Paris, France – Diaba Konate was a rising star in French basketball.
Referred to as up by the French Federation of Basketball (FFBB) at 17, she went on to play within the nationwide youth groups in three main tournaments, reaching the finals of the U18 European Championship and the Youth Olympic Video games in 2018, and successful a gold medal on the 2019 World Seaside Video games.
On the time, the sky was the restrict.
She moved to the USA on a full scholarship to play with UC Irvine, surpassing 1,000 factors in her collegiate profession after scoring a season-high 20 towards UC Santa Barbara in February 2023.
Now 24, Konate goals of enjoying for France once more, nevertheless it has change into a trickier proposition.
What’s stopping Konate from one other nationwide call-up isn’t her potential – it’s that two years in the past, she began carrying a hijab, a scarf worn by many Muslim ladies to cowl the hair and neck.
“I by no means thought it could be an enormous hindrance”, Konate advised Al Jazeera, recalling how little modified when she began carrying it within the US at 22.
However when she needed to play in a match in France that summer time, match organisers advised her she may solely do it if she took off her hijab.
She felt “humiliated”, and later found that this was a part of new FFBB laws that forbid gamers from carrying “any tools with a spiritual or political connotation”.
Konate felt “deserted” by the FFBB and by lots of her former nationwide coaches, who by no means contacted her after Article 9.3 banning headscarves was carried out in December 2022.
Now, Konate has turned to activism to marketing campaign with a collective known as Basket Pour Toutes (Basketball For All) that features largely younger hijab-wearing Muslim ladies in France who love basketball.
Collectively, they’re defying a hijab ban in basketball and throughout French sports activities.
Their marketing campaign is gaining momentum earlier than the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Video games, as French Sports activities Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera introduced final September that French athletes carrying a hijab can be banned from competing.
At the moment, any athlete carrying a hijab can be allowed to compete at Paris 2024 – besides in the event that they’re French.
French laïcité and its influence on Muslim ladies
Timothee Gauthierot is a basketball membership coach within the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec – he’s the co-founder of Basket Pour Toutes.
He mentioned that even earlier than this nationwide ban, there have been only a few hijab-wearing women who dreamed of changing into skilled athletes in France as a result of “there may be a lot discrimination” towards them. “We don’t enable them to succeed in that stage”, he mentioned.
Human rights specialists have mentioned the hijab ban in French basketball is a part of a pattern of policymakers “weaponising” France’s custom of laïcité (secularism) to exclude Muslim ladies and women from French society, drawing parallels with legal guidelines to ban the headband and later the abaya (loose-fitting, long-sleeved gown) in public faculties, in 2004 and in 2023, respectively.
Campaigners have repeatedly pressured the FFBB to overturn Article 9.3, which was carried out with out session from basketball golf equipment.
A number of sources advised Al Jazeera that the FFBB launched new laws after French senators voted to ban the hijab in sporting competitions in January 2022. This set a precedent as makes an attempt by a collective of Muslim ladies footballers to permit the hijab in French soccer have been struck down.
However Rim-Sarah Alouane, a authorized professional on spiritual freedom, mentioned these laws “disproportionately influence Muslim ladies, thus amounting to oblique discrimination”. She added that “the precept of laïcité is supposed to make sure state neutrality in spiritual issues, to not suppress spiritual expression”.
Paris 2024 Olympics – a case of ‘sportswashing’
Paris 2024 would be the first Olympic Video games the place human rights provisions are included in its Host Metropolis Contract.
The contract states that Paris 2024 intends to “assure respect for the human rights of all populations positioned below its duty throughout the organisation”.
Forward of the Olympics, Basket Pour Toutes is pushing for each the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Worldwide Basketball Federation (FIBA) to intervene towards France’s hijab ban.
FIBA itself had a hijab ban till 2017, when it was overturned after an advocacy marketing campaign. In the meantime, the IOC permits athletes to put on headscarves in its competitions, however has not responded to letters by Amnesty Worldwide, FairSquare and the Sport and Rights Alliance calling for it to make sure France permits its hijab-wearing athletes to play sports activities.
For these causes, Shireen Ahmed, an award-winning journalist centered on Muslim ladies in sports activities, mentioned that these Olympics are the “greatest case of sportswashing”, as France claims to guard human rights whereas “being anti-Muslim in its personal yard”.
This concern is “all about alternative” Ahmed mentioned, describing how this ban pertains to points round ladies’s bodily autonomy and reveals an try by policymakers to dictate what ladies can or can’t put on.
“Our objection is just not with laïcité [secularism], it’s that it’s erratically utilized,” she mentioned, noting how male athletes who put on a spiritual cross don’t face the identical scrutiny.
The trickle-down results of French basketball’s hijab ban
In the meantime, the French Federation of Basketball’s ban is having harsh results on feminine Muslim athletes in France.
December 4, 2022 was the date that Helene Ba was first advised she was banned from enjoying basketball.
Ba, a 22-year-old regulation scholar who grew up within the Paris suburb of Yvelines, remembers that “probably the most violent factor” on that match day was that the referee advised her coach, as a substitute of her, that she couldn’t play.
She mentioned the referee didn’t even point out Article 9.3 – however as a substitute remarked that carrying a hijab was “an issue of hazard”.
However, figuring out the regulation, she fought again.
“I mentioned that I wouldn’t take off my hijab,” Ba advised Al Jazeera. “FIBA [the world basketball body] authorises it, and this was an area match. It’s violent to ask a lady to take off a chunk of material. It is a authorized declare and we have now the appropriate to faith and the liberty to observe sports activities.”
However Ba mentioned this didn’t cease individuals within the stands from asking “Are you certain you don’t need to take it off?” She refused to as a result of “religion all the time comes first”, she mentioned. Ba then left the stadium and her workforce performed with out her.
It was then that Ba realised she needed to do one thing about this, not only for her however for all Muslim athletes in France. “Whenever you assault the freedoms of minorities, you assault everybody,” Ba mentioned. “This [Article 9.3] damages the picture of basketball.”
Via mutual acquaintances, Ba would meet two pivotal individuals with whom she would co-found Basket Pour Toutes: coach Timothee Gauthierot and sociologist Haifa Tlili.
After conducting greater than 150 interviews with Muslim women in sports activities in France, Tlili mentioned that “we don’t realise the consequences of those traumas” triggered by the hijab ban.
“Many ladies have advised me: ‘Should you take basketball away from me, what do I’ve left?’,” she mentioned.
Solidarity and criminalisation on the basketball court docket
Badiaga Coumba, a 21-year-old who performs in Gauthierot’s membership in Noisy-le-Sec, mentioned that for the reason that FFBB’s ruling took impact, she has felt misplaced, not sure what to do with herself, and has just about given up basketball, though she considers her teammates her “second household”.
However in contrast to Ba, who was one of many solely Muslim athletes at her membership and who was unnoticed when the hijab ban was carried out, Coumba is in a really numerous membership: nearly totally gender equal (uncommon for many basketball golf equipment), and with many Black and Muslim gamers.
On a workforce of 10 women, there are normally three who put on the hijab, creating a powerful sense of solidarity.
When referees began telling coaches that hijab-wearing athletes couldn’t even sit on the bench, most French golf equipment adopted the foundations – however not Coumba’s membership.
The eligible gamers went on the pitch, positioned the ball on the bottom, and refused to play. Referees would rapidly grasp what was occurring, and name off the match.
Gauthierot, who has stood by his feminine athletes after they’ve achieved this, has confronted extreme authorized reprisals by the FFBB, and even the president of the Paris area, Valerie Pecresse. On October 7, 2023, she posted on X, previously Twitter, “I name on the State to cease leaving competitors referees alone within the face of Islamist makes an attempt to destabilise sport grounds”.
After receiving a collective letter from 70 Paris golf equipment protesting this basketball hijab ban, Pecresse ordered the suspension of “any subsidy to a membership violating our constitution of laïcité”.
Since most golf equipment are depending on public funds, as many as 20 golf equipment have been closely impacted and have needed to retract their assist.
The FFBB has additionally hit again immediately towards Gauthierot, fining him 300 euros ($325) and suspending him from all official capacities in basketball for six months from September 2024, in an ongoing case that Gauthierot is legally contesting.
“They are saying that it [the hijab] can result in radicalisation, however we actually dwell in concord,” Gauthierot mentioned. “They [the FFBB] make choices with out figuring out us.”
Gauthierot, who’s of Guadeloupean origin, cited sports activities legends who stood up towards discrimination as function fashions, like trendy American soccer’s Colin Kaepernick; or former US runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave the Black Energy salute on the 1968 Mexico Metropolis Olympics.
“I’ve obtained nothing to lose,” mentioned Gauthierot, who works in IT and volunteers on the native basketball membership. “I’d moderately do it with out discriminating towards women.”
Illustration issues, particularly on the Olympics
Critics of the hijab ban level out that that is occurring whereas France prepares to host the primary Olympic Video games to succeed in full gender parity, making the state of affairs much more alarming.
“By proudly claiming that the Video games can be ‘gender equal’, the French authorities are exposing their very own hypocrisy of celebrating such alleged developments whereas on the identical time discriminating towards Muslim ladies and women by means of hijab bans in sports activities,” Amnesty Worldwide researcher Anna Blus mentioned.
Andrea Florence, director of the Sports activities & Rights Alliance, highlighted, “It’s the Olympic precept 6 [of the Olympic Charter] that folks ought to get pleasure from sports activities with out discrimination of any sort. It’s not in regards to the variety of individuals banned, it’s about those that can’t even be included.”
Al Jazeera contacted the FFBB, the French Ministry of Sports activities, FIBA, and the IOC for remark. Solely FIBA replied, stating that “the headgear is allowed in Official Basketball Competitions, together with the Olympic Video games, in accordance with the Official Basketball Guidelines”. It didn’t specify if it could intervene towards the FFBB’s hijab ban.
Regardless of difficult instances for the women from Basket Pour Toutes, they aren’t shedding hope of their battle for justice.
Final April, they organised a large match in Noisy-le-Sec open to all ladies. Twenty-five groups and 90 women took half, in what Helene Ba described as a chance “to indicate the FFBB that the whole lot is ok and that we are able to play with none issues”.
In the meantime, Diaba Konate – who recognises that she is without doubt one of the few Muslim women in France who had the privilege to maneuver to the US to pursue the game she loves – is now coming again to her nation to pave the way in which for cultural change in French basketball, and to be nearer to household.
She mentioned that no girl ought to have to maneuver away from residence to play sports activities, and vowed to make use of her experiences to assist others.
“There’s a battle to be fought in France. I need to assist the FFBB to deconstruct stereotypes about veiled ladies as there’s a number of prejudice,” Konate mentioned. “We don’t need to make that alternative [between faith and sport]. We shouldn’t be pressured to do this stuff.”
“Illustration issues. It’s essential to have function fashions. You want individuals [who look] such as you to be impressed. I’ve completed the whole lot I needed – now it’s for the long run generations.”
