The European Union has come under fire from Italian MEP Silvia Sardone over its funding of academic research projects, which she deems “wasteful”.
A particular study rejected by Sardone, MEP for the right-wing Lega party, is a €1.6 million piece of work examining hair, identity, beauty and personal identity among Muslim women, with a focus on emotional landscapes and evolving femininity “beyond the veil”.
According to the Ghent University, the study, titled HAIR, “offers a compelling new perspective on the everyday politics of beauty, religion, and identity by placing the under-researched topic of Muslim women’s head hair – rather than the headscarf – at the center of analysis”.
It focuses on Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates and explores “how women feel and express themselves about their bodies as they navigate changing socio-religious expectations”.
HAIR claims to have a “unique” “interdisciplinary and innovative blended methodology”.
“The project brings together Islamic studies, social anthropology, and the anthropology of emotions to explore the plurality of beauty practices in relation to understandings of religiosity and identity. It combines fieldwork, digital ethnography, and literary analysis to comparatively examine how women experience, share and talk about their intimate selves – both online and offline,” the university claimed.
“By foregrounding gendered body politics and the emotional and cultural dimensions of beauty, HAIR challenges dominant narratives and offers new ways of understanding rapidly changing societies.
“It opens up fresh perspectives on the entanglements of the body, beauty, and belief in diverse Muslim contexts. The project will produce scholarly publications and an online exhibition that rethink how concepts of gendered beauty and religious lifeworlds are constructed and re-imagined in globalised contexts,” it concludes.
Sardone, a vice-secretary of the Lega party and member of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, was not impressed and highlighted the grant in a post on X yesterday.
She described the project as an example of Brussels “throwing away” taxpayers’ money on what she called ideologically-driven initiatives, arguing that it reflects a gap between EU priorities and the concerns of ordinary citizens.
In her statement, Sardone linked the funding to a broader pattern of EU support for Islam-related research.
She noted that she had previously flagged grants totalling €17 million for studies on topics such as the European Quran, Sharia law, Muslim youth in Europe and related themes.
She also referenced additional allocations, including more than €3 million for projects with titles such as Sustainable Alliances Against Anti-Muslim Hatred, A Model Towards a Non-Discriminatory Culture, and Reporting and Documenting Anti-Muslim Racism.
“For a long time, I’ve been denouncing these wastes … It’s time to say stop to this ideological pro-Islam madness funded with taxpayers’ money,” Sardone commented.
“In practice, public money given to associations and universities to tell us what we can or cannot say about Islamism and immigration, transforming any legitimate criticism into ‘hatred’ and accusing freedom of expression.
“Among other things, nothing is being done about the anti-Christian hatred that is growing all over the world,” she added.
The specific €1.6 million project appears to fall under the European Research Council (ERC) or similar EU competitive funding schemes for social sciences, humanities, or cultural studies. Such grants are awarded through allegedly independent, peer-reviewed processes based on criteria of scientific excellence, innovation, and potential societal impact, rather than political directives.
The controversy has been amplified in conservative Italian media, which framed the expenditure as part of a recurring pattern of Brussels funding what some view as niche or ideologically-slanted academic work.
Brussels Signal reached out to Franke to explain why the study into the hair of Muslim women was relevant and deserving of EU subsidies but she had not replied by the time of writing, after initially having said she would react one day prior.
🟥 Spulciando i finanziamenti dell’Unione Europea ho scoperto un milione e 600 mila euro di fondi europei per un progetto di ricerca sui capelli delle donne musulmane e quasi 3 milioni per campagne sull’islamofobia. Da tempo ho denunciato questi sprechi: in passato ho segnalato i… pic.twitter.com/DqjOJqqbgr
— Silvia Sardone (@SardoneSilvia) January 15, 2026
