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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To think a school can't legally suddenly ban the headscarf for muslin girls!

678 replies

Headscarfs123 · 13/09/2011 00:15

So our local catholic school has banned the headscarf this week...disastrous for some of the girls but also against church advice that headscarfs are fine, against DFES advice about consultation and sensitivity to religious groups, against best practice as this type of change should involve the governing body? discriminatory on religious and sexist grounds...Sikh boys can keep their turbans.

Aibu to think that the school is legally in the wrong?

OP posts:
CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 19:09

Whoever answered that is right, though - Islam does not have the same kind of higher authority as Christianity at all. Therefore, there really isn't anything comparable to "church leaders" in Islam.

Animation · 13/09/2011 19:09

So I assume it was the religious leaders - (men) - who decided that menstruation was the turning point for the cover up. It's a shame they didn't decide age 16 or 18 was a more appropriate age... to be a woman - after school age.

Cocoflower · 13/09/2011 19:11

Defensive? Lol

Cote and I are just having a general Chat- aren't we? Wasnt aware we were fighting Cote?! Grin

knittedbreast · 13/09/2011 19:13

well no since there were not many schools back then.....

life events were how we measured things back then, sun movements, moon cycles. tides, birth, menstration, death etc..

and it wasnt just men, what about khadijah? Fatima and Aisha?

Cocoflower · 13/09/2011 19:13

Agree Animation tbh.

Im not sure if I was 8 years old I would revel in the fact I was letting the world know my period had started.

Or got to 21 and they still hadn't for medical reasons.

Animation · 13/09/2011 19:15

"well no since there were not many schools back then.....

life events were how we measured things back then, sun movements, moon cycles. tides, birth, menstration, death etc.."

Is it time for a review?

knittedbreast · 13/09/2011 19:15

well maybe not, but times are different. it was celebrated then, not now when we feel ashamed about these, natural things

knittedbreast · 13/09/2011 19:19

do you think so?

ThePosieParker · 13/09/2011 19:31

There are Imams and Intellectual leaders, scholars....there are higher authorities that interpret texts and debate. Mujtahid, Mullah, Grand Mufti, Grand Ayatollah, Ayatollah (forgive my spellings)...and so on.

Did you know in China there are lots of Imams that are women....I wonder how they cover?

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 19:36

It wasn't "religious leaders" who decided this, at all. This is how it was at the time. Girls married when they started menstruating, at which point nature decided that they could have children. Life expectancy was much shorter than it is now, and people (boys and girls) were considered adults much earlier.

16 is an arbitrary age, under which our "judicial leaders" have decided boys and girls are legally "children". It is based on social custom, not biological certainty. Perhaps in another thousand years, when life expectancy is around 200 years and people are fertile for at least a hundred years, they will be expected to abstain from sex until they are thirty. And they will look back at our pregnant teens in horror.

ThePosieParker · 13/09/2011 19:39

No Cote, but religious scholars and authorities have a chance to reform, reinterpret those ancient and irrelevant texts for the modern Muslim, but they don't.

Animation · 13/09/2011 19:41

"No Cote, but religious scholars and authorities have a chance to reform, reinterpret those ancient and irrelevant texts for the modern Muslim, but they don't."

Why don't they?

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 19:50

Imams have nowhere near the religious authority that Christianity had bestowed on church leaders. In fact, if you know anything about Islam (and it is astounding that you still don't, given your interest in these threads through the years), you would know that it intentionally avoids a central authority a la Christian Church, considering it one of the downfalls of Christianity, how it has strayed from God's path (one other being idolatry, which is why Muslims are forbidden to even depict Mohammad in drawings, for fear that they might then worship him like Christians do Jesus, Mary, et al)

Islam is very clear that all a Muslim needs to know is in the Quran, that there is no need for an intermediary person or institution. Quran is perfect, complete, and basically all you need to understand and follow Islam.

Animation · 13/09/2011 19:50

It seems to me that the pressure is going to come from schools to make these reforms.

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 19:50

Coco and I are indeed having a pleasant conversation. She isn't being argumentative at all that I have seen.

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 20:01

"religious scholars and authorities have a chance to reform, reinterpret those ancient and irrelevant texts for the modern Muslim, but they don't"

You clearly don't want to learn, so why exactly do you keep coming back to every thread on Islam, Posie? You and I have had this conversation many times before and in some I have even had the impression that you understood.

Here it goes (again):

Islam cannot be easily "reformed" or even slightly changed in any way because (1) its instructions are very detailed, and (2) these are practically set in stone because they mainly come from the Quran, which is the literal word of God. This is why there is only one version of the Quran and why it has not changed at all through centuries.

Do you know of any scholars who would be willing to alter the word of God, even if the reward for doing so were not certain death? I didn't think so.

Imho, reform in Islam will only happen the way it happened in Christianity at the end of the Dark Ages - through popular revolt and bloodshed.

Animation · 13/09/2011 20:13

Am I right in thinking that the Quran doesn't specify when a girl becomes a woman. Isn't that down to interpretation? I would have thought she'd have to be 16 at least.

littleducks · 13/09/2011 20:16

The quran doesn't specify an age, it is down to interpretation. Some Muslims believe that girls are 'baligh' at 9, others at the start of puberty (which probably is around 9 for many girls to be fair) and some do as Cote describes and wait until they start menstruating.

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 20:22

It's not interpretation and Quran didn't have to specify it because this is how it was at that time and place. Girls were children until they menstruated and then they were women, to be married & impregnated.

Mohammad, for example, married Aisha for various political reasons when she was 6 but did not consummate the marriage until she menstruated at age 9 (which is probably why some now think of age 9 as a magic number of sexual maturity).

Desiderata · 13/09/2011 20:25

Organized religion is a mystery to me, full stop.

My personal view is that faith is either allowed its hollow baubles, or it is not.

If the hollow baubles are allowed, (and we live in a free society, so it would seem that they must be), then all fans of God/Allah/Paul McCartney and Van Morrison, must be free to do as they please.

It is illegal to walk into a bank donning a full-face motorcycle helmet. It is not illegal to walk into a bank wearing a burka (or whatever they're called), on the grounds of religion. Religion begets confusion and inconsistency. It's the nature of the beast.

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 20:25

Animation - In Christian Dark Ages, girls were usually married off by the time they turned 14, and that was half a century after Islam's appearance on the world stage. So how you think 16 should have been the age when girls become women in Mohammad's day and age, I don't know.

Animation · 13/09/2011 20:35

"So how you think 16 should have been the age when girls become women in Mohammad's day and age, I don't know."

I think 16 seems about the right age in this day and age, when sex before 16 is illegal.

CoteDAzur · 13/09/2011 20:39

That is because some men making law has decided so. It is not a biological absolute. Nothing changes in the anatomy or physiology of the human female between ages 15 and 16 to warrant one being called a "child" and the other an "adult" in sexual matters.

CaptainNancy · 13/09/2011 20:49

Sorry- thread has moved on somewhat from last night... but may I just at 'conceals and flattens hair' being a used as an argument against the wearing of headscarves?

I'd have thought getting teenaged girls to spend less time on their hair was actually a good argument for the wearing of scarves...

MistyValley · 13/09/2011 21:07

In answer to the OP's question, I have no idea whether it's legally wrong for a Catholic school to forbid the wearing of religious headscarves (of whatever type).

I don't personally agree with outlawing Muslim women's headgear, as I think that has the effect of pushing our island's tribes further apart. Better that they come together through understanding and education.

But as another poster said earlier, it does highlight just one more reason why it's problematical to allow state schools to exercise religious discrimination, whatever form this discrimination might take.

Having said that I do think that if all the various tribes in the UK are to live happily together, then they have to take a long hard look at themselves. Racism, sexism, bigotry and intolerance should be challenged, whichever tribe happens to be displaying it at the time - knuckle dragging Milwall fans, BNP members, or those operating oppression which they use their religion to justify.

Sexism and sectarianism were rife in my mother's generation - it's only really in my generation that things are starting to improve. We don't want to go back there.

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