Paris – Salimata Sylla was about to take her team to the basketball court, as she had done many times before.
That Sunday morning, she and her teammates had completed a three -hour bus trip from the Aubervilliers suburb of Paris to a rival club in northern France. They had changed and heated, and Sylla, the team captain, was ready to start.
But moments before the pinch, they told him that he could not play. The reason? Your head scarf.
More than two years later, Sylla is still prohibited from competing under the jurisdiction of the French Basketball Federation.
The former 27 -year -old owner is among thousands of young Muslim women in France who are marginalized from competitive sport due to the prohibitions of uniforms and other clothing that have religious or political importance. These rules, critics say, are directed disproportionately to Muslim athletes who use the hijab.
Now, a controversial bill backed by right -wing politicians who would prohibit scarves in all sports competitions has cleared his first legislative obstacle in the Senate. If you pass through the House of Representatives, what has been decided by individual sports federations would be consecrated in the law.
Supporters say that the proposed law is a necessary step to Protect secularism – A pillar of the French Republic. The opponents denounce it as discriminatory, Islamophobic and a violation of both the rule of law and the very concept of secularism.
“We know that sport is a vehicle for emancipation, especially for girls,” Sylla told The Associated Press. “So what are they really trying to tell us? They think we are oppressed because we use our head scarf? But in the end, they are also oppressing us because they have excluded us from the basketball courts. We choose to be Muslims. Under any circumstance, do not tell me what we should or should not use.”
In January 2023, they told him to take off his head if he wanted to play against the rival Club Escudain in the National League 3. Sylla refused, citing the personal conviction and the fact that his sports hijab was officially approved and considered adequate for competitive use.
Only then did he learn that the rules of the Basketball Federation prohibited all heads from the head to be inappropriate for the game, unlike the rules of the International Basketball Federation.
“I was very surprised,” Sylla said. “I went to see the referee to tell him that he had played eight games with him since the beginning of the season and that no one had forbidden to play with him. And he said: ‘Sorry, here are the rules’.”
The French Federation did not provide Associated Press an explanation of the prohibition of children in competitions.
Sylla, who this year made a pilgrimage to the Muslim Holy City of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, has stopped playing with her old club. She continues to organize games outside the jurisdiction of the Federation, organizing monthly tournaments in Paris and her suburbs that are open to women who play basketball with or without hijab.
“Don’t you want to include us? So let’s include everyone,” Sylla said.
Until now, sports federations have been free to decide whether to allow diapers in the head. One of the predominant sports in the country, football, chose to ban them.
A date has not yet been established for the bill to discuss in the lower house of Parliament. To approve, I would need a coalition of forces that generally do not work together in the deeply divided national assembly.
But the vote of the senators in favor of the bill has already revived the ongoing debate on secularism and the separation of the Church and the State. It is still a hot topic more than a century after a 1905 law established it as a principle of the French Republic.
French secularism – “lakité” – affirms the concept of religious freedom, while stipulating that the State does not favor any religion and remains neutral. At their most basic level, he argues that everyone in France is free to believe, or not believe, and free to worship as they want, but not to impose their religious beliefs on others in public spaces. Conceived to protect everyone’s religious freedom after centuries of bloody religious wars, critics see the lava now a pretext to discriminate and restrict Muslims access to public life.
A group of football players with a head scarf called “Les Hijabeuses”, who campaign against the ban, say that the new bill would unfairly force Muslim women to choose between using a handkerchief in the head or practicing a sport.
“We reject this injustice,” they said. “Because this law does not take place in France. And we will never do it. We will continue to fight until this election is no longer imposed.”
After the highest administrative court in France ruled in 2023 that the Football Federation can prohibit scarves in the matches, the children have filed a complaint before the European Court of Human Rights against France, claiming a violation of its freedom of religion.
The supporters of the bill cite increasing attacks against secularism in sport, arguing that its central values are based on a principle of universality. To protect sports land from any unimportant confrontation, they say, a principle of neutrality must be implemented to ensure that no political, religious or racial agenda cannot be promoted.
“For several years, government bodies and local elected officials have been warning about the unbridled dissemination of the ideas of radicalization architects and proselytism in sport,” said Michel Savin, the senator who promoted the bill. “Whenever they can, they try to prove the limits of our republican principles.”
Nicolas Cadène, the former general secretary of the Observatory now disappeared for Laïcité, a non -partisan institution that previously advised the French government, says that the principles of French secularism cannot be used to justify the prohibition of scarves in the head.
“The State, because it is secular, has no business judging a religious symbol,” he said. “That is not your concern. The State does not deal with religious symbols: it only prohibits them for those who represent public administration. This law aims to exclude all these young women.”
The bill is dividing the government and facing athletes with each other.
The five -time Olympic Judo champion, Teddy Riner, an imposing figure in French sports, has joined the fray, arguing that the bill was pointing to a religion and that French society should focus on promoting equality. Mahyar Monshandour, a former professional boxer born in Iran, replied, asking Riner not to get involved in a debate he did not understand.
“The handkerchief in the head, which is not, as they would make you believe, a piece of fabric that covers the hair, but rather a” death ‘destined to hide the bodies of women at the beginning of menstruation, it is in itself a visible sign of an institutionalized and legitimated inequality between men and women, “Monsionoural argued.
The dispute has exposed cracks within the coalition government. While some ministers have expressed doubts about the bill, it has the strong support of the heavyweight of the right as Interior Minister Bruno Retilleau.
The Hijab “radically questions the equality of men and women, and is a sign of the degradation of the state of women,” he said. “Obviously, not all women who use the veil are Islamists. But you will not find a single Islamist who does not want women to use the veil.”
Legislators have previously approved a bill to strengthen the supervision of mosques, schools and sports clubs. With bloody France by terrorist attacks, there is a generalized feeling that Islamic radicalization was a danger. But critics also saw that the law of 2021 as a political ploy to attract the right wing to the centrist party of President Emmanuel Macron before the presidential elections that Macron won.
With the next presidential elections two years away, the debate on radical Islam has resurfaced, returning to the center of attention after the recent release of a report marketed by the government that generated concerns about the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood to expand its influence in France through base organizations, including sports clubs.
Amnesty International said that the new bill is aimed at Muslim women and girls excluding them from sports competitions if they wear a handkerchief in the head or other religious clothes. Before the 2024 Olympic Games, Amnesty published an investigation that analyzed the rules in 38 European countries and discovered that France was the only country that prohibited the prolonged ones with the first lips in sports.
“If the law is approved, France will be the only democracy in the world that prohibits all religious head cutlery or accessories in sports,” said Cadène.
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