France’s hijab policing became a template copied across continents

Evidence

But this was still France, where Muslims remain vulnerable to the plague of Islamophobia that follows their bodies wherever they live or go. It is a nation ailed by an anti-Muslim hate that fixates intensely on the bodies of Muslim girls and women and focuses its state-sponsored Islamophobia on the heads of those who don the hijab. Policing the headscarf is a modern obsession with deep imperial roots, and the fountainhead of a gendered Islamophobia viewed as the vanguard for copycat policies across Europe, India, and North America. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 705

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that French hijab law is ‘the fountainhead’ for India and North America copycat policies is causal and deserves scrutiny — what evidence traces the diffusion chain?
• DEFINE: Defines the reader-facing concept of headscarf policing as the touchstone of gendered, state Islamophobia.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”