WUNRN
Germany – Muslim Teachers May Wear Head Scarves, German Court Rules
By ALISON SMALE
- MARCH 13, 2015
BERLIN — The Federal Constitutional Court ruled on Friday that female
Muslim teachers may wear head scarves in school.
The 6-to-2 ruling from the court in Karlsruhe stipulated that teachers may
wear the head scarf so long as it does not cause disruption in the school.
The decision comes amid growing tensions throughout Europe over the
absorption of thousands of Syrian refugees and other Muslims, stoking
nationalism in many parts of the continent.
Several politicians and legal experts welcomed the ruling as an advance for
religious and individual freedom. Leaders of Germany’s estimated 3.5 million
Muslims noted that Muslim women who had previously declined to train as
teachers for fear they would not be able to wear the head scarf in school would
now be encouraged to do so.
Although the ruling does not mean a general permission to wear the head
scarf, “it is cause for joy,” said Nurhan Soykan, general secretary of the
Central Council of Muslims in Germany. “It gives worth to Muslim women in
Germany and lets them participate in social life as citizens with equal
rights.”
Christian Pestalozza, a constitutional law professor at Berlin’s Free
University, said, “I especially like that the court does not give either a
blanket ruling that anything goes, or a blanket ban.”
But teachers and school principals could face a challenge. Some news media
commentators also worried that the ruling would fan anti-immigrant sentiment
and perhaps lend new support to Pegida, an anti-Islam protest movement that
started in Dresden and argues that Europe is being “Islamized.”
“Pegida will celebrate,” the leftist Taz newspaper said on its front page.
Udo Beckmann, the chairman of one of Germany’s biggest teachers
organizations, said the ruling puts a new burden on school principals to decide
whether wearing the head scarf constitutes a real disruption. It also
potentially increases pressure on Muslim girls from traditional families or
social groups to wear the head scarf, Mr. Beckmann said.
“The head scarf ban in schools created a certain zone of protection for
girls who were being pressed to wear the covering,” he said in a telephone interview.
“This space will now disappear.”
Concerns about Muslims and their influence are common across Europe, which
is now home to an estimated 18 million Muslims, out of a total population of
about 500 million.
The ruling leaves Germany in stark contrast to France, where a law bans
conspicuous religious symbols, including Islamic head scarves, in state
schools.
French Muslim advocates welcomed the ruling. Elsa Ray, spokeswoman for the
Collective Against Islamophobia in France, said the German court’s decision
showed that religious freedoms should be respected.
But she said she had little hope that French courts would follow the German
example. “We are very far from this in France, where, if anything, there is a
push to extend the head scarf ban,” she said. “There is hysteria about Islam at
the moment in France and a deformation of the notion of secularism that limits
freedom of religion and conscience. The German decision can raise the same
issue here, but the judicial environment will not change.”
The Karlsruhe court ruled on complaints brought by two unidentified Muslim
women working in schools in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous
state. One, a social science teacher, had substituted a woolen cap and rollneck
pullover for a head scarf when asked to remove the head covering. She had
nonetheless received a disciplinary warning, and then sued.
The second plaintiff was a woman who taught Turkish in several schools and
eventually was fired for refusing to remove her head scarf.
Professor Pestalozza said he interpreted Friday’s ruling as taking
immediate effect.
In its lengthy ruling, the court explicitly said that the freedom of
religion and belief granted by Germany’s constitution allowed women in state
schools to conform with a dress code stipulated by religion. In addition, it
noted, forbidding women to wear the head scarf effectively excludes them from
teaching and thus violates the constitutional requirement not to discriminate
against women.
An 11-page statement from the court summarizing the ruling also specified
that state schools should promote religious tolerance, and that permitting the
wearing of a Jewish kippa, a nun’s habit or symbols like a cross is part of
that tolerance.
By contrast, the ban on crosses, crucifixes or other religious symbols on
the walls of state schools stands, the court ruled. “A cross or crucifix on the
wall is something different,” Professor Pestalozza said. “If you put it up on
the wall, then that is not an individual act by a teacher. It is the school,
and by extension in effect the state.”