Belgium’s highest administrative court has overturned the sacking of a Muslim woman teacher by two schools because she wore a headscarf, national press reported Friday.
The State Council found that the two schools had abused their powers by firing the woman, who wore the headscarf in the school grounds but not in the classroom, reported the dailies De Standaard and Het Laatste Nieuws.
The woman was teaching Islam temporarily at two suburban Dutch-language schools in the capital Brussels in 2005 and 2006, but she refused to take off her headscarf after the schools’ management asked her to do so.
The tribunal said the schools had not shown “that wearing the headscarf outside of the classroom would have a negative effect on the way the teacher was doing her work,” the newspapers said.
It was while Marwa el-Sherbini was in the dock recalling how the accused had insulted her for wearing the hijab after she asked him to let her son sit on a swing last summer, that the very same man strode across the Dresden courtroom and plunged a knife into her 18 times. Her three-year-old son Mustafa was forced to watch as his mother slumped to the courtroom floor.
On Sunday about 120 Muslims protested in Antwerp against the headscarf ban in the Royal Athenaeums of Antwerp and Hoboken.
“Last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his support for legislation to ban the burka, the dark, heavy and not-too-comfortable garment worn by many Muslim women. The question arises: Is this forcible French secularism run amok, or a prohibition that Americans, who often believe we have struck a better balance between church and state, might entertain? I would say the latter….
Two pupils and their teacher were ordered to remove their face veils before they could make an official visit to a Roman Catholic school.