The policing of Muslim women’s bodies, from West Asia to Europe and beyond

There is something profoundly vile about discriminating against women and policing their bodies in the name of secularism. Dictating what a woman should or should not wear is fundamentally at odds with freedom of choice. When institutions use their authority to compel women to dress according to a particular vision of society, secularism begins to resemble the very authoritarianism it claims to oppose.

The question has never been whether women should wear the hijab. The question is why everyone seems to believe they have a say in the matter.

As I write this, in October 2026, Azerbaijan is witnessing protests following new school clothing restrictions that have resulted in hijabi students and teachers being denied entry to some schools. The government’s amendment, approved in September, prohibits clothing deemed inconsistent with the principle of secularism, indirectly restricting the wearing of the Muslim headscarf. Women are now being forced to choose between their religious beliefs and their access to education or employment.

But what kind of freedom requires a woman to abandon part of her religious identity before she can enter a classroom? What does secularism achieve when its application excludes the very people it claims to liberate?

The language of secularism often obscures the power relations at work. Rather than allowing religion to remain a matter of personal conviction, the state assumes the authority to determine which expressions of religion are acceptable in public. The woman’s body becomes the site on which the state performs its commitment to a particular national identity. Her clothing is no longer simply clothing. It becomes a political problem to be managed, regulated and, ultimately, removed from the public sphere.

This is not to suggest that secularism necessarily requires such restrictions. A secular state can protect the right to practice a religion while refusing to impose religious doctrine on its population. The contradiction emerges when secularism is interpreted as a mandate to make religious women less visibly religious. And Azerbaijan is hardly the only place where women’s clothing has become a battleground.

The freedom to wear the hijab, and the freedom not to

If the justification for banning the hijab is women’s liberation, what are we to make of Iran, where women have faced state enforcement of compulsory veiling? How can a politics that claims to liberate women through unveiling coexist with a politics that claims to protect them through veiling, while both deny women the authority to decide for themselves?

These systems are not identical, and their histories, institutions and methods of enforcement differ. Yet what they share is a troubling premise that women’s bodies are legitimate objects of state intervention, and that women cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about how they appear in public.

A woman who chooses to wear the hijab is not necessarily oppressed. A woman who chooses not to wear it is not necessarily liberated. Clothing alone cannot tell us whether a woman is acting under coercion, religious conviction, personal preference, cultural attachment or some combination of these.

The insistence that it can tell us more about the observer than the woman herself.

Freedom of choice cannot be conditional on making the choice that the state approves of. If a woman is compelled to veil, her autonomy is violated. If she is compelled to unveil, her autonomy is violated too. Defending one freedom while dismissing the other is not a consistent defence of women’s rights.

It is also worth asking why the language of women’s liberation so readily becomes a justification for excluding women from public life. When a student is denied access to education because she wears a headscarf, or a teacher is prevented from entering her workplace, the consequences are not abstract. The woman loses access to institutions, opportunities and their livelihoods. The supposed liberation takes the very form of exclusion.

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Who gets to be modest?

The policing of Muslim women’s bodies does not always come from the state. Sometimes it comes from a restaurant door, a private beach, a dress code or the unspoken expectations of a particular social class.

In Egypt, investigations have documented cases of hijabi women being denied entry to upscale restaurants and other venues. A 2022 BBC News Arabic investigation found that 11 of 15 venues contacted during its reporting said women wearing the hijab were not permitted entry.

In Lebanon, allegations of hijab-based exclusion at private beach resorts have continued to generate public debate. In June 2026, a visitor reported being denied entry to Nowhere Beach because her friend wore a hijab, prompting renewed criticism of discriminatory admission policies.

These incidents reveal another dimension of the problem. The woman who covers her hair or wears a full-coverage swimsuit is not always being asked to conform to religious expectations. She is sometimes being asked to conform to an entirely different aesthetic: one that treats visible expressions of Muslim identity as incompatible with leisure, luxury, modernity or even social prestige.

This is where the policing of women’s clothing intersects with class and racialisation. Certain spaces cultivate an image of exclusivity by deciding which bodies belong in them and which bodies disrupt the atmosphere they are trying to sell. A headscarf can become a marker through which women are judged as insufficiently fashionable, insufficiently modern or somehow out of place, even in societies where Muslim women are part of everyday public life.

The contradiction becomes especially striking when we consider the attention given to celebrities who wear full-coverage swimwear. In June 2026, photographs of Anne Hathaway wearing a full-body swimsuit in Saint-Tropez prompted comparisons between the praise directed at her choice and the restrictions faced by Muslim women who wear similar swimming suits. There is nothing wrong with celebrating Hathaway’s clothing choice. But it is the double standard through which one woman’s covered body becomes a symbol of skincare, practicality or personal style, while another woman’s covered body is treated as evidence of backwardness.

The same garment can be fashionable on one woman and politically threatening on another. Its meaning is assigned according to who wears it, how she is perceived and what her body represents to the people looking at her.

The racialisation of Muslim identity

The policing of Muslim women’s bodies also raises questions about the relationship between religion, ethnicity and national identity.

Consider Azerbaijan. The country is predominantly Muslim, yet its official commitment to secularism has become central to the controversy over the visibility of religious clothing in schools. The current dispute raises a broader question about what forms of identity are permitted to appear in public and under what conditions.

I find myself wondering whether the discomfort with the hijab is also, in some contexts, a discomfort with the visible presence of an identity that is treated as foreign, even when it belongs to the people being asked to conceal it. In some political imaginaries, Muslimness and Arabness are conflated, despite the fact that most Muslims worldwide are not Arab and that Arab identity is not synonymous with Islam.

This conflation has consequences. It allows Muslim women to be racialised through their clothing, their bodies turned into symbols of a cultural identity that others wish to regulate, distance themselves from or erase.

It also makes the relationship between domestic exclusion and foreign policy worth examining. Azerbaijan’s restrictions on hijab in schools and its military relationship with Israel are distinct political matters; establishing a direct causal connection between them would require further evidence. But their coexistence raises questions about how national identity, Muslim visibility and solidarity with Palestinians are understood within the same political landscape.

The question is not whether these policies have a single motive. It is whether the boundaries drawn around acceptable Muslim identity at home can be examined alongside the state’s political and military relationships abroad.

The same scrutiny should extend to Europe, where secularism has frequently been invoked in debates over Muslim women’s clothing. France, in particular, has made the hijab a recurring site of political conflict. In September 2026, French National Rally MP Julien Odoul shared an AI-altered image of a Muslim woman’s photograph that removed her hijab and changed her clothes, captioning it “LIBERTÉ FRANÇAISE!”

There is something deeply revealing about invoking freedom while digitally altering a woman’s appearance, without her consent, to remove the very thing that makes her religious identity visible. It is a contradiction that deserves to be taken seriously.

When a politician uses AI technology to manufacture an unveiled version of a Muslim woman and presents that image as an expression of freedom, whose freedom is being represented? The woman’s, or the politician’s desire to see her differently?

The incident demonstrates how the demand to unveil can move beyond legislation and into the realm of public humiliation. A woman’s image becomes material for someone else’s political performance and agenda. Her consent is displaced by an assumption that her body would be better, freer or more acceptable if only it looked different.

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I am a hijabi, and my life is not smaller

I want to bring this discussion back to the everyday lives of the women who are so frequently discussed but so rarely allowed to define themselves.

I write this as a hijabi woman who travels. Wearing the hijab has not prevented me from hiking, swimming, travelling or pursuing the things I want to do. Across professions and walks of life, hijabi women are doctors, nurses, teachers, dancers, researchers, business owners, chief executives, politicians, employees and students. They occupy public space, develop expertise, build careers, create art and participate in the world around them.

Their lives are not adequately described by the fabric they wear.

I am not suggesting that every hijabi woman experiences the same freedoms, or that the hijab is never imposed on anyone. Some women experience family pressure, social coercion or state enforcement. Others choose to wear it freely. Some women change their minds over the course of their lives. Their experiences are not interchangeable, and none of them should have to prove that she is sufficiently independent before her rights are respected.

What I reject is the assumption that the hijab itself is proof of a woman’s oppression, or that removing it is necessarily proof of her liberation.

As a hijabi, I do not want my life reduced to a debate over whether the way I dress is acceptable to someone else other than myself. I do not want my ability to study, work, travel, swim or enter a public space to depend on whether another person approves of my appearance. I do not want to be treated as a political symbol before I am recognised as a person.

And I should not have to demonstrate how much I can accomplish while wearing the hijab to deserve that freedom in the first place.

The right to autonomy does not have to be earned through productivity. A woman who wants to become a doctor and a woman who wants a quiet life deserve the same respect. A woman who wears the hijab and a woman who removes it deserve the same freedom to participate in society without coercion or discrimination.

It is unacceptable that people are still discriminated against because of their headwear or skin color. We must reject these outdated prejudices and judge everyone by their character and actions—not their appearance.

A meaningful commitment to women’s freedom must resist that premise wherever it appears. It must oppose compulsory veiling without turning that opposition into a justification for compulsory unveiling. It must defend secularism without confusing it with the removal of religion from public life. And it must challenge discrimination against Muslim women without assuming that all Muslim women share the same beliefs, experiences or relationship with the hijab.

Secularism, if it is to mean anything in a plural society, should protect the freedom to practise any religion and any belief, and the freedom not to practise it too. It should not require women to erase visible expressions of their beliefs to gain access to education, employment or public life.

Women’s liberation cannot be measured by how closely women’s bodies conform to someone else’s preferred image of freedom.

A woman should not have to remove her hijab to enter a classroom, put it on to satisfy a religious authority, change her swimsuit to gain access to a beach or watch strangers digitally alter her appearance to make a political point.

She should be able to decide for herself.

That is what freedom of choice means. Not the freedom to choose what we approve of, but the freedom to make choices that belong to us, even when others disagree.

And if we truly believe in that freedom, we must be prepared to defend it even when a woman’s choice is not the one we would make for ourselves.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.