… My wife, a teacher in a state school in a deprived suburb of northern Paris, tells me that until the start of this year she had never seen an abaya in her classroom. Within weeks they became commonplace. In some cases they were worn by body-conscious girls, a way of concealing anxieties about their weight.
But religion is the main reason the abaya has taken off. Its popularity spread on TikTok, as part of a campaign aimed at challenging the Republic’s secularism. Jean-Éric Schoettl, secretary general of France’s constitutional council from 1997 to 2007, wrote in Tuesday’s Le Figaro: ‘To dismiss the abaya as a mere ‘cultural’ fad, or to put it down to an adolescent crisis, is to deny that it is an expression of adherence to a political Islam that pursues a hegemonic goal.’
