The protracted German debate on Muslim teachers’ right to wear the hijab when working in the public sector has received its newest episode. The State Labour Court (Landesarbeitsgericht) of Berlin and Brandenburg decided in favour of a Muslim teacher who had sued the state of Berlin for barring her from exercising her profession because of…
Press coverage of the Cologne sexual assaults and their aftermath has focused above all on the perceptions and fears of the ethnically German majority population. The past weeks have been marked by a frantic discussion about tightening asylum legislation as well as the laws governing sexual offences, by growing alarmism about the continuing arrival of…
The Federal Constitutional Court decided that “a General Ban on Headscarves For Teachers at State Schools is Not Compatible With the Constitution”. Despite of the plead for the freedom of religion, the judges argued that headscarves could be banned when “turning to a dangerous signal”. Addressing the State of North-Rhine Westphalia, the court underlined that…
6 April 2011 In a piece for Qantara, Lamya Kaddor, scholar of Islamic studies in Germany, vividly explains why the Islamic veil in her opinion is no longer required in contemporary Germany and how it has become obsolete over time. She writes that the original purpose mentioned in the Quran (33:59), i.e. that the veil…
Iran has reacted with outrage over the stabbing death of an Egyptian woman in a German courthouse, calling it a sign of racism against Muslims, yet has said little about China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims – a silence some leading Iranian clerics have criticized. The differing reaction from a country that portrays itself as a…
