman as someone in need of saving [...] presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her”. I consider the silence from the 50 high-profile French actresses who filmed themselves cutting their hair in support of the Iranian women and girls persecuted by the Islamic regime’s morality police for not wearing a veil. The fight for bodily autonomy is a global one, and yet mainstream Western feminism seems to monopolise what women’s freedom can look like.

“We’re educated, we’re working in different sectors, and we don’t want to make ourselves invisible any more” Ania Tayri

“From primary school we’ve been taught about the French Revolution and fed a narrative that secularism is about enlightenment and taking us out of the dark ages,” says Hiba Latreche, head of internal development for Femyso, which represents Muslim youth organisations across Europe. “The initial secularism was just separation of church and state and it was a good thing. At that time, religion had a strong grip on France. When a person died, the priest would go to their family and convince them to hand over their gold, claiming that they would guarantee the deceased a good afterlife. For a century this was secularism – separation between church and state, without the need for religious neutrality and the need for women to be stripped of their rights. Secularism wasn’t born in 2004, but we act as if it was.”

In recent years, the notion of secularism has been extended to other areas of public life. In January 2022, the French senate voted to ban the wearing of hijab in sports competitions. In September 2023, a few weeks after the ban on the abaya in schools, French sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra confirmed that no athlete playing for France in the 2024 Olympics would be allowed to wear the hijab, framing it as a “ban on any type of proselytising”. The change did not happen overnight. It took the French Federation for Basketball until December 2022 to amend their general sports regulations to ban any equipment of a religious or political connotation in competitions. On January 8, 2023, moments before stepping onto the court, Aubervilliers basketball player Salimata Sylla was told by the referee that she would have to take off her hijab for the match. She refused, and in one fell swoop was excluded from her profession, social network and her main form of exercise. Having been booked as a promotional speaker for girls in the deprived banlieues and as a model for Footlocker, she now found herself on primetime TV defending her right to wear what she wants.

That Muslim women and girls have not been entirely disenfranchised is a testament to their tenacity. Sylla responded to her exclusion from basketball by establishing Ball.Her, a basketball club that she describes as a “space of solidarity” for all women and girls interested in the sport. One of the club’s members is Sarah Bennani, a podcaster and student of international commerce. “Salimata changed my life,” she tells me. “The media talks about the hijab all the time. It’s broadcasting news all day, often platforming the extreme right. There’s not a single day you don’t hear about Arabs, Muslims or immigrants on the news. But the media is portraying a version of us that doesn’t exist. You have to explain to every single person you meet that you don’t put your hijab on because you were forced to!” As I hang up the phone, a news notification pops up about Pascal Praud, a popular French TV host, querying whether the rise of bedbugs in Paris is due to the existence of migrants “who don’t have the same hygiene conditions”.

“We need to ask ourselves why there’s no debate on [the hijab in sport] anywhere apart from France” Salimata Sylla

Just as initial efforts to contest the abaya ban have failed, attempts to question the constitutionality of the hijab ban in sport have not borne fruit. In June 2023, the Conseil d’État ruled in response to a complaint brought by the Paris soccer collective Les Hijabeuses that the French Football Federation ban of the hijab was “sustainable and proportionate”.

“We trusted the justice system,” says Hawa Doucouré, an architecture student on the steering committee of Les Hijabeuses. “We thought we would win. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of facts and law. Now, we begin to think that the justice system is benefitting those who have power. Even lawyers and politicians who weren’t on our side thought we would win because we were right in the face of the law. What this decision means is that to ‘protect’ the people who are oppressed, you oppress them more.” Doucouré seems invigorated, however. “We’re still going to fight, we’re not going to let it go. We have more and more girls that join us every day. This is just the beginning.” Later, I hear that Les Hijabeuses are taking a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights.

The French state’s efforts to, in their words, defend women’s rights and prevent ‘separatism’, as it was infamously termed in a 2021 law further entrenching the ban on the hijab and other religiously affiliated clothing, are entirely self-defeating. Firstly, because the issue at hand is largely fabricated – reports of women being forced to wear modest clothing, including the hijab, are wildly exaggerated. Secondly, because you can’t claim to promote integration by stripping women of their rights and excluding them from public life. All credit is due to the Muslim women and girls who have chosen to stake their own claim to Frenchness, refusing for it to be singularly defined by the white, predominantly Catholic model. I ask Ania Tayri, the founder of a creative agency, Concentré de Talents, that helps French youth from ethnic minorities or working-class backgrounds into university and professional life, what motivates this generation of activists working to create a more accepting society for all those who live in France. “The generation before us, when they arrived here, were in a position where they didn’t want to make waves,” she says. “They made themselves invisible. They told us to try not to be noticed, to say yes to our teachers and always agree that they’re right, because we aren’t at home [in France]. But now, us youth, we feel we’re at home because we are at home! And we’ve understood that we don’t need to make ourselves invisible in the way our parents did. We’re educated, we’re working in different sectors, and we don’t want to make ourselves invisible any more. We’re not going to say yes to everything.”

*name has been changed to protect her identity

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