With the Paris Olympics due to take place in just two years, some xenophobic populists saw this as a good opportunity to apply anti-Muslim bigotry to the sport. Western Europeans preach freedom for all women, except for Muslim ones.
The debate came to center stage when Vogue France initially praised the American actor Julia Fox for looking stylish with a black head-covering during a visit to Paris Fashion Week.
"Yes to the headscarf!" read an exciting Vogue caption, before it was edited out. Instagram users pointed out that Vogue was hypocritically praising a white American for covering her head in France where Muslim women are actively oppressed for doing so.
Turkey
In 2010, French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, stood firm in their opposition to Turkey's bid to join the EU. The leaders agreed that Turkey, with a mainly Muslim 71-million population, has no place in Europe.
"The rules of the game have changed" since Turkey first applied to become a member of the bloc six decades ago, Merkel said through an interpreter after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In Turkey, the ban on women wearing a headscarf in university was lifted in 2008 and fully lifted in 2017, which the government says is meant to improve democracy.
The ban dated from 1925 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk passed reforms to move towards Westernization and secularism which banned women from wearing the hijab in government buildings, universities, state functions, and events. He also granted women the vote in 1934, 11 eleven years before France.
Iran
Mahsa Amini, 22, died on September 16, following her arrest by the country's so-called "morality police" for allegedly violating the requirement to wear a hijab that fully covers a woman's hair. Thousands of women took to the streets in cities across Iran, removing their hijabs and cutting their hair in solidarity.
The Islamic Republic's current forced hijab law demonstrates how the state can regulate women's clothing by dictating something as personal as clothing.
In 1936, after a visit to Turkey, Iran's leader Shah Reza Pahlavi banned the wearing of the hijab. The police had instructions to pull veils off women. The ban was lifted in 1941 due to resistance from the clerical establishment.
By the 1970s, the hijab came to symbolize an anti-Western stance and a challenge to the last Shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979. The Islamic Republic that emerged after the revolution made the hijab mandatory in 1981 and Iran continues to dictate women's fashion.
Qatar
The World Cup will soon begin in Qatar, the first Muslim country to host the global event. Recently, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar's Foreign Minister, called out Germany's "double standards" when it comes to criticism of Qatar's hosting of the World Cup.
His interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) came after German interior minister Nancy Faeser called for World Cup tournaments to be awarded according to certain standards, which was a direct jab at Qatar.
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