FASHION week in Paris, and after a display of pink and purple mini-dresses in an elegant apartment near the presidential palace, an assistant wheels out a rack bearing two very different creations: black abayas. The billowing gowns, usually worn with a veil, have been made for the Saudi market by Paris-based couturier Adam Jones. As France considers banning full facial veils such as the niqab and the burqa, which President Nicolas Sarkozy has said is not welcome here, the fact that it is a major exporter of couture abayas may seem odd. But that is just one of the many contradictions exposed by the latest clash between secularism and religion in the home of Europe's largest Muslim community. “If someone tells me, ‘design an abaya,' why not, I'm proud of that. It's just a garment,” haute couture designer Stephane Rolland, who has made many abayas for Middle Eastern clients, told Reuters backstage after his fashion show in Paris. While French designers are wooing Saudi clients in airy showrooms, across town in the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville the picture is very different. “If you wear the veil, you get insulted and attacked all the time, you get called a terrorist,” said Ikram Es-Salhi, a 20-year-old student standing outside the Zeina Pret-A-Porter shop that sells mass-produced headscarves, tunics and abayas. Es-Salhi wears a long brown veil that covers her head and body but leaves her face open. She would like to wear the full niqab, but it is banned at her college. She already switched from her preferred course of study, nursing, to languages and sociology as nurses are not allowed to wear veils. She and her friend Aichatou Drame, who wears an ample white headscarf, decided to veil themselves three years and two weeks ago, respectively. Their families were against it, worrying it would cause them trouble. For them, the main problems of Muslim women here are not the veil but discrimination and unemployment among young people from immigrant families.
