France fined niqab-wearing Muslim women more than it fined unmasked citizens during the pandemic.

Evidence

The pandemic exposed the fundamental hypocrisy of the French plague. While every citizen was ordered to cover their face, Muslim women who covered their face for religious purposes were legally reprimanded and fined 150 euros, fifteen more than the penalty for violating the new face mask mandate. One face covering was legally mandated, the other legally prohibited. Even if a Muslim woman like Ibtissam wore the very same piece of cloth around her face as a niqab instead of a face mask, the intention of wearing it for Islamic purposes could garner punishment. It took a pandemic to expose the absurdity of this French policy and the capricious nature of a gendered Islamophobic regime that denied the free exercise of religion rights to Muslim women. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 728

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects directly to Iftikhar’s global Islamophobia synthesis the reader is pairing this book with — the pandemic made cross-national structural hypocrisy legible.
• SHARE: The 135 vs 150 euro detail — one face covering mandated, another prohibited — is a sharp concrete anecdote for anyone following French secularism debates.

Related

• France criminalized Muslim face coverings while mandating analogous pandemic masks (similarity 0.94)
• The pandemic mask mandate exposed laïcité as thinly veiled Islamophobia (similarity 0.85)
• The pandemic produced new Islamophobic tropes instead of pausing anti-Muslim campaigns (similarity 0.84)
• The coronavirus pandemic spawned distinctive new Islamophobic practices worldwide (similarity 0.83)
• French law fined face coverings for religion more than the pandemic mask mandate (similarity 0.82)
• French hijab bans rest on narratives contradicting Muslim women’s own accounts (similarity 0.79)
• France’s 2019 law barred hijab-wearing mothers from school chaperoning (similarity 0.79)
• France’s hijab policing became a template copied across continents (similarity 0.78)
• France’s Hijab Ban inaugurated gendered Islamophobia that polices Muslim women’s bodies (similarity 0.78)
• France’s hijab ban seeded copycat policies across Europe, India, and North America (similarity 0.78)