On a recent Friday, inside the peaceful courtyard of the al-Wahid mosque, tucked within Milan’s bustling Navigli district, the usual post-prayer murmur was tinged with bewilderment. Worshippers had been discussing something that felt distant from their daily lives: the Italian government’s plan to ban the burqa and niqab in schools. For many, the proposal seemed to describe a country they did not recognize. Mulayka Laura Enriello, a 58-year-old high school maths teacher, stood among them and tried to make sense of it. In all her years in the classroom, she said, she had never once seen a student arrive in a full-face covering. Girls who wear the hijab, the headscarf that leaves the face open, do so without trouble. “Those girls who want to wear a (hijab) to school do so, no one bothers them, neither teacher nor student,” she said. The idea that a young woman might appear in a burqa or niqab was, to her, almost hypothetical. Yet the prime minister had spoken of it as a pressing danger. Enriello’s response was not fear but compassion. She said the proposal felt inhumane. “If a girl shows up at school wearing a burqa, I can’t tell her to go home,” she explained. “I have to treat her as a minor who probably thinks she is doing something good.” Her words captured the mood of a community that felt itself being used as a backdrop for a political message. The mosque’s imam, Yahya Pallavicini, was blunter. He called the proposed ban a “false problem” that focused public anxiety on a garment worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women, while distorting the image of Islam in the Italian imagination. For him, the real issue was not the fabric on a woman’s face but the attempt to impose a single, rigid model of society—one that treats difference as a threat rather than a fact of life.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni unveiled the proposal on Sunday at a rally of her nationalist conservative Brothers of Italy party, presenting it as a measure for gender equality. “You must go to school with your face uncovered,” she declared. “And in Italy no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself.” The state-run Ansa news agency reported that only about 500 to 600 female students in the entire country wear a full-face covering. The numbers made the urgency of the measure difficult to grasp, and for many in the mosque it felt less like protection than punishment. Pallavicini, who also serves as vice president of the Italian Islamic Religious Community, saw a deliberate manipulation. He described the plan as an example of “intellectual dishonesty” used to malign a small segment of Muslim society that is less palatable to the Italian public. More strikingly, he said the ban reflected an attempt to present “a unified model of society, a society that is white supremacist and if something is different it is caricatured by the specious use of the burqa.” These are strong words, but they speak to a deep sense among Italian Muslims that their presence is being treated as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be lived with. The proposal, in their eyes, was never really about schoolgirls. It was about sending a signal that certain bodies, certain beliefs, certain ways of appearing in public do not belong. And by framing the ban as a defense of women, Meloni could claim the moral high ground while appealing to voters who see Islam as fundamentally alien.
Meloni’s party is not alone in turning the veil into a political symbol. At the annual rally of Italy’s populist League party in Pontida last week, female activists from the French far-right group Collectif Nemesis staged a theatrical protest. They walked onto a stage wearing full-face coverings, then removed them as the crowd shouted “liberta”—freedom. The image was designed to be powerful: women casting off the veil as an act of liberation. But Renata Pepicelli, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Pisa, saw a troubling echo. In 1958, during the Algerian War, French colonial authorities organized groups of Algerian women to remove and burn their veils, sometimes under coercion, in a public show of allegiance to Paris. The gesture was meant to demonstrate that France was saving Muslim women from their own culture. Pepicelli said the veil remains a “battlefield,” and its removal is still used as a symbol of social predominance. The ban that Meloni has put forward, she argued, belongs to this climate. It is not a neutral policy about school safety or identification; it is a way of marking who is inside and who is outside the national community. The fact that the protest took place at a political rally, with a crowd cheering, only underscored the point. For many Muslim women, the veil is a matter of faith, identity, or personal choice. For the politicians and activists who oppose it, it is a prop in a larger drama about immigration, secularism, and the future of Europe. The women who actually wear it are rarely asked what they think.
Beneath the political rhetoric lies a legal question that may prove more complicated than the government expects. The decree, as drafted, does not explicitly mention burqas or niqabs. Instead, it forbids participation in school with a full-face covering or “in any other modality that prevents identification.” That wording avoids a direct clash with religious freedom, but it still raises concerns. Nico Tonti, a researcher in the department of legal studies at the University of Bologna, explained that while the directive has already taken effect, Parliament can examine whether it is proportionate to its stated objectives and compatible with the right to religious freedom. Italian law has long prohibited wearing items in public that make personal identification difficult, but it includes an exception for a “valid reason.” Over the years, courts have increasingly recognized religious observance as a valid reason, meaning that a woman who wears the niqab for faith is not automatically committing an offence. The new school decree could change that understanding, at least within educational settings. But the legal path is not straightforward. If the measure is challenged, judges will have to weigh the government’s interest in security and identification against the constitutional right to religious freedom. They will also have to consider whether a rule affecting only a few hundred students is truly necessary. For the women and girls at the center of the debate, the uncertainty is painful. They are not asking for special treatment, only for the same freedom that other Italians enjoy: to dress according to their beliefs, without being accused of threatening the nation. The law, as it stands, may not criminalize them overnight, but the message is clear—they are no longer welcome to be themselves in a classroom.
Observers see more than ideology behind the timing. With the campaign for the 2027 elections already underway, Meloni is facing a challenge from her own right. The National Future party, led by former general Roberto Vannacci, has been gaining ground, reaching eight percent in opinion polls since its creation in February. Vannacci is a polarizing figure known for provocative statements on immigration, sexuality, and national identity. His rise threatens to pull voters away from Brothers of Italy, and Meloni appears determined not to let him own the terrain of identity politics. Lorenzo Castellani, a professor of History of Political Institutions at LUISS University, said the prime minister is trying to project a more hardline, nationalist direction. “Meloni is approving this legislation to give a strong signal to right-wing voters, for whom security and immigration are among the main concerns,” he said. Castellani predicted that Meloni would build her electoral campaign around three topics: immigration, security, and political stability. The first two allow her to speak directly to her base without ceding ground to Vannacci on issues that stir strong emotions. The third is what makes her proposal different—she can present herself not only as a leader who understands the demands of the right, but as the head of a government that can actually deliver on them. The burqa ban, in this context, is less a piece of education policy than a badge of credibility. It tells voters that she shares their anxieties and is willing to act on them, even if the problem is statistically tiny. It also sends a message to her rivals: no one will outflank her on the question of who belongs in Italy.
Meloni’s confidence is not unfounded. Italy is famous for political instability, but she now leads the country’s longest-lasting government since World War II, having surpassed Silvio Berlusconi’s record of 1,412 consecutive days in power earlier this month. That achievement gives her a powerful story to tell in the next election. Castellani predicted that she would try to link immigration and security to the theme of government continuity: vote for us, and you get not only firmness on borders but the stability that Italy rarely enjoys. The burqa ban fits into that narrative as a symbol of resolve. It is simple, visible, and easy to understand. It does not require explaining complex migration policy or economic reform. It is a promise that the state will draw a line, even if the line affects almost no one. But for the people in the courtyard of the al-Wahid mosque, the line feels like an accusation. They are Italian citizens, many of them born and raised in this country. They teach mathematics, lead prayers, and send their children to public schools. They do not recognize themselves in the caricature of Islam that the debate has produced. And they wonder what will come next. If a garment worn by a few hundred girls can justify a national law, what other differences will be deemed unacceptable? The imam’s warning about a “white supremacist” model of society may sound harsh, but it captures a fear that is real. The ban is not about protecting women. It is about power—the power to decide what is normal, what is visible, and what must be hidden. In the end, the girls in burqas and niqabs are not the threat. The threat, for many Italian Muslims, is a politics that needs an enemy to survive. And on that Friday, in the quiet courtyard, the only thing they could do was pray that the country they love would remember its own better self.