Wearing a headscarf or hijab during a football match is authorised by the sport's world governing body FIFA. But they remained banned for official games in France. A group of Muslim women players are fighting against this discriminatory policy and are calling on the French football authorities, the Fédération Française de Football (FFF), to change their rules. As part of that battle the group, known as Les Hijabeuses, organised a football tournament on the outskirts of Paris. Mickaël Correia reports.
The head of President emmanuel Macron's LREM party has threatened to remove support for four of its candidates in local elections in southern France unless they withdraw a campaign flyer in which one of them is pictured wearing a Muslim headscarf.
The woman accompanying a school party who was asked by a far-right councillor to leave a regional council meeting in France because she was wearing a Muslim headscarf, a shocking incident captured in a photo of her distressed son breaking into tears, has decided to file an official complaint with prosecuton services for 'violence of a racial nature'.
At a regional council meeting in Burgundy on Friday, a councillor from France's far-right Rassemblement National party (formerly the Front National) demanded that a woman in the public gallery should remove her headscarf or leave. She was accompanying a visiting group of primary school children, which included her son who burst into tears over the humiliation of his mother. A photo of the incident immediately caused outrage as it circulated on social media, and has since developed into a major political controversy, dividing members of government and highlighting the blurring of the boundaries of France’s secular rules and their misuse as a weapon for Islamophobia.
A Paris university student union leader involved in current protests against a reform of university entrance criteria has dismissed as 'pathetic' and 'quite comical' criticism by government ministers who accuse her of 'provocation' and promoting 'political Islam' by wearing a headscarf during media appearances.
French far-right presidential election candidate Marine Le Pen, on a visit to Lebanon where she has met with a number of officials, cancelled her planned meeting with the head of the Lebanese Sunni Muslim authority Dar al-Fatwa, after she refused to wear a headscarf when she arrived for the encounter, despite having been previously notified of the requirement.
The Ifop study found 29 percent of those polled said sharia legal and moral code was more important than secular France's laws, while 60 percent wanted to see headscarf ban on girl students lifted.
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