Category Archives: Women

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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Muslim feminism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Toronto Star last week ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she ‘blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity’ in the Islamic world. This is closely related to a large-scale and continually growing problem: analysts attribute the actions of the global terrorist movement to a hijacking of Islam, without caring or daring to look squarely at what exactly it is about Islam that gives rise to fanaticism and violence.”

Yes, you probably guessed – another Islamophobic rant from Robert Spencer.

Front Page Magazine, 14 April 2005

“Spencer portrays himself as a scholar of Islam, and that he is not. He misquotes verses of the Qur’an, takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies.” Khaleel Mohammed replies to Spencer. (Errs on the side of mildness, if you ask me.)

Front Page Magazine, 18 April 2005

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

‘Wrong from head to toe: a ridiculous and ominous decision in Britain’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.”

Theodore Dalrymple expresses outrage over the Shabina Begum case. “No expressed desire by a child or young woman to wear traditional clothing such as the jilbab can be taken as arising from free choice – even if, in any given instance, it is the result of such a choice – because of the oppressive nature of the subculture.”

National Review, 28 March 2005

Muslim girls unveil their fears

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“French education”, declares a trim man behind a big desk, “aims to allow each person, irrespective of their religion or their community, the chance to start on an equal footing and receive the same education.” This impassioned defence of French secularism comes from Raymond Scieux, headmaster of Lycee Eugene Delacroix in Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris.

By Elizabeth C. Jones, director of “The Headmaster and the Headscarves”, BBC2, 9pm, Tuesday 29 March

BBC News, 28 March 2005

Two German states reject hijab ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The legislatures in two German states have turned down proposals by the opposition Christian Democratic Party to ban Muslim school teachers from wearing hijab. The parliament of Nordrhein-Westfalen, western Germany, rejected the party’s  request as having no legal merit.

The Christian Democratic Party claimed that hijab places woman at a lower status and was a political symbol not entrenched in the Muslims’ holy book, the Noble Qur’an. Thomas Kufen, the party’s immigration affairs officer, alleged that disputes could emerge in schools over the issue of hijab and that a legislation was needed. The party, yet, said nuns should be exempted for any ban on religious dress codes.

The Socialist and the Green parties, the ruling coalition, as well as the Free Democratic Party had opposed the proposals. They particularly took issue at the Christian Democratic Party’s attempt to exempt nuns’ wear from the ban as a violation of the constitution which demands equal treatment for citizens irrespective of their religious affiliations.

Islam Online, 24 March 2005

Intolerant ban dressed up as secular ruling

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Intolerant ban dressed up as secular ruling

By Yasmin Qureshi

Morning Star, 23 March 2005

It has now been just over one year since the introduction of a new law in France forbidding the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French state schools.

This law has been of considerable concern to London’s Asian communities in particular.

Sikh and Muslim groups in Britain asked the mayor of London to take the issue up and look into the impact on community relations across Europe of the so-called “headscarf ban.”

I visited Paris last week on the mayor’s behalf, meeting, among others, representatives of Muslim organisation le Collectif des Musulmans de France, as well as the French civil rights group the Ligue des droits de l’Homme and representatives of the Sikh community – including the two Sikh boys who have been excluded from their school as a direct result of the law .

There is a widely held view among those opposed to the ban that it came at a time when the French government needed to divert from the country’s economic problems.

As an attempt to divert attention from high unemployment and budget cuts it was very successful, tapping into long-held French secular political traditions.

The overwhelming focus of the debate about the new law – which is why it has become known as the “headscarf ban” – was the Muslim community.

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Mayor of London condemns French hijab ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A basic right

Morning Star, 19 March 2005

By Ken Livingstone

This month marks the first anniversary of the French law banning students from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in schools.

I have given the fullest support to the campaign against this attack on the rights of minority religious communities in France.

In February last year, just before the French parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the ban, I wrote to prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin warning that the new law would be a blow to good community relations throughout Europe, and would inflame tensions between communities and encourage attacks on minorities.

Earlier this month the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination drew attention to the problem of racism in France.

The committee urged the French government to prevent the law against conspicuous religious symbols “from denying any pupil the right to education and to ensure that everyone can always exercise that right”.

But this is precisely the right that the French law does deny many pupils.

According to the French government’s own figures, when the law came into force at the start of the September 2004 school term, over 600 students defied the ban.

Some were forced out of the state system and into private education, while many others were obliged to comply with the law under threat of expulsion.

At least 47 Muslim girls have been excluded from French schools for continuing to wear the hijab (Islamic headscarf), and hundreds more have been compelled to renounce a form of dress that they believe is an important aspect of their religion.

In addition, three Sikh students have been expelled for refusing to remove their turbans and another two have been refused admission to their school.

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