Veil: As France moves to ban abaya, Indonesian teacher shaves 14 girls’ heads on hijab issue

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: Amid protests, France moved on Monday to ban the wearing in schools of abaya dresses by Muslim girls, Indonesia imposed a strict dress code in schools, shaving off the heads of 14 female students for not wearing the veil ‘properly.’

Last year, millions of angry women hit the roads across Iran protesting against the death of a woman in police custody on this matter. Many Iranian women cut off their hair publicly and burnt the veil as the police killed over two dozen people trying to control the irate mobs.

Recently, the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan also imposed strict rules on women and banned them from schools.

According to the media reports on Monday, French Education Minister Gabriel Attal said the abaya would be banned as it violated the European nation’s strict secular laws in education.

“It will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” he told TF1 television, saying he would give “clear rules at the national level” to school heads ahead of the return of students to classes nationwide from September 4.

The latest French move comes after months of debate over the wearing of abayas in schools, where women have long been banned from wearing the Islamic headscarf. The right and far-right politicians had pushed for the ban, which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties.

Many French schools reported tension between teachers and parents after abayas became increasingly worn in schools.

“Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” Attal said, describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the French Republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.

“When you enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them,” he said.

In March 2004, France legally banned “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” in schools. This includes large crosses, Jewish kippas, and Islamic headscarves.

Unlike headscarves, abayas –a long, baggy garment worn to comply with Islamic beliefs on the modest dress—occupied a grey area and had faced no outright ban until now. However, the education ministry had already issued a circular on the issue in November 2023.

It described the abaya as among items of clothing whose wearing could be banned if they were “worn in a manner as to openly display a religious affiliation.”  The circular put bandanas and long skirts in the same category.

An ocean away, 14 Muslim girls in a school on the main island of Java in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country by population, were subjected to partial head-shaving  after they were accused of wearing the Islamic hijab headscarves ‘incorrectly.’

The media reports, quoting activists, said Muslim and non-Muslim girls have been forced for years to wear a hijab in conservative parts of the nation of 270 million people, which tried to exclude schools from such mandatory dress codes.

An unidentified teacher at state-owned junior high school SMPN 1 in the East Java town of Lamongan partially shaved the hair of 14 Muslim girls. Later, the school apologized and the teacher was suspended. The schoolgirls did not wear inner caps under their headscarves, leaving their fringes visible, the reports said.

“We apologized to the parents and after mediation, we reached a common understanding,” the reports, quoting an official, said

The headscarf issue grabbed headlines in 2021 after a Christian student in West Sumatra was pressured to wear a hijab in a case officials described as the “tip of the iceberg”.