Category Archives: Hijab

Swiss canton to vote on veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

On September 22, Ticino will become the first Swiss canton to hold a referendum on banning face-covering headgear in public places. Political commentators say the initiative has good chances of being accepted.

Burkas, full-body cloaks worn by some Muslim women, especially in Afghanistan, are few and far between in the Italian-speaking canton in southern Switzerland. According to official estimates, only about 100 women in Switzerland wear them.

“Hand on heart: who has ever seen a burka in Switzerland?” began an editorial in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2010, after canton Aargau tried to get a nationwide ban on burkas in public places (thrown out by the federal parliament two years later). “You might see a few Arab tourists coming out of expensive boutiques in Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse or Geneva’s Rue du Stand – but out in the sticks?”

The Ticino initiative does not explicitly target Muslims – the phrasing to be voted on is “nobody in public streets or squares may veil or hide their face” – but in practice it means women in burkas. The law would apply to burkas and niqabs, Arabic face coverings with a slit for the eyes often worn as part of a full-body covering, but not to headscarves.

Until now, burka bans haven’t stood a chance in Switzerland. Yet pundits believe Ticino could write history and become the first canton to introduce a ban on all face coverings – similar to the controversial one already in force in France – into the cantonal constitution.

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Majority opposed to hijab in French universities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Figaro hijab polls

Le Figaro reports that an Ifop poll it commissioned has found that almost eight out of ten people in France are opposed to the wearing of the headscarf or veil in university classrooms. It quotes Jerome Fourquet of Ifop as stating that this represents a similar level of opposition to the hijab that has been found in previous polls on this issue.

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France may ban hijab in universities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Momentum is growing in France for a ban on wearing religious symbols in the country’s universities. A new report recommends prohibiting students from wearing religious symbols, such as Christian crucifixes, Jewish Kippah skullcaps and Muslim headscarves.

Due to “escalating tensions in all sectors of university life” the High Council of Integration (HCI), a research institute founded by the French government, has made 12 recommendations to ease religious tensions among students.

The report’s key proposal would prohibit wearing religious symbols in “lecture theaters and [other] places of teaching and research in public areas at universities,” Le Monde reported.

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Muslim woman asked to remove headscarf during bar exam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MA bar exam headscarf note

On Wednesday and Thursday, law school graduates aspiring to practice in the Commonwealth gathered in Boston and Springfield to take the 16-hour bar exam, broken into several parts. During the morning portion of the test Thursday, recent graduate of the University of Michigan Law School Iman Abdulrazzak was handed a note from an exam proctor asking her to remove her headscarf.

As many Muslim women do, Abdulrazzak wore a hijab, covering her head and chest, during the exam held at the Western New England University School of Law. The note, written in capitalized block letters read, “Headwear may not be worn during the examination without prior written approval. We have no record of you being given prior written approval. Please remove your headwear and place it under your seat for the afternoon session.”

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Thug who racially abused Muslim women must pay compensation to victims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A foul-mouthed thug who racially insulted two muslim women in headdresses in Chesterfield town centre has been ordered to pay £1,000 in compensation.

Chesterfield magistrates’ court heard how former Navy serviceman Mark Carr, 41, of Holme Road, Chesterfield, had been drinking at The British Legion and The Victoria pub before unleashing racist abuse at the women, on Cavendish Street.

Prosecuting solicitor Becky Mahon said one of the women had children in a double buggy and said she saw a male who appeared drunk and he was with a second male and the defendant swore.

Miss Mahon told how the woman said she heard the words “f*** off, Muslim b*****d” and the defendant was waving his hands and her children were crying and scared. The second woman heard the words “f*** off and go back to your own country”, according to Ms Mahon, and a witness saw the women crying.

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France needs to start facing up to Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Valérie Amiraux and Marwan Mohammed on the prevalence of Islamophobia in France:

It shows up in multiple forms: attacks on mosques, desecration of religious sites, the ban on the headscarf in public schools, making it impossible for certain veiled women to access public services, to accompany their children on school outings, the rampant insults, harassment, humiliation, physical and verbal aggression they are subject to, racial and ethnic profiling and discrimination, sometimes culminating in physical attacks, such as the recent one on a veiled woman in Argenteuil, who lost her baby as a result. But the principal characteristic of Islamophobia is that it remains, at least in France, very rarely denounced. It is consistently perceived as an exaggeration, the result of victimised posturing invented by troublemaking Muslims, who are incapable of integrating and bending to the requirements of French citizenship.

Guardian, 26 July 2013

Increase in Islamophobic incidents in France

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobic incidents in France saw an overall increase of 35% in the first half of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012, the president of the Observatoire contre l’islamophobie told AFP on Tuesday.

Abdallah Zekri stated that 108 Islamophobic acts – violence, assault, arson, vandalism – were officially recorded between 1 January and 30 June 2013, compared with 80 during the same period in 2012, an increase of 41.2%. Islamophobic threats – threatening gestures and abuse – rose from 63 during the first half of 2012 to 84 during the same period this year, an increase of 33.3%. Overall this represents an increase of 35%.

Zekri emphasised that the figures are only for incidents that have been the subject of an official complaint and therefore underestimate the real number of Islamophobic incidents.

He also pointed out that the figures are for the six months to the end of June and therefore “do not take account of a new and worrying phenomenon that arose during the month of July, namely attacks against women whose faces are not covered, who are not wearing the niqab but the simple headscarf”. Zekri told AFP that the Observatoire contre l’islamophobie had counted five such attacks in the Reims region, 3 in the Val d’Oise and one in Trappes.

Let us speak for ourselves: five women’s experiences of Islamophobic attacks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

What does it feel like to have your hijab yanked off your head by a man shouting abuse at you? Or to be chased down the street, shouted, sworn or spat at because what you are wearing identifies your beliefs?

These are examples of what are described as anti-Muslim incidents specifically against women. Tell Mama, the government-backed organisation which records anti-Muslim behaviour, has said Islamophobic attacks against women have increased in the aftermath of the brutal killing of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May. It says approximately 70 per cent of the calls it received since then have come from women. Of reported street attacks, 75 per cent have been against Muslim women wearing Islamic dress.

For Andrew Gilligan, who has criticised Tell Mama’s statistics in the Telegraph and accused it of exaggerating Islamophobia, incidents such as “hijab yanking” are “at the lower level of seriousness” because they do not result in physical injury. Nothing has been as critical as the latest incident in France, where a pregnant Muslim woman miscarried last week after two men attacked her, but to entirely dismiss what some women have been reporting in the UK is still deeply undermining to those who have found themselves at the receiving end of unprovoked assault, physical or verbal, simply because of their faith.

Muslim women and their clothes, their relationships with men and their place in British society are written and talked about and discussed and debated to death – but rarely are Muslim women included in those discussions themselves. That’s why I contacted five Muslim women who have experienced varying degrees of anti-Muslim incidents to find out how it has affected them.

Huma Qureshi in the New Statesman, 24 July 2013

Valls stands by veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Manuel Valls (2)Interior Minister Manuel Valls defended on Monday France’s ban on wearing full-face veils in public places after a police check on a veiled Muslim woman sparked riots in a Paris suburb at the weekend.

The 2010 law was brought in by conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy and targets burqa and niqab garments that conceal the face rather than the headscarf that is more common among French Muslim women.

A police check on a couple in the southwest suburb of Trappes sparked an angry confrontation that led overnight on Friday to a police station being surrounded by several hundred people, some hurling rocks. Another building was torched in several hours of street violence that led to six arrests.

“Police did their job perfectly,” Valls told RTL radio. “The law banning full-face veils is a law in the interests of women and against those values having nothing to do with our traditions and values. It must be enforced everywhere,” he said.

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