Category Archives: Hijab

Burchill on Muslim women and hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“So certain moderate Muslims are now suggesting that devout women can take off their shrouds and walk free in God’s sunshine. How very magnanimous of them. It turns out that rigging yourself up like a parrot’s cage with the covering on is less to do with flaunting your devilish female charms and thus inflaming bestial male passion, as we were told, than allowing Muslim women to go ‘unmolested’. So now, if wearing the hijab means women will be molested by us nasty infidels, they can go without.”

Julie Burchill in the Times, 6 August 2005

Minister urges fine for burka

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Women wearing burkas in Italy should be reported to the police and fined, Silvio Berlusconi’s justice minister said at the weekend. Roberto Castelli said the garment was at odds with an Italian law that forbids masks.

The burka is rare, though not unknown, in Italy. But commentators yesterday noted that the minister’s ruling against masks could be applied to other garb more commonly worn by Muslim women, that leaves only the eyes visible.

Mr Castelli told a meeting in the northern town of Como: “No one may break the law.”

He was referring to a decision by the local prefect to overturn fines imposed last year on an Italian convert to Islam from nearby Drezzo, who wears a burka. Two other women have been fined for wearing the garment elsewhere.

Mr Castelli’s remarks were condemned by leftwing parties. Marco Rizzo of the Communist party said they were “at the threshold of incitement to racial and religious hatred”.

Guardian, 6 June 2005

See also “Italian minister grilled over fining niqab”, Islam Online. 6 June 2005

US Muslim sues over prison visit, headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cynthia RhouniA Muslim woman who was ordered by male prison guards to take off her headscarf before she could visit an inmate has filed a federal lawsuit alleging her constitutional right to practice religion had been violated.

Cynthia Rhouni, 43, of Madison, says the scarf, or hijab, that always covers her head and shoulders in the presence of men shows the world she is a devout Muslim.

Rhouni’s lawsuit claims that male prison guards at the maximum-security Columbia Correctional Facility north of Madison told her rules prohibited any head covering in the visiting room. They ordered her to take off her scarf before she could see her estranged husband in 2003, the suit alleges.

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Hijab activists see European campaign a ‘success’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rajnaara AkhtarMarking the end of three months of intense lobbying and painstaking efforts to make their voice heard and gain the support of Members of the European Parliament, Protect Hijab activists see the campaign a “success” and “positive step”.

“If we look at the number of Written Declarations (WDs) that have been put before the European Parliament this year, from eight WDs only two got more signatories than ours,” Vice-Coordinator of the London-based Assembly for the Protection of Hijab (Protect Hijab), Rajnaara Akhtar, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, May 24.

She was referring to a Written Declaration on Religious Rights and Freedoms, which was tabled by Protect Hijab and MEPs to the parliament February 21 as a preliminary step towards a binding resolution obliging European countries, particularly France, to lift ban on hijab in state-run institutions like schools.

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Anti-hijab party wins elections

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In an unhappy outcome for German Muslims in the largest regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the conservative anti-hijab Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won state elections Sunday, May 22, triggering a decision to hold a snap general election across Germany in the autumn.

The CDU’s resounding victory sent shock waves among the Muslim minority in NRW, home to one million of Germany’s 3.4 million Muslims. During the election campaign, Christian Democrat leader in NRW Juergen Ruettgers said he would swiftly ban hijab from state schools.

Ruettgers’s plan to ban hijab within three weeks of his election victory, despite opposition from other parties, was not the only reason for Muslims’ concern. His anti-Muslim drive is shown in many statements he made in the run up to state elections and even before.

Late last month, he told a German news channel that he is a Catholic who believes Christianity presented the best image of man and should therefore be leading all other religions worldwide.

Islam Online, 23 May 2005

Muslim dress focus of Sydney debate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading Australian politician has called for an end to public debate about a high school student who has won the right to wear a Muslim garment in class.

Yasamin Alttahir, 17, was placed on detention after she refused to stop wearing an ankle-length manto to Auburn Girls’ High School in Sydney. The school eventually agreed to let her continue wearing the religious garment after she obtained a permission note from her parents.

Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales state, has supported Alttahir’s right to dress according to her faith. “Let’s tolerate the difference in our community,” he told reporters. “Young women, conservatively presented, not dressed like Britney Spears, turning up to school.”

Carr called for an end to media debate about Alttahir, an Iraqi-born Shia Muslim, who has been accused of being a troublemaker by some talkback radio presenters for defying school uniform policies.

“I just think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t traumatise a young woman who’s at school to get her education and training and set herself up for life,” he said. “I think we should give the issue a rest.”

Al-Jazeera, 17 May 2005

Belgian king renews support for hijab-clad worker

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Belgian King Albert II and Queen Paola have made a rare visit to a factory where a hijab-clad woman was forced to quit her job over death threats, to express their support for the Muslim employee and her factory colleagues against extremist threats.

Naimi Amzil, of a Moroccan origin, was forced to quit her job in the Remmery seafood factory on March 3, after receiving death threats from an extremist group for no reasons other than being a veiled Muslim. Expressing outrage at the extremist threats, the Belgian monarch decided to visit the factory to back the Muslim employee and other factory workers against the extremist death threats.

During a reception party held on the sidelines of the King’s visit Tuesday, April 19, Rick Remmery, the factory owner, said the visit represents a powerful sign of support for the Muslim employee and the factory workers.

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Defence of hijab ban is backward thinking

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Letter in Morning Star, 6 April 2005

Peter Duffy’s defence of the reactionary French law on religious symbols (Morning Star, April 2) merely shows how backward many parts of the left have become in relation to the rights of Muslims and other minorities in Europe.

In particular, he argues that there are “progressives” who support the headscarf ban.

Just because some people who regard themselves as being on the left support the law – perhaps even a majority – does not actually make it progressive.

Many people who regard themselves as progressive argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a cause to celebrate. Being on the left did not stop them from being wrong.

One’s position must be judged on whether it really is progressive. There is nothing progressive about banning a child from school because of the crime of wearing an under-turban, a hijab or a skull-cap. It is merely the subordination of genuine secularism to intolerance and prejudice.

In his long letter, Peter Duffy mentions Muslims many times but omits to mention the plight of the Sikhs. What am I to tell Sikhs in London? “Don’t worry, Sikh kids are banned from their schools in France for wearing their under-turbans, but it’s OK because ‘progressives’ support it”? I somehow doubt that they will be convinced.

It is our obligation as progressive people to tell them that we firmly oppose this law.

If there is not a place for an Asian person in France to have a full state education and also to continue to hold their religious beliefs, including wearing their religious dress, then forgive me as an Asian person in Britain for saying as clearly as I can that this is a reactionary state of affairs, regardless of the sensibilities of some rather prickly parts of the left.

Yasmin Qureshi
Human rights advisor to the Mayor of London

Hijab ban forces French Muslims out of state education system

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s ban on religious symbols in state schools, a move meant to check a feared spread of Islamist radicalism, is prompting some Muslims to pull out of the system and launch their own schools and tutoring services. Representatives of new projects around the country turned up at France’s largest Muslim convention at the weekend, canvassing for money and support to educate girls who have dropped out or been expelled from school for insisting on wearing headscarves.

Pro-Hijab, 31 March 2005

Robert Spencer has his own interpretation of this – he seems to think it is an example, not of resistance to state oppression, but of French Muslims’ rejection of “assimilation”.

Jihad Watch, 5 April 2005

Hijab ban, but half-mast flags for Pope: Chirac’s ‘selective secularism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The French government ordered yesterday that flags on all public buildings be flown at half mast for the death of the Pope yesterday and was immediately accused of breaching the country’s secular principles…. France is so concerned about separating church and state that last year it passed a law banning Islamic headscarves and other signs of religious faith from public schools…. France’s main teachers’ union, Unsa, said the government was being ‘selectively secular’ in asking headteachers to lower school flags.”

Guardian, 5 April 2005

See also “Marseille city workers given time off for Pope”, AFP, 5 April 2005