Beirut — France’s far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen capped her visit to Lebanon with controversy on Tuesday when she refused to wear a headscarf to meet the country’s top Sunni Muslim cleric. On her last day in the Mediterranean country, Le Pen arrived at Sheikh Abdellatif Deryan’s office in Beirut and was offered a white shawl to cover her blonde hair. The National Front candidate promptly refused and made a brief statement to journalists before leaving. "The highest Sunni authority in the world had not had this requirement, so I have no reason to," Le Pen said, referring to her 2015 visit to Al-Azhar, the prestigious Egyptian institution of Sunni Islamic learning. She said she had told Deryan’s office on Monday that she would not wear a headscarf: "They did not cancel the meeting, so I thought they would accept that I will not wear the scarf. "They wanted to impose this on me, to present me with a fait accompli. Well, no one presents me with a fait accompli," the cand...
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