Hannah Rich explores what the hijab ban at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games says about state secularism in France. 01/08/2024

The Paris Olympics have highlighted what secularism and diversity mean in modern France, how the nation understands religious tolerance, and ultimately how national secularism lets religious communities down. One of the ways in which this has been evident is in the controversy surrounding French athletes being banned from wearing the hijab.  

The French principle of laïcité means that since 2004, the wearing of ostentatoire (visible or conspicuous) religious symbols in public has been banned. This has been codified to mean that across all sports, at all levels, religious head coverings such as the hijab are forbidden.  

Basketball player Diaba Konate has enjoyed success in the United States and in world championships, but cannot take part in this, her home Olympics, because of her desire to wear the hijab. One of the French 4×400m relay team almost missed the opening ceremony because of a standoff about the same, until a compromise was reached whereby she wore a cap. The baseball cap, it seems, is suitably non–religious as head coverings go, even when worn with religious intent.  

I think there is an undercurrent of misogyny, or at least of gender discrimination, at play here too. When the French men’s football team won the World Cup in 1998, the ‘black, blanc, beur’ diversity of a team consisting of players with Caucasian, Black and North African heritage was celebrated.1 Among them, Zinedine Zidane was a Muslim, albeit non–practicing. Some of the most prominent and successful French footballers since have been public about their Muslim faith, from Paul Pogba and N’Golo Kante to Karim Benzema and Ibrahima Konate. None of these would have been able to achieve the same level of success had they been Muslim women choosing to wear the hijab. 

The relationship between sport and the wearing of the hijab is long and fraught. Many sports federations at one point or other prohibited it; almost all bar the French have now relaxed that. If women’s football is less religiously diverse than the men’s game, it is perhaps at least in part the legacy of this ban. The number of athletes who are explicitly not competing at the Olympics because of it is the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that many more (overwhelmingly) women and girls never reached the pinnacle of their sport, or perhaps were dissuaded from even engaging at a grassroots level in the first place because of the hijab ban, according to Les Hijabeuses, a French collective of women advocating for the right to wear the hijab in football. 

All of this contrasts noticeably with British swimmer Adam Peaty’s heavily tattooed torso bearing the story of his faith. Peaty has been open both about his struggles with mental health and the impact of his Christian faith in helping him through. His tattoos include a cross and the words ‘into the light’. These are nothing if not ostentatoire, especially in the swimming pool.  

It also raises broader questions of whether regimes of secularism apply to citizens or to countries; in the event, French athletes have been subject to French secularist norms not applied to other athletes, which seems somewhat inegalitarian. Adam Peaty’s religious faith is not fundamentally different to Diaba Konate’s just by virtue of their passports. The alternative, of enforcing a ban on visible religious symbols including the hijab on all athletes, would be impracticable; for one, it would mean imposing laïcité on competitors from Muslim–majority countries, which would be a geopolitical overreach and not within the International Olympic Committee’s gift. 

But it does highlight the centrality of faith and belief to many athletes, at odds with the norms of French society, in ways that are as yet unreconciled. Almost inevitably, state secularism fails to account for the diversity of contemporary France and the disparate impact of this at this Olympics shows how lacking it is as an approach to religion.

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