Category Archives: Hijab

Attacker tried to strangle Muslim woman with her own hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim woman was left degraded and ashamed after her hijab was ripped from her head and used to strangle her. Barka Ali-Abdulla told a court she was left afraid for her life and unable to go out after she was attacked by Tanya Squires. Ms Abdulla, a Somali refugee, said she was left so devastated she is thinking of leaving Britain after living here for more than 20 years.

Squires, 21, who is three months pregnant, hurled a stone at her head in an unprovoked attack near Churchill Square, Brighton, in August. When Ms Abdulla, the mother of a young daughter, turned round Squires spat in her face and launched a vicious assault on her, Brighton Magistrates Court was told yesterday. Amanda Burrows, prosecuting, said: “Squires punched her hard in the eye and then pulled off her hijab, a traditional headscarf, which she used to try to strangle Ms Abdulla.”

Squires was given a five month prison sentence suspended for a year and was ordered to pay £200 compensation to her victim. She was also ordered to wear an electronic tag and not go out between 8pm and 6am until February 5.

The Argus, 13 December 2008

ECHR backs French headscarf ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Europe’s top rights court ruled Thursday that a French school ban on headscarves was not a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In a case involving two French Muslim girls who had been expelled from school after refusing to remove their scarves during sports classes, the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the decision did not discriminate.

The applicants, Belgin Dogru and Esma-Nur Kervanci, are French nationals who were born in 1987 and 1986 respectively and live in the northwestern town of Flers.

Dogru, then aged 11, and Kervanci, aged 12, went to physical education and sports classes wearing their headscarves on numerous occasions in January 1999 and refused to take them off despite repeated requests to do so by their teacher. The teacher had said that wearing a headscarf was incompatible with physical education classes.

A month later the school’s discipline committee decided to expel the two from the school for failing to participate actively in physical education and sports classes.

The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was to adhere to the requirements of secularism in French state schools. The court also said that the penalty of expulsion did not appear disproportionate, and noted that the applicants had been able to continue their schooling by correspondence classes.

“It was clear that the applicants’ religious convictions were fully taken into account in relation to the requirements of protecting the rights and freedoms of others and public order,” the court said in a press release. It was also clear that the decision was based on those requirements and not on any objections to the applicants’ religious beliefs.

AFP, 5 December 2008

See also ECHR press release, 4 December 2008

Muslim barrister called ‘tent head’ wins £75,000

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Saleca ParkerSaleca Faisal-Parkar, 31, was harassed, overlooked for jobs and training and was even branded “lazy” after she became seriously ill while pregnant.

The abuse was led by Stephen Jones, then head of litigation at the leading law firm Shakespeares, who also referred to her as a “flipping nun”. He was also a deputy district judge and a member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Panel, but has resigned both positions in the light of the scandal.

Mrs Faisal-Parkar, who has a young daughter, joined Shakespeares in 2002 as a legal assistant. Not long after she started, she found out from a fellow worker that she had been nicknamed “Mother Teresa” because she wore a hijab, which covers her head.

Over the course of the following months, she said Mr Jones – who made the derogatory comments in emails – harassed her, refused her training requests and potentially reduced her annual salary increase by the type of work he gave her. In one email he says to a colleague: “From where I sit tent ‘ead looks like a flipping nun today unless there are auditions for the Sound of Music on somewhere?”

Mrs Faisal-Parkar told The Daily Telegraph: “It was the worst experience of my life; it was just one thing after another. It had a terrible effect on my life at a time that should have been my happiest, getting married and having a baby. To this day I don’t know what motivated Mr Jones to treat me like he did, but I’m glad now he’s been shown up to be the sort of man he was.”

Mrs Faisal-Parkar, from Great Barr, West Mids, accepted an out of court settlement at the beginning of a three-day tribunal in Birmingham. Mr Jones has been demoted and fined a five-figure sum by the company.

Daily Telegraph, 5 December 2008

Local soccer association and Muslim council unite to back Safaa Menhem

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Alberta’s minister of recreation said Monday he backs a referee’s decision to ban a 14-year-old Calgary girl from playing soccer while wearing a hijab. But local soccer and Muslim associations plan to ask the provincial body that governs the sport to reverse its stance and allow religious headgear.

In a letter to the Alberta Soccer Association, which sets the rules for competition within Alberta, the Calgary Minor Soccer Association said the rule had been inconsistently applied and it asked for clear guidance on whether players can wear hijabs during games. “We’re hoping they give some leniency to the rules and allow a player with a hijab to play,” said executive director Daryl Leinweber. Soccer’s accessibility would be damaged if hijabs were banned, Leinweber said. “At a local level, should that exclude a player from playing soccer?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Nagah Hage, chairman of the Muslim Council of Calgary, said he plans to file a similar letter with the Alberta association. “It’s not hard to see that it’s just another attack against a Muslim woman,” he said. Hage said he’d never heard of any safety concerns related to hijabs, adding other headgear is a regular part of other sports. There’s a remote chance someone would pull a hijab and injure a player, he said, but there’s potential for injury throughout soccer. “There’s a possibility of missing the ball and kicking someone with your foot,” he said.

Calgary Herald, 27 November 2007

Netherlands bans niqab from colleges

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Netherlands plans to ban face coverings worn by some Muslim women from universities, not only for students but also mothers and anyone else entering the grounds, the Education Ministry said Wednesday.

Education Minister Ronald Plasterk said in parliament that the planned ban, initially intended to apply only to the compulsory schooling system, would now also extend to tertiary education institutions, his spokesman told Agence France Presse. It would apply to pupils, teachers, cleaners and parents – all women who come through the gates of such institutions, said spokesman Freek Manche. “It will forbid any kind of garment that covers the face. The intention is to ensure that all people who communicate with each other on school grounds are able to look each other in the eye, to see each other’s faces,” he said.

Plasterk had initially intended the ban on garments such as the burka and nikab only for schools, citing the importance of children being able to recognize and identify others. “If you want to be present there (at school) as service provider, as parent, as teacher or as pupil, then you will have to let your face show,” the minister said when he initially announced the restrictions in September. “Freedom of religion must be weighed against the freedom of children to go to school in an environment where they can see each other’s faces.”

He hadn’t originally wanted to extend the ban to tertiary education, said the minister’s spokesman, “because this level of education is not compulsory. These are adults.” However, Plasterk had to adapt his plans on the insistence of a majority in parliament.

AFP, 26 November 2008

Quebec coalition criticises ‘reasonable accommodation’ hearings

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A coalition of Muslim and social justice-groups says the Bouchard-Taylor commission has fanned the flames of racism and Islamophobia by offering a platform to those with extremist views. Instead of dealing with such issues as exploitation of immigrant, home-care and migrant workers, the commission has sought to deal with minor irritants, speakers from various groups said yesterday.

May Haydar, of the Al-Hidaya Association, said the reasonable-accommodation debate was “fabricated, manipulated” because “there is no crisis.” Poverty and streets gangs in Montreal are the real issues, she continued, while Muslim women with headscarves, Sikh men with Kirpans, and Jews with skullcaps are not threats.

The coalition, under the banner Refusing Intolerance in Quebec, plans to organize a series of demonstrations to underline its stance on these issues.

Montreal Gazette, 20 November 2007

Veiling and security

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Metro niqab pictureThe Metro carries a story on the comments made by Admiral Lord West, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, to the Commons Defence Committee meeting yesterday on “UK national security and resilience” where he said that ending radicalization among young British Muslims could take up to 30 years.

The newspaper complements the news item with a picture of Muslim women in niqab. Is it any surprise that some Muslim women have had their veils forcibly torn from their faces when newspapers allude to connections between forms of Muslim dress and stories on terrorism and security?

You can write to the newspaper via email: mail@ukmetro.co.uk or post: Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT.

Engage, 22 October 2008

Can we take the opportunity to give a big plug to this excellent new website.

No hijab at schools: UK minister

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasOnly two weeks in his post, Britain’s new immigration minister believes that hijab should not be allowed at British schools. “People wear veils for different reasons: some out of religious conviction. some because they’re forced to. It should be up to them,” Phil Woolas told The Times on Saturday, October 18. “But at school you shouldn’t wear one. It’s harder to get a good education if you wear a veil as you’re more cut off.”

Islam Online, 18 October 2008

Islamophobia Watch hesitates to defend Phil Woolas, but to be fair we think he was talking about a ban on the niqab rather than the headscarf (not that we’d support that either, of course). But he should be asked to clarify his remarks.

Incidentally, we can’t help noting that Woolas’s Times interview, with its call for “a tougher immigration policy” and unpleasant talk about “putting British people first” and “not pandering to Hampstead liberals” over immigration, is reproduced with evident approval by Searchlight on their Stop the BNP site. Presumably they, like Woolas himself, think that the way to stop fascism is to adopt the fascists’ own rhetoric.

France bans immigrants wearing burqas in state language classes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In secular France, it is illegal for hotel owners to turn away women wearing Muslim headscarves but OK to ban those wearing head-to-toe burqas from state-sponsored French language classes.

Two recent decisions have demonstrated how tough and touchy it is to legislate religious expression in a country that has a long-standing separation between church and state – and an increasingly multicultural society with a growing Muslim population.

“Religious freedom is not absolute,” the head of France’s government anti-discrimination agency, Louis Schweitzer, said in an interview with the Catholic daily La Croix, published Thursday. He said authorities are trying to find “the most reasonable compromise.”

His agency ruled last month that it was acceptable to ban women wearing the burqa and niqab – billowing clothes that cover the body and face worn by pious Muslim women – from state-sponsored French language classes for immigrants.

Earlier this year, a national agency responsible for dealing with new immigrants complained that the presence of the veiled women “hinders the proper functioning” of the language classes and asked the anti-discimination agency, known as Halde, to examine the matter.

In its Sept. 15 decision, Halde called the burqa a symbol of “female submission that goes beyond its religious meaning” and said it is “not unreasonable, for public security requirements … or the protection of civil liberties” to bar it from the publicly funded language classrooms.

USA Today, 9 October 2008

Via Islam in Europe

Ban Muslim headscarves, say [some] teachers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Teachers TVForty-six percent of primary and secondary school teachers suggested that allowing pupils to wear religious symbols went against British values. They also feared it would undermine the drive to promote religious and racial harmony in schools.

The findings, in a poll carried out by YouGov, will fuel the controversial debate about the wearing of religious symbols in schools.

Currently, individual schools are free to make their own decisions, but a string of recent court ruling said some policies amounted to “unlawful discrimination”. In July, a Sikh schoolgirl, won a discrimination case against her school after she was banned from wearing a religious bangle.

The poll, commissioned by Teachers TV, found that more than 70 per cent of teachers agreed that the promotion of British values was part of a teacher’s role.

Andrew Bethell, chief executive of Teachers TV, said that the results marked a “shift away from multiculturalism” in the “post 7/7 Britain”. He added: “There seems to be an increasing feeling among teachers that simply embracing difference is no longer enough. Pupils need a sense of common identity and ‘Britishness’ is a big part of this.”

Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2008