While the ministry wants to promote the study of Arabic and make classes more readily available, it has not provided many details about the plan, other than to say that Arabic teaching will be strengthened alongside that of Russian and Chinese.

And most French schools will have to start their Arabic programs from scratch.

Only 0.2 percent of students in public middle and high schools in France took Arabic classes in the 2017-2018 school year, putting the language far behind the widely taught English, Spanish and German.

In addition to the pedagogical challenges of jump-starting Arabic programs in public schools, there are social and political obstacles, as well.

Rime Abdel Nabi, who teaches Arabic at two public high schools, as well as at Sorbonne University in Paris, said public school principals were reluctant to open classes, saying, “ ‘No, we don’t have enough Arabs here,’ ” or “ ‘No, we don’t want to attract Arabs.’ ”

The ministry’s plans is causing particular alarm on the political right. Luc Ferry, a former education minister, suggested that the measure was tantamount to allowing Islamism in public schools.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a right-wing lawmaker who endorsed Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election, said, “With the pretext of fighting against fundamentalism, Blanquer is paving the way to the Islamization of France.”

But many leaders in the Arabic community support the Education Ministry’s plan.

Azzedine Benjemaa, the president of the Muslim association at the mosque where Habiba attends classes, said the public school classes would be of higher quality than religious ones. The Quran-based courses at the mosque, he said, can rely too heavily on memorization rather than allowing students to express themselves.

“Our professors have a lot of passion and good will, but they are not trained teachers,” Mr. Benjemaa said. “They didn’t pass national exams.”

Habiba’s class at the mosque starts with a prayer. That is not how lessons begin at the Claude Monet high school in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, one of the few French public schools offering Arabic.

Here, the teacher opens the lesson by using LinkedIn to show students how many jobs are open to them if they speak Arabic. One student, Imène, 13, used to learn Arabic at the Grand Mosque of Paris, but stopped going once she started taking classes in her public middle school.

Marianne Cossé, the school’s principal, said that offering Arabic prevented families with Arab origins from sending their children into the hands of people who could “radicalize” them.

“Offering secular Arabic classes in public school prevents the language from becoming the hostage of religion or extremism,” she said.

That position is supported by a report on the spread of political Islam in France by the Institut Montaigne, a policy research think tank. “Arabic classes have become the best means for Islamists to attract young people into their mosques and schools,” the report states.

But many argue that the government’s rhetoric around the new policy sometimes dangerously conflates the Arabic language, Islam, political Islam and religious fundamentalism.

“While the education minister underlines that learning Arabic at school celebrates Arabic culture and civilization, this decision is mainly taken in the name of the fight against Islamist radicalization,” said Sarah Mazouz, a researcher at the state-run National Center for Scientific Research.

Ms. Mazouz, who studies discrimination and naturalization, said that such an approach confirmed an “anchored stereotype that Arabic is the language of fanatics and obscurantists.”

Arabic has long been a popular and uncontroversial subject at public universities in France, where the language is viewed as a valuable asset for careers in business and diplomacy. At Sciences Po, an elite university in Paris, there are 37 teachers of Arabic, compared with 180 such teachers across all of France’s public schools.

But at the primary- and secondary-school levels, the Education Ministry’s plan has spurred resistance because of the role French schools are expected to play in shaping a shared national identity, Ms. Mazouz said.

“In France there is a strong belief that it is the public school that forms the French, that produces French citizens no matter their origin or their parents’ history,” Ms. Mazouz said.

While university students who have been through the process of “becoming French” are encouraged to learn Arabic, any attempt to teach it in public schools, she added, has been perceived by some as a deviation from that path, one that will promote a hyphenated identity of French-Arabs.

What does Habiba, who speaks French at school, with her friends and at home think of her own efforts to learn Arabic?

When her school homework gets intense, she said, she wishes she did not have to go to Arabic classes. But she needs to be ready for the summer, she said, for a visit to her cousins in Tunisia.

“Of course I want to learn Arabic,” she said. “All my family speaks it.”