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ISLAM

French Muslim sent home from school over long skirt

A teenage Muslim girl was barred from entering her school grounds for wearing a long black skirt seen as too openly religious.

Published: 6 May 2016 08:13 CEST
French Muslim sent home from school over long skirt
Photo: AFP
The 16-year-old was sent home this week after her headmaster took a dislike to her skirt.
 
The skirt – popular among some Muslim women who cover their whole body – reportedly reached beyond her knees and down to her sneakers, reported the Nouvel Obs newspaper.
 
The headmaster of the Seine-et-Marne school, in the outer suburbs of Paris, reportedly deemed that the skirt “conspicuously” showed religious affiliation, which is banned in schools by France's strict secularity laws.
 
According to the 2004 law that governs secularity in schools, veils, the Jewish kippa or large Christian crosses are all banned in educational establishments, but “discreet religious signs” are allowed.
 
The mother of the teenage girl has since returned to the school to complain. After a chat with the headmaster, the school has promised to discuss the matter further with the family on Monday.
 
“Yes, my daughter, who is Franco-Portuguese and from a Catholic family, has converted to Islam,” Marie-Christine de Sousa told the paper. 
 
“I've always supported her choices and decisions. Earlier this year, I allowed her to wear the veil, which she takes off before going into the school. She wears long dresses for school.”
 
The family of the girl is already planning legal action, the paper reported. 
 
In the meantime, the teenager, who converted to Islam a year ago, will have to find something to wear to school instead of her black H&M skirt.. 
 
France was rocked by a similar case to this in April last year when a girl with a long skirt was also barred from class.
 
Her story trended on Twitter across France with the hashtag #JePorteMaJupeCommeJeVeux, translated into English as “I wear my skirt as I please.”
 
Some suggested that long black skirts were nothing out of the ordinary provided they're worn by non-Muslims. 
 
“Wearing a long skirt is nothing ostentatious. This is more due to mass hysteria,” Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory against Islamophobia, said at the time.
 
The CCIF Islamophobia watchdog said this week that some 177 students were rejected from class in 2015 for outfits deemed too openly religious.
 
Does a long black skirt really flout French laws?

ISLAM

Mosques in Cologne to start broadcasting the call to prayer every Friday

The mayor of Cologne has announced a two-year pilot project that will allow mosques to broadcast the call to prayer on the Muslim day of rest each week.

Published: 11 October 2021 10:28 CEST
Mosques in Cologne to start broadcasting the call to prayer every Friday
The DITIP mosque in Cologne. Photo: dpa | Henning Kaiser

Mosques in the city of the banks of the Rhine will be allowed to call worshippers to prayer on Fridays for five minutes between midday and 3pm.

“Many residents of Cologne are Muslims. In my view it is a mark of respect to allow the muezzin’s call,” city mayor Henriette Reker wrote on Twitter.

In Muslim-majority countries, a muezzin calls worshippers to prayer five times a day to remind people that one of the daily prayers is about to take place.

Traditionally the muezzins would call out from the minaret of the mosque but these days the call is generally broadcast over loudspeakers.

Cologne’s pilot project would permit such broadcasts to coincide with the main weekly prayer, which takes place on a Friday afternoon.

Reker pointed out that Christian calls to prayer were already a central feature of a city famous for its medieval cathedral.

“Whoever arrives at Cologne central station is welcomed by the cathedral and the sound of its church bells,” she said.

Reker said that the call of a muezzin filling the skies alongside church bells “shows that diversity is both appreciated and enacted in Cologne”.

Mosques that are interested in taking part will have to conform to guidelines on sound volume that are set depending on where the building is situated. Local residents will also be informed beforehand.

The pilot project has come in for criticism from some quarters.

Bild journalist Daniel Kremer said that several of the mosques in Cologne were financed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “a man who opposes the liberal values of our democracy”, he said.

Kremer added that “it’s wrong to equate church bells with the call to prayer. The bells are a signal without words that also helps tell the time. But the muezzin calls out ‘Allah is great!’ and ‘I testify that there is no God but Allah.’ That is a big difference.”

Cologne is not the first city in North Rhine-Westphalia to allow mosques to broadcast the call to prayer.

In a region with a large Turkish immigrant community, mosques in Gelsenkirchen and Düren have been broadcasting the religious call since as long ago as the 1990s.

SEE ALSO: Imams ‘made in Germany’: country’s first Islamic training college opens its doors

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