One year on from the survey he conducted for our monthly Screen Watch (Observatory of teachers faced with the expression of religious beliefs in schools, October 2022), in which the issues surrounding the wearing of the Abaya and the Qamis in schools were probed for the first time, François Kraus, director of Ifop’s Politics / News division, conducted a large-scale survey (representative national sample of 2,145 people aged 18 and over) for our Charlie Hebdo colleagues, following the ban on these outfits in state schools.
In this interview, he discusses the main findings of this two-part study: a survey carried out on 30 and 31 August and documentary research on the religious nature of the Abaya and Qamis and the way in which these outfits are presented to French buyers by the retailers and brands that sell them.
It represents a very small card in the jungle of administrative recommendations issued in France on the occasion of deconfinement, but it is a huge step in the fight against communitarianism. This three-page document issued by the Ministry of National Education, under the title of “Coronavirus and the risk of communitarian withdrawal”, is at once unprecedentedly clear-sighted on the complexity of the “spectrum of radical ideas of communitarianism”, on the “techniques and ways of proceeding” of the various “radical groups” carrying out “anti-democratic and anti-republican” projects and on the “conduct to be adopted” to thwart the “separatist” aims of such groups, whether they are “communitarian, authoritarian or unequal”.