Key Factors
- Nouhaila Benzina is ready to be the primary lady to put on a hijab on the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup.
- The governing physique overturned the ban on head coverings in 2014.
- A French court docket upheld the choice to ban the hijab in soccer.
Nouhaila Benzina is a part of the Moroccan squad that has certified for the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup for the primary time, making them the one Arab crew to realize this feat.
The 25-year-old shall be sporting a hijab when Atlas Lionesses tackle Germany of their first group-stage sport.
“A number of work was completed over a few years, and thank God it had a constructive outcome,” Benzina advised Al Jazeera.
“We hope to play at a excessive degree and honour Moroccans.”
The hijab was banned by the game’s governing physique in 2007 as a result of considerations over participant security. It was finally overturned in 2014, however a head overlaying has not been worn on the World Cup earlier than.
The ban led to Iran’s soccer crew pulling out of Olympic qualifying matches and prevented an unknown quantity of grassroots footballers from getting concerned.
A number of sports activities have moved to carry bans on head overlaying lately, together with basketball and volleyball.
Are hijabs nonetheless banned in sport?
However in France, the highest administrative court docket upheld a choice to ban the hijab in soccer, in distinction with FIFA’s insurance policies.
Les Hijabeuses, a girls’s footballing collective, had introduced the case arguing it was Islamophobic and stopping girls from collaborating in sport.
They argued that Christian gamers are permitted to make the signal of the cross throughout play.
However the French Soccer Federation maintains that allowing hijabs on or close to the pitch goes towards a 1905 legislation on secularism.
The ban additionally covers “any signal or clothes clearly displaying political, philosophical, non secular or union affiliation” and would due to this fact apply to different clothes, together with the Jewish yarmulke.
A ban on hijabs underneath worldwide basketball tips was overturned in 2017 after a hard-fought marketing campaign by athletes, together with Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, who needed to depart the game within the years the hijab was banned, saying she selected her religion over her profession.
However basketballer and activist Salimata Sylla earlier this yr mentioned she was banned by the French basketball governing physique for sporting a hijab throughout video games in her French league.
With the nation’s capital internet hosting the 2024 Olympics, some worry native basketball and soccer bans on hijabs might have an effect on different athletes.
The Worldwide Olympic Committee has refused to touch upon the difficulty, as a substitute reiterating there is no such thing as a discrimination on the Olympics.
Hijabi athletes had been excluded from the Olympic Video games till 1996, however boxers, weight lifters, runners, fencers and judo athletes have since worn it on the competitors.
Zahra Lari was the primary determine skating athlete from the United Arab Emirates and competed on the PyeongChang 2018 qualifiers for the Winter Olympics.
Egypt’s Doaa Elghobashy was the primary seashore volleyballer to put on the hijab on the Olympics, at Rio 2016, with tabloid newspapers making a lot of the distinction between her outfit and her opponent’s bikini.
In Australia, the hijab is permitted in netball, and rugby league does not have any particular tips on head coverings, however state gamers might not put on something thought-about ‘harmful’.
Aussie Guidelines’ Auburn Giants Australian Soccer crew was the primary to be made up of Muslim girls and has a number of gamers who put on the hijab.
In 2017, sportswear large Nike unveiled a line of modest swimwear with Muslim girls in thoughts, however the full-body fits usually are not capable of be worn on the sport’s prime degree.
In 2010, swimming’s governing physique banned full-body fits as they had been thought to offer athletes an excessive amount of of a bonus.
It led to three-time Egyptian Olympian Aya Medany quitting her beloved pentathlon as a result of she wasn’t capable of swim in a full-cover equipment.
Nike is one among a number of corporations which have produced ‘sports activities hijabs’, that are supposed to be light-weight and moisture-wicking to assist handle sweat.