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

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

Just a few hours after Aisha arrived at her highschool in Lyon, she was called to the chief educational advisor’s office in the midst of class. Suspecting something was mistaken – 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 may tell me – it’s you who called me here,” she replied. Through the recording, I hear her unwavering voice – steadfast, though polite.

After a few minutes of forwards and backwards, the chief educational advisor got to the purpose.

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

“What kind of outfit is that this?”

“–and also you place yourself in conformity with other students by wearing something with out a religious connotation. Or you’ll be able to go home.”

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

“It’s just so you’ll be able to assimilate,” a female staff member said.

That very same day, Sihem Zine appeared before the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court. Zine, who founded Motion Droits des Musulmans (ADM) to guard Muslim residents’ rights after the French government declared a state of emergency in response to the Paris terror attacks in 2015, had filed the motion to hunt an injunction against the ban on the abaya and qamis. Despite being the one woman to talk amongst a court of men, she didn’t seem fazed; Zine has been interrogating the exclusion of Muslim women and girls from French public life because the state began to purge all religious signs from its institutions through legislative motion over the course of a couple of a long time. But this was a recent type of case: the abaya has no religious value (unlike the hijab, which is already banned in French state schools), and so Attal’s memorandum appeared to be banning modest clothing altogether. “You might have introduced two recent words here – ‘abaya’ and ‘qamis’,” Zine argued before the judge. “Why didn’t you write the French word robe [dress] so we all know what exactly is forbidden?” For the reason that French government’s memorandum only defined the abaya and qamis as outfits “which ostensibly manifest a non secular belonging in the college setting”, Zine reasoned that this is able to force school personnel to establish what was an abaya, maxi dress, boot skirt or kimono by racially profiling students to determine who was wearing an extended dress for the needs of ‘religious belonging’ and who was wearing it for fashion. She argued this is able to lead to 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 vary out of their abayas, and 67 had refused and been made to go home.

However the Conseil d’État didn’t accept the case being presented by ADM. The judges, echoing the arguments of the Ministry of Education, found that anything which ostensibly manifests a non secular affiliation is prohibited at state schools, and that items could change into a non secular garment “resulting from the behaviour of the scholar”. The judges also noted that the memorandum was circulated because of this of “attacks on secularism” within the previous academic yr, during which 1,984 reports had been made about alleged breaches of college dress code, largely pertaining to the abaya and qamis.

Once I speak to Zine after the choice, she is incensed. “The concept of secularism on this country is misguided, and has been become an exclusionary secularism,” she says. “The overall principle of secularism is the liberty to imagine or to not imagine, which implies that the state and its officials should be neutral. But for several years, it’s the individuals as users of public services who see themselves neutralised. The definition of secularism without delay is so broad that it means we’re eternally reopening the discussion on the place of ethnic minorities and Muslims in society.” Once I ask her if she saw any rationale behind the ban on the abaya and qamis, Zine is obvious that she sees no legal justification – only a political one. “The one reason for that is that the acute right likes it,” she says. “When you ask an individual on the road what they consider the abaya, they won’t even know what it’s. They won’t comprehend it’s sold in Mango.”

“The media portrays a version of us that doesn’t exist. You might have to elucidate to each person you meet that you simply don’t put your hijab on since 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 choice wasn’t well reasoned,” she says – one other lawyer was preparing his case. Aisha, forced to miss out on a day of college 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 recent legal strategy. “The Conseil d’État will not be independent,” he says, “and France is a really bad student with regards 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 girls’s human rights. As for the European Court of Human Rights, they’ve decided to present France a large 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’d like 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 by the hands of the staff in her school. I asked him whether he himself needs a little bit of Braveheart, in his own words, to do that work. “After all. I often receive death threats due to 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.”

Attributable to its association with the revolution, the concept of secularism (laïcité) is venerated in French culture. But recent debate across the word has change into divisive; to query its nuances is to be accused of questioning the essential foundations of recent France. Discussions on secularism subsequently 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 didn’t 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 non secular affiliation inside state institutions. This flurry of motion was sparked by what’s now often called the ‘Creil affair’, when three girls of north African descent were expelled from their highschool in Creil, just outside Paris, for refusing to take off their headscarves at school. The increasingly extremist interpretation of secularism has gained pace because the Muslim population in France has grown from roughly 1 per cent in 1990 to eight.8 per cent of the population within the last census in 2016, to 10 per cent in 2019-20 in keeping with Insee, the country’s national statistics bureau. In some ways, the trendy 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 now have increasingly more girls that join us on daily basis. That is just the start” 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 related to Islam on the “complex intersection of colonial legacies, entailing racism, Islamophobia, and gender-based discrimination”. Her political evaluation, referencing scholar Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and sociologist Hanane Karimi, is devastating to the French political class, who champion a form of recent secularism to the detriment of Muslims. She argues that “regulating bodies” is a component 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 Thirties. She mimics the rhetoric of republics past, raising the spectre of the French military’s régime du sabre in Algeria: “If we would like to affect Algerian society in its entirety and in its ability to withstand, we must first gain control over the ladies – we must seek them out behind the veil by which they conceal themselves and within the households, where men hide them.”

Policing women’s bodies ends in far more than policing their religious affiliation: it reinforces the belief that every one of society has a right to map its interests onto the bodies of probably the most marginalised. Reguig, through the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en Europe, received testimony from a schoolgirl whose headmaster demanded he confirm 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 display that she wasn’t wearing an abaya underneath, however the headmaster insisted on her lowering her skirt further. In her fear, she complied and brought her skirt right down to her knees.”

Boudi has also, through a long time of representing Muslim women and girls who’ve allegedly fallen foul of laws on secularism, found that many schoolgirls determine to wear modest clothing not resulting from religious affiliation but moderately because of this of hysteria surrounding their body image. Women’s lack of bodily autonomy is a type of inescapable maze: women, out of fear they don’t 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 sometimes shrouded within the false consciousness that banning modest clothing perceived to be affiliated with Islam is emancipatory moderately than oppressive. I return to Lila Abu-Lughod’s book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and her statement that to “construct the […] Muslim woman as someone in need of saving […] presumptions are being made in regards to the superiority of that to which you’re 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 worldwide one, and yet mainstream Western feminism seems to monopolise what women’s freedom can appear to be.

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

“From primary school we’ve been taught in regards to 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 superb thing. At the moment, religion had a robust grip on France. When an individual died, the priest would go to their family and persuade them handy over their gold, claiming that they might guarantee the deceased a superb afterlife. For a century this was secularism – separation between church and state, without the necessity for religious neutrality and the necessity for girls to be stripped of their rights. Secularism wasn’t born in 2004, but we act as if it was.”

Lately, the notion of secularism has been prolonged 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 couple of weeks after the ban on the abaya in schools, French sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra confirmed that no athlete playing for France within the 2024 Olympics can be allowed to wear the hijab, framing it as a “ban on any kind of proselytising”. The change didn’t occur overnight. It took the French Federation for Basketball until December 2022 to amend their general sports regulations to ban any equipment of a non secular 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 should take off her hijab for the match. She refused, and in a single fell swoop was excluded from her occupation, social network and her primary type of exercise. Having been booked as a promotional speaker for ladies within 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 haven’t 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 fascinated by the game. One among the club’s members is Sarah Bennani, a podcaster and student of international commerce. “Salimata modified my life,” she tells me. “The media talks in regards to the hijab on a regular basis. It’s broadcasting news all day, often platforming the acute right. There’s not a single day you don’t hear about Arabs, Muslims or immigrants on the news. However the media is portraying a version of us that doesn’t exist. You might have to elucidate to each person you meet that you simply don’t put your hijab on since you were forced to!” As I hang up the phone, a news notification pops up about Pascal Praud, a preferred French TV host, querying whether the rise of bedbugs in Paris is resulting from the existence of migrants “who don’t have the identical hygiene conditions”.

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

Just as initial efforts to contest the abaya ban have failed, attempts to query the constitutionality of the hijab ban in sport haven’t borne fruit. In June 2023, the Conseil d’État ruled in response to a criticism 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’d win. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of facts and law. Now, we start to think that the justice system is benefitting those that have power. Even lawyers and politicians who weren’t on our side thought we’d win because we were right within the face of the law. What this decision means is that to ‘protect’ the people who find themselves oppressed, you oppress them more.” Doucouré seems invigorated, nevertheless. “We’re still going to fight, we’re not going to let it go. We now have increasingly more girls that join us on daily basis. That is just the start.” Later, I hear that Les Hijabeuses are taking a criticism to the European Court of Human Rights.

The French state’s efforts to, of their words, defend women’s rights and forestall ‘separatism’, because 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 difficulty at hand is basically fabricated – reports of girls being forced to wear modest clothing, including the hijab, are wildly exaggerated. Secondly, because you’ll be able to’t claim to advertise integration by stripping women of their rights and excluding them from public life. All credit is resulting from the Muslim women and girls who’ve chosen to stake their very own claim to Frenchness, refusing for it to be singularly defined by the white, predominantly Catholic model. I ask Ania Tayri, the founding father of a creative agency, Concentré de Talents, that helps French youth from ethnic minorities or working-class backgrounds into university and skilled life, what motivates this generation of activists working to create a more accepting society for all those that live in France. “The generation before us, once they arrived here, were able where they didn’t intend to make waves,” she says. “They made themselves invisible. They told us to try to not be noticed, to say yes to our teachers and at all times 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’re at home! And we’ve understood that we don’t have to make ourselves invisible in the best way our parents did. We’re educated, we’re working in numerous sectors, and we don’t intend to make ourselves invisible any more. We’re not going to say yes to every thing.”

*name has been modified to guard her identity

Hair OUMMY YOUSSOUFA, make-up MIN KIM at STREETERS, talent FOUNÉ DIAWARA, HAWA DOUCOURÉ, YOUSRA, SALIMATA SYLLA, LOUBNA REGUIG, ANIA TAYRI, SARAH BENNANI, HIBA LATRECHE, photographic assistants JEREMY CARDOSO, OLIVIA TRAN, CAMILLE SUILS PORTE, styling assistants JULIETTE DUMAZY, COPPELIA MANDIN, make-up assistants JIEYU WANG, BEA HAN CHING, videography TOM GODDARD, production WA GMBH, post-production LSD LAB, THE HAND OF GOD

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