France's supreme court upheld a decree that refused citizenship to a Muslim woman from Morocco, ruling that she had failed to assimilate French culture. It was ruled that her radical practice of Islam is incompatible with French values.

On June 27, 2008, the Council of State (Conseil d’Etat), the French Supreme Administrative Court, upheld a Prime Minister’s decree refusing citizenship to a Moroccan woman who was married to a French national and had two French children. The Council’s decision was based on the grounds that the woman lacked assimilation to French society because of her radical practice of religion, deemed incompatible with the essential values of the French community, in particular equality of the genders. These findings were supported by elements in the court file that the Moroccan woman was a Salafist Muslim and wore the Burqa. [Link]

Canadians could be forgiven for thinking veiled Muslim women pose an urgent threat to the integrity of our electoral system after Prime Minister Stephen Harper made one of his first priorities in the fall sitting of Parliament a bill to force voters to show their faces at the polls.

But there is not one shred of evidence that such a problem existed in the first place. Even Harper's Conservative government has admited "there was no apparent case of fraud" in three federal by-elections that were held in September in Quebec, when unjustified hysteria over veiled Muslim women first boiled over.

Yet that has not stopped Harper from trying to fix this imaginary problem by proposing changes to the country's election law that would require voters to show their faces before they cast their ballots. The opposition parties are just as guilty of stirring up this issue, even though the Liberals and NDP now appear less enthusiastic about the measure than they did only a month ago.

Harper has tried to dress up the bill as a means to "enhance public confidence in the democratic process." But it has nothing to do with electoral integrity and everything to do with pandering to narrow-minded fears about minorities, particularly in Quebec where a troubling debate over "reasonable accommodation" is now raging.

Glaring inconsistencies in the proposed legislation only highlight that Harper and other federal politicians are shamefully playing cheap politics at the expense of Canadian Muslims.

For one thing, the bill does little to achieve Harper's stated goal of improving the visual identification of voters. Voters are still not required to show photo identification in order to vote. They can present two pieces of non-photo ID approved by Elections Canada instead.

One acceptable combination is a debit card and a bank statement, neither of which contains a photo, age or physical description. In that case, showing your face might prevent you from voting twice, but does nothing to establish who you are in the first place.

Nor does it prove anything to show your face while being vouched for by another voter, another method of getting a ballot.

At the same time, Canadians temporarily living overseas who vote by mail do not have to show their faces to election officials. Approximately 80,000 people mailed in their ballots in the 2006 election. Why isn't Harper worried about them?

By singling out veiled Muslim women, Harper and others have seized on one of the most visible signs of difference in our multicultural society in order to make a point: If minorities want to exercise all their rights as Canadians citizens, they need to act more like "us."

Absent real security concerns, Harper is sacrificing the openness and inclusiveness on which this country was built in order to appeal to the ethnic prejudices of a few. That is not the Canadian way.

When it comes up for debate in the House of Commons, opposition parties should take a stand against fearmongering and intolerance by voting against this odious bill. [Link]

Cherie Blair has questioned whether the full-face veil restricted Muslim women from being "people in their own right".

The wife of the former Prime Minister said full veils, such as the niqab or burqa, could prevent a woman from expressing her personality.

Mrs Blair told Radio Four's Today programme: "I think we can get very hung up about women's clothes. The question is whether we honour people's religious beliefs or not. I am happy to honour people's religious beliefs, provided they are freely undertaken.

"Women covering their heads, women dressing modestly, I have no problem with at all. I think, however, that if you get to a stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because you can't see her face, then you do start to have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman's right to be a person in her own right." [Link]

Muslim students distribute head scarves to foster an understanding of women who wear hijabs

For Kavelle Thorne, the most challenging part of wearing a hijab for the first time was figuring a way to get the earphones for her MP3 player on without dislodging the bright pink scarf covering her hair.

Luckily, Sajda Khalil, a veteran hijabi and organizer of the National Hijab Day initiative at the University of Toronto, was on hand. "You have to go under the scarf, not on top" she said, laughing.

Thorne, a third-year Caribbean studies student, was one of 70 non-Muslim women at U of T to take part in the cross-country initiative to encourage an understanding of the everyday experiences of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.

Overall, those experiences are the same as any other woman, said Khalil. While most women face relatively few incidents of overt racism in multicultural Toronto, Muslim women on campus have been targeted in the past.

In March 2006, the university was forced to make a statement after incidents including a verbal attack on a hijab-wearing woman and eggs being dropped on two students with hijabs.

The impetus for this year's event was an attempt to open dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims, said Khalil, a volunteer with the Muslim Students' Association.

"The hijab creates a separation between yourself and somebody who is not Muslim," she said. "People are more hesitant to just come up to you and ask you about it, even if they want to. That's why this kind of event makes it a lot easier for people to start a conversation, and makes them realize that there really isn't that much difference between me and them."

Third-year student Zarie Lorne wanted the first-hand experience of wearing a hijab. She wore hers on the TTC to university and felt conscious of the inquisitive stares.

"I've gotten a lot of looks, a lot of confused looks," said Lorne. "I think they're curious and want to ask questions, but they are scared."

Nicole Miller was worried that wearing a hijab for a day would be offensive to Muslim women.

"I don't know if we can really understand their experience by wearing the hijab just one day," she said.

The inspiration for National Hijab Day came after a McMaster University professor created an event last April to draw attention to discrimination against Muslim women. A week later, her office door was vandalized with graffiti. [Link]

Critics pan legislation that will require all federal voters to show their faces

The Harper government yesterday introduced legislation requiring all voters -- including veiled Muslim women -- to show their faces before being allowed to cast ballots in federal elections.

Peter Van Loan, the minister responsible for democratic reform, said he hopes the bill will settle the potentially corrosive debate over the accommodation of diverse religious beliefs.

But Opposition parties and some Muslim groups suggested it will do just the opposite -- giving a national forum to a heated debate that has provoked some anti-immigrant sentiment in Quebec.

Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff said while he supports requiring all voters to identify themselves, "what I don't like about this whole project is the idea that we take a bunch of women wearing veils and we make a whole big deal about this ... Let's not have politicians fishing around and creating divisions between Canadians about this."

Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress said the law is unnecessary and will feed discrimination against Muslim Canadians.

He suggested the Tories are hoping to make "political mileage among Islamophobes." [Link]

A top anti-discrimination body has ruled that French schools were violating the rights of headscarf-wearing Muslim mothers by preventing them from taking part in their children's outings.

A group of Muslim women petitioned the French anti-discrimination authority HALDE after they were barred from accompanying school trips or extra-curricular activities.

The school invoked a 2004 French law which bans students from wearing religious insignia, including Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, Sikh turbans or large Christian crosses, in state schools.

In a ruling dated May 14 the HALDE stressed the ban only concerns students, and that "the refusal on principle for mothers wearing the headscarf" to join in school activities was a form of "discrimination on religious grounds."

The HALDE recommended that all schools revise their guidelines on parent participation "in order to respect the principle of non-discrimination on religious grounds."

France, which has Europe's biggest Muslim population, is one of the few countries to have passed legislation banning visible religious symbols in public schools.

The law sparked a wave of anger and incomprehension among Muslims worldwide, but in France the controversy that surrounded its adoption three years ago has all but died down. [Link]

On March 15, 2004, a French law was passed banning students from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in primary and secondary public schools. The law is widely referred to as the "French headscarf ban." Last week, Professor Joan W. Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study, author of the forthcoming Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, October 2007), spoke to a capacity crowd at the Humanities Center's Levinthal Hall to explore the complex and underlying motives for the ban. The talk was a Stanford Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts.

"The French idea of 'one and indivisible' is different from E Pluribus Unum. There's a lack of any recognition for social difference," Scott said. Yet despite the claims of égalité, the French have "a deep uneasiness about sharing power." Scott outlined the emerging "cracks in French universalism."

The French portray their concept of universalism as "dating back to the French Revolution in a seamless story," she said. However, in the 19th century, class became the "great exception" to equality. After women received the vote in 1945, their inequality "had to be explained away." In the 1990s, gay rights and domestic partnership issues flagged more "exceptions." Now France continues to face the challenges of racism, immigration and religious intolerance.

The headscarf brought several of these issues to a head in a nation where "assimilation is seen as the passport to Frenchness."

One issue is the specter of Muslim inassimilability. Scott recalled that, during the 2005 riots in the Parisian housing projects, then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy blamed the troubles on "illegals." However, in the investigations, "they couldn't find many—they were French citizens," some of them second- and third-generation French.

She also pointed out that, in France, the word immigrant "doesn't refer to Portuguese, Spanish, Italians—Europeans or Eastern Europeans"; it only refers to former colonials, further pinpointing the Muslim population as different and problematic....

"Surely there is a better way of dealing with terrorism besides banning the headscarf," she added....

When [a] student asserted the ban was part of a general attempt to keep public schools secular, Scott said that no laws had been passed affecting yarmulkes, or Sikh turbans, until the headscarves became a concern. "This is a symbolic stand against Islam." [Link]

A Muslim teaching assistant today lost her appeal against an employment tribunal’s decision that being prevented from wearing a veil in the classroom was not discrimination.

Aishah Azmi, 24, was suspended on full pay after staff at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, said pupils found it harder to understand her.

A Leeds employment tribunal dismissed three of Mrs Azmi’s claims of discrimination and harassment, but found that she was victimised and awarded her £1,000 for “injury to feelings“.

A month later, the local education authority sacked her from her post as a bilingual support worker.

Her lawyer, Nick Whittingham, said that the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) accepted that it was possible for direct discrimination to occur in respect of a manifestation of a religious belief such as the wearing of the veil.

“The EAT rejected the employer’s argument that all discrimination on the basis of such manifestations can potentially be justified as indirect discrimination but decided that in this particular case there had not been direct discrimination against Ms Azmi,” he said.

Rachel Dineley, an employment partner at law firm Beachcroft, said: “In coming to its conclusions the EAT has given employers guidance on the principles that tribunals should apply when they are considering employers’ practices which affect a particular section of the workforce on religious grounds.

“This is particularly welcome given the sensitive nature of the allegations raised and the concern that many employers feel, about balancing the need to respect the beliefs of their employees with a desire to communicate clearly and effectively with clients, customers or those to whom they are delivering services.”

However, Ms Dinely said the ruling did not allow employers to ban staff from wearing veils in all circumstances.

“In Mrs Azmi’s case, wearing a veil was clearly incompatible with the effective teaching of the pupils in question. But in other cases it may be far harder to make such a determination," she added. [Link]

Britain Says Schools Have Right to Ban Students From Wearing Muslim Veils

Schools have the right to ban students from wearing Muslim veils if teachers believe the garments affect safety or pupils' learning, the British government said Tuesday.

But educators should speak with parents before introducing such a ban, the Education Ministry said in updated guidelines that also addressed keeping uniforms affordable and spelling out disciplinary measures.

"Schools should consult parents and the wider community when setting uniform policy," Schools Minister Jim Knight said.

"And while they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence," he said.

The ministry said head teachers always had the right to set their school's uniform policy. Schools had already been advised to accommodate different religions, but the new rules spelled out for the first time that concerns such as safety are valid reasons for exceptions. [Link]

The Muslim teaching assistant at the centre of a row over wearing a full veil in class appeals against tribunal decision, which cleared the school of discrimination and harassment.

Aishah Azmi is taking her case to the employment appeal tribunal in London. It will be heard before a panel including a high court judge.

The appeal comes three days after the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) confirmed that headteachers will retain the power to decide whether Muslim pupils should be allowed to wear the full veil.

Confirmation of the status quo followed a review of school uniform after the high court last month rejected the appeal by a Buckinghamshire Muslim schoolgirl that her human rights were infringed because her school refused her permission to wear the full-face veil.

Today's tribunal hearing focuses on the case of Azmi, who was suspended on full pay last year after staff at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, said pupils found it hard to understand her. [Link]