[caption id="attachment_1816" align="alignleft" width="620"] The ban is set to come into place when French students return to school. Photograph: Mubashir Hassan/Pacific Press/Shutterstock[/caption] France will forbid girls from wearing abayas to public schools, igniting a new debate over women's attire and secularism. The kind of long, flowing robes worn by certain Muslim women will no longer be permitted when the new semester starts the next week, according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal, since they contradict the French concept of lacité, or secularism. “I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools,” Attal told French television. “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them.” He said: “Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must be”. Attal told a press conference on Monday: “Our schools are continually put under test, and over the past months, breaches to laïcité have increased considerably, in particular with [pupils] wearing religious attire like abayas and kameez [long shirts].” The French republic is built on a strict separation of church and state, intended to foster equality for all private beliefs. But over the past 20 years, state schools – where there are no uniforms and children can dress as they please – have increasingly become the focus of rows over secularism. In 2004, a law banned the wearing of ostensibly religious symbols in schools. This included the Islamic headscarf, Jewish kippas, Sikh turbans and Christian crosses.