A student in a headscarf arrives for the start of school in Villeneuve D’Ascq, northern France. The student removed the scarf before entering the school. (Reuters)

Paris, Sept. 2 (Reuters): Twelve million French pupils returned to school today with few Muslim girls wearing the traditional headscarf that France has banned in a bid to keep religious extremism out of its state schools.

The kidnapping of two French reporters in Iraq by Islamist militants demanding that Paris revoke the ban overshadowed the start of the school year and Muslim groups that had condemned the ruling did not attempt to resume their campaign against it.

Even schools with dozens of veiled pupils last year saw few or no headscarves at their gates. In schools around Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Lille — areas with large Muslim populations — some girls wore their headscarves to the school gates.

“I’ll take it off when I get inside,” teenager Mounana Ouliat told France 3 television as she walked toward her Marseille lycee. “I have to get an education.”

The Jacques Brel School in La Courneuve, a poor suburb north of Paris, last year had 52 veiled pupils but no covered heads were seen today.

Parents said they did not like the ban but did not want to risk their daughters being expelled.

With the hostage crisis rallying Muslims to show their French patriotism, even groups that had encouraged girls to challenge the ban sought to avoid any clash.

“We’re telling the girls not to come to defy the state,” Fouad Alaoui, secretary general of the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), said in a final appeal before leaving for Baghdad to try to help in negotiations for the two reporters.

“They should make their schooling the priority,” he said in a hint girls should take off headscarves if the school demanded.

Education minister Francois Fillon instructed schools to admit everyone on opening day but invite girls defying the ban for talks that could take up to a week or two. If a girl still refused to take off the headscarf, she would be expelled.

Although increasing numbers of Muslim teenagers have chosen to wear a headscarf in recent years, the number of girls who insist on wearing it at school is relatively small.

France clamped down on them as a symbol of a growing Islamic identity among pupils, also seen in cases of Muslim pupils denying the Holocaust and rising numbers fasting during Ramadan and pressuring less observant Muslim pupils to join them.

Jewish pupils have also reported increasing attacks by Muslims. France’s 5 million Muslims and 600,000 Jews are both Europe’s largest such minority.

The ban also covers Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses, to ensure the secular rules are applied evenly, but officials have made clear their main target was the headscarf. The ban does not apply in Catholic and other private schools.

Just one pro-headscarf protest took place on the eve of the return to school. About 50 people in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, many of them girls in head-and-shoulders hijabs, demonstrated against the law.

But only 10 girls turned up in headscarves in Alsace today, French radio said. In Mantes-la-Jolie west of Paris, eight girls uncovered their heads when asked by their principal.