Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
The Challenge of the Hijab
Posted on December 19, 2003 in Crosstalk Human Rights Secularism
Deb has some good thoughts about secularism gone wrong in France and the United States:
In America, that great stronghold of religious freedom, I have seen that secular agnostic liberals can be just as wrong-headed as Chirac, and just as dogmatic as any Bible-thumping Christian….a state where a schoolgirl is forbidden to cover her hair in the name of religious freedom is no more free than medieval Europe, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
All has been well in the West as far as religious freedom goes until the coming of Islam. The arrival of Muslims with their conspicuous expression of their faith is becoming the test of our commitment to the principles of religious freedom. It discourages me to participate in conversations — like the one I had on Undernet #political the other day — where several champions of secular schools insisted that this meant there shall be no religion in public schools, period. The principal advocates of this point of view came from Australia, Canada, and one Fundamentalist from the United States who suddenly dropped his usual “school prayer” advocacy to pick on little girls wearing the hijab.
I think by banning religious symbols in public schools we’re denying ourself a great opportunity to teach the central message of religious freedom which is tolerance. One chatter said that he was fine with letting students wear religious symbols, but not teachers. I asked Why not? and the reply was that when a teacher entered the doors of a school, s/he became a person without a religion!
I have deep problems with this imposition of intolerant values on both the children and the adults in our educational system. There’s a notion of purity at work here. It’s no departure from what Yule says about what Middle East nations must do to escape “the political cycles of violation and sovereignty” that I propose here. Forcing little girls to wear the hijab is a form of mind control. Prohibiting them from wearing the hijab is also a form of mind control. A third route is to teach that such expressions of religious belief are welcome in our secular institutions as long as the institutions themselves do not state an opinion and encourage the People to make up their own minds as individuals. A Christian teacher, for example, may wear a cross to school, but s/he must also teach that this is a personal choice and that her/his students are free to make their own choices.
This was the point I argued. The reasons that I was given in rebuttal included:
- Our schools are secular, dammit!
- Taxpayers should not have to bear the burden. (What burden? They pay for the hijabs, the kippas, and the crosses?)
- Secular schools should not be teaching morals. (So, no “thou shalt not kill” and no “Just say ‘no’ to drugs”, eh?)
We need rules that target those who commit acts of hatred towards others. The Respect Policy of Mulkiteo, Washington’s school district not only spells out what constitutes misconduct, but encourages victims and their friends to stick up for themselves:
When you witness behavior that is in violation of the Respect Policy, tell the person to stop. Apathy, silence or laughter encourages the abuse and further disrespects the victims. Inform an adult in school and your parents.
We cannot afford to go on with a “boys will be boys” or a “kids are just like that” argument. What our schools and our society needs is a sense of Rights for Victims, including the right to be who you are as long as you do no harm to others; the right to dissent with the opinions and tastes of the crowd; the right to stick up for yourself; and the right to enjoy safety from bullies.
The kind of secularism that Chirac champions teaches the wrong lesson. Kids will get the idea that it is the wearing of the symbols — the expression of difference — that is wrong. What the founding fathers had in mind was different: freedom from violence based on respect for individuality and choice of group identity.
If we want Muslims to respect our core democratic values, it will behoove us to respect them as people. Assimilation is not something that must be done by the outsider: it derives from a verb which means to take in, to incorporate. That means we who are already here must do much of the work of helping Muslims and other people of faiths outside the Judeo-Christian theologies to be at home in a land where the government does not choose our religion for us.
