France rails over hijab for runners
PARIS Yet again, France has descended into controversy over the prospect of what Muslim women might choose to wear.
This time, the item in question is a hijab for runners, a product that appeared on the website of the sporting goods company Decathlon and was designed to allow observant Muslim women a chance to exercise in public while adhering to traditional codes of modesty.
Much like the “burkini” swimsuit in 2016, the runner’s hijab has set off a bitter national debate. What began as the usual Twitter tempest has now seemingly become a matter of state, with top officials taking a break from any number of political crises to address the allegedly offensive garment.
“It’s a vision of the woman that I do not share,” Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said Tuesday on French radio. “All that leads to differentiation bothers me. I would have preferred a French brand not to promote the veil.”
While the far right National Rally (formerly the National Front) called the runner’s hijab a “new intrusion of Islamic communitarianism in public space,” there were notable attacks from nominally left-wing French feminists, as well. Left-wing senator and former women’s rights minister Laurence Rossignol shared a statement from France’s International League for Women’s Rights, which decried the new hijab as an item “whose sole purpose is to prolong sexual apartheid.”
Aurore Berge, a spokeswoman for Republic on the Move, the party of President Emmanuel Macron, criticized the hijab and Decathlon, a rare use of a public platform to single out a business.
Amid the firestorm, Decathlon has temporarily removed the runner’s hijab from its website, but told the French press it will be available in France starting in March.
For Laura Youkana, a spokeswoman for the Muslim feminist organization Lallab, the furor showcases “enormous contradictions.” The irony, she noted, is that the product — much like the burkini — was evidence of a larger number of Muslim women seeking to participate in public life, not withdraw from it.
“Those who attack the hijab speak in the name of women’s rights, but this is something that actually enables a woman to practise sports, and sports is something that emancipates women,” she said in an interview. “It makes sports more accessible to all women.”
In the U.S., a Nike commercial titled “Dream Crazier” and narrated by tennis star Serena Williams aired during the Oscars. The ad featured several female athletes breaking barriers and being called “crazy” for daring to do so.
One of those featured was fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first U.S. athlete to compete in the Olympics with a hijab.