Now that face masks are being used to help fight the spread of COVID-19, it has caused some to look anew at discrimination against Muslim women who wear niqabs.
A woman wearing a niqab and headscarf, with other shoppers in Istanbul, August 13, 2018.
YASIN AKGUL/AFP via Getty Images
As people everywhere don face masks, scarves and bandanas to protect against coronavirus, Muslim women who wear the niqab, or Islamic veil, are feeling a lot less conspicuous.
A demonstrator protesting a disputed election wearing a headband in support of the Green Movement, Tehran, June 15, 2009.
Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images
The conflict between Iran and the US has gone on for decades. A scholar of social movements in Iran asks why the US has consistently failed to support that country’s activist reform movements.
Muslim women wear the hijab as a statement of fashion and identity.
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Muslim women are often perceived as oppressed and self-segregated, but many contemporary Muslim women reinterpret Islam to express their sense of style and fashion.
A Senegalese nun prays during a service at the St. Peters church in Dakar, Senegal.
EPA/Nic Bothma
Neither French nor American, Senegalese secularism stands midway between these two models
People hold up signs as they march during a demonstration in Montreal, April 7, 2019, in opposition to the Quebec government’s newly tabled Bill 21.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
The proposed secular law (Bill 21) in the province of Québec appears to be directed primarily against Montreal and Québec City, and reflects a fear of strangers in Québec’s more homogeneous regions.
Halima Aden, the first Muslim model to wear a hijab and burkini on the cover of the swimsuit edition of the Sports Illustrated.
Yu Tsai
Hijab-wearing model Halima Aden will be featured in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition. Here’s why her success needs to be viewed in context of a long history of black Muslim women’s fashions.
Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault on the campaign trail last September before the election that saw his party form a majority government.
The language of the neutral and secular state in Bill 21, like its precursors, presumes an invisible Christian default for the rules around public expressions of religiosity.
A mother teaches her daughter by reading Alquran inside a mosque in Indonesia.
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For Muslim women, the hijab is not simply about religion. They may wear it for a variety of reasons. On World Hijab Day. women – Muslim and non-Muslim, are invited to experience this head covering.
Muslims can pray anywhere in the world using the prayer carpet.
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
Trump recently tweeted about prayer rugs being left along the border. Many may not know the role and history of Muslim prayer rugs and why they are not likely to be left behind.
For many Muslim women, a hijab is a way of expressing resistance.
AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty
Hijab is not simply about religion – women wear it for a variety of reasons.
The freedom to choose one’s clothes is key to sartorial experimentation. In the late 1920s, the Catholic Register wrote that these swimsuits were indecent.
State Library of Queensland
Powerful forces in Québec have long kept tabs on women’s dress codes, and therefore women’s bodies.
Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault on the campaign trail last September before the election that saw his party form a majority government.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
The Québec government’s push to ban the hijab is ‘sexularism’ and also basic nationalism – one that pits an ‘us’ against ‘them,’ where the ‘them’ represent multiple threats to the nation.
Ilhan Omar, a Somali American, who was elected from Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, will be the first woman in U.S. Congress to wear a hijab.
AP Photo/Jim Mone, File
The de Young Museum of San Francisco recently opened an exhibit devoted to the Islamic fashion scene. Here’s how Muslim women’s fashions challenge popular stereotypes.