Tabernac…
Declan
I would guess the student lives in Canada for the same reason she wears a veil, because a male parent or relative wishes it so. There is no religious reason for the veil so it comes down to whose social dress codes are enforced.
Possibly not. But I haven’t seen the curriculum for the course to say either way.
And screw the other students because they don’t count?
Legal obligations to that person? As long as she follows the rules set in the classroom then fine. If she doesn’t then she gets the boot. Apparently, the school and teacher thought that what they had done was enough and they gave her options to resolve the issues at hand. She refused and so got the boot.
You have a right to take a class as long as in doing so you are not causing problems for the teacher and other students. People get kicked out of class for many reasons. In some cases it can be as simple as showing up late a few too many times.
Wearing a Niqab is a cultural preference, not a religious one. It is not required by her religion as the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslim women in Canada can attest to by the very fact that they don’t wear one.
Naked tuba playing is my religious practice (at least if there was an actual god it would be). I should be allowed to do so where and when I like. Too bad it bothers you. What? I’m the only one who believes that god wants me to play a tuba naked? Stop oppressing me!
Now we’re down to subjective criteria. The school and teacher thought she was disruptive enough to give her the boot. You think otherwise.
Here is an easy way to resolve the issue. If her god thinks this is so important then it should be easy enough for her to bring him to the courtroom and attest to that fact. That he doesn’t deign to let the rest of us know his true thoughts is proof enough that it doesn’t really matter to him one way or the other what she does and thus has no standing for her complaint.
I have the same dilemma that Kimstu has. Do we say she can’t wear the veil with the possibility that we isolate her more, or do we hope that in relating to others she has a chance to gain enough confidence to tell whoever requires her to wear it to crawl back under the rock they came from.
A teacher who relied on eyesight to tell if a student was pronouncing Spanish “d” or Russian soft consonants correctly would have to be offended by the student’s not having lips and teeth made out of plexiglass: it’s all in the position of the tongue. That’s why my foreign language teachers relied on their ears. As for umlauted vowels–even I can tell the difference between über and tuba; it’s a lot more obvious than the difference between dónde and Darth Vader. And where does it say in the OP’s article that she refused to interact with male students?
I have taught English to veiled Qatari ladies. No problem whatsoever, except for drinking tea when I was in the room. Otherwise, not an issue.
Take that back, please. I feel nothing of the sort. I’d like an apology.
Right, because all adherents of Islam hold exactly the same beliefs and customs.
Just like all adherents of Christianity. I remember well the day the Pope said Catholics had to stop celebrating birthdays because the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t do it.
Yeah, because we all know women never observe social customs without men making them do it. :dubious:
uh? Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
Anyway the thing they need to do is being more upfront about it. Lay down clearly how people moving to the region are expected to do and behave, then if a person doesn’t like it he or she can just stay away.
Just as a data point, there’s a story in the Globe and Mail which elaborates on this incident.
Actually, keeping your scarf over your face while inside would be extremely suspicious - you expose your face as soon as you get inside to warm it up.
You can respect a religious practice without changing your whole institution to accommodate one student. There is a reasonable limit to respecting religious practices; I don’t think any of us will ever know if the school went far enough or not. I see from the last article that the school did make accommodations - I strongly suspect that we are nowhere near being told the whole story here (from either side). Thing are just not making sense.
From the last linked article -
Well, that just friggin’ scares me. I don’t want to be on roads with people who are driving while peeking out of a tiny slit in their face veil. Driving is dangerous enough already with most people able to see around them.
I think you are grossly (and comically) overstating the effect of one student wearing a piece of cloth across her face will have on the other students. In addition, I suspect that you would not apply this principle equally to other students who are not participating. If a student sits in the back of the classroom, doesn’t speak except when directly addressed, and generally does nothing at all to contribute to the classroom experience, but does all of this with his face uncovered, would you support expelling the student? Or would simply giving that student a zero in participation be sufficient? Why should a different standard be applied to this woman?
The question at hand is, are the rules established in the classroom violating her right to religious freedom? Simply saying that the school has rules does nothing to resolve that question. If the school had a rule that every student had to say an Ave Maria at the beginning of class, would expelling a non-Catholic student be acceptable, since the school is simply enforcing its rules, and the non-Catholic refused to comply?
What has not been shown is how wearing a veil in a classroom creates a problem for the teacher or other students. Yes, I know, you’re going to beat on the participation drum again. Except, you’re basing that argument entirely on air and fantasy, because there’s no evidence at all that the student refused to participate with other students. All we know is that she wanted to wear her veil in class. What, precisely, does wearing a veil do to prevent participation in the class, or to harm the other students ability to learn the material?
The vast majority of Christians don’t pay any heed to the Pope, either. That doesn’t mean that obedience to Rome is not part of the Catholic religion. Similarly, most Muslim sects don’t require a niquab. This woman’s sect does. That doesn’t make the practice “not religious,” it just makes it a minority religious practice.
No one is arguing that anything goes so long as you can tie it to a religious belief. If a practice is genuinely disruptive, such as your hypothetical tuba observances - or, to pick a far less stupid example, the Muslim daily prayer requirements - then there’s nothing wrong with barring students from doing that during a class. If this woman was demanding the right to roll out her prayer mat in the middle of French class and make her obeisances to Mecca, the school would have every right to refuse. Arguing that wearing a piece of cloth across her face is similarly disruptive is disingenous in the extreme.
I don’t think it’s at all subjective. In what way is wearing a niquab disruptive to the educational process? It doesn’t make noise. It doesn’t obstruct other student’s views. It might impact her own ability to learn the material, but that’s her problem, and if she’s okay with taking a reduced grade because of it, then I don’t see why that should be anyone else’s concern.
I take it, then, that you feel that there should be no protection for an individual’s religious beliefs? That any form of religious discrimination should be allowed under the law? Because this argument, if one were foolish enough to accept it as valid, would apply to any and all religious practices. So I can only assume that you are basing your arguments on the concept that Canadian law should not recognize freedom of religion as a fundamental right. Am I incorrect in that conclusion?
What institutional change are you talking about? We’re not talking about forcing the cafeteria to practice hallal, or for the school to build a minaret in the middle of the quad. It’s one student wanting to sit in a classroom wearing a veil. How is that an unreasonable imposition on the institution?
I don’t know; that’s what I’m saying. We’re not getting the whole story here, from either side. From what I know of Canadian post-secondary institutions, they aren’t rampantly racist - if the whole issue was a student sitting in class with an unusual bit of clothing, I don’t know why it has become as big a deal as it has.
I completely agree that a student just wearing an unusual item of clothing should not be considered a problem, and I would totally support, say, a Muslim student’s insisting on being allowed to wear a headscarf that covered her hair but not her face.
But the issue with this student’s veil appears to have been specifically that she insisted on keeping it on solely to avoid letting men see her face. From Gorsnak’s link:
In our culture, to say that one group of strangers with whom you’re interacting in public life may look at your face while another group may not comes across as not treating those groups with equal courtesy and respect.
Although I sympathize with Ms. Ahmed’s dilemma about how to handle the situation, that fundamentally discriminatory approach just doesn’t seem right to me.
Yes, of course. I realize that I’m making statements about culture and principle that may be US-specific in some cases, and it’s up to the Canadian dopers to decide how far those statements are valid for the Canadian context as well.
I completely agree that someone in Qatar should follow Qatari cultural practices such as letting women be veiled in mixed-gender classroom situations. However, I don’t think that we’re necessarily equally obligated to follow those cultural practices to accommodate Qataris in other cultures.
I don’t agree that the school is obligated to respect all religious practices, if they conflict with other principles that the school is supposed to be upholding. I don’t know about Canadian universities, but many US colleges and universities explicitly affirm in their official policies a commitment to equality and non-discrimination. And I can think of a whole bunch of religious practices that potentially conflict with such a principle.
For example, suppose a couple of Hindus of the Brahmana hereditary group (varna, to be technical) are enrolled in a cooking class, and the teacher assigns everybody the task of making a particular dish and sampling everybody else’s dishes to evaluate their cooking. But the two Brahmana Hindu students follow the traditional religious custom of sharing food only with other Brahmanas, so they’ll sample each other’s dishes but won’t touch anybody else’s. Are those two students entitled to demand that their religious practice should be accommodated?
Now suppose that those two students follow a less stringent version of varna purity where they can share food with non-Hindus and most other Hindus but not with members of certain low-caste Hindu groups considered ritually “unclean”. And the class also happens to contain another Hindu student from one of those groups. Are the two Brahmana students entitled to refuse to touch only that one student’s food, on the grounds that their religious principles require them to view such contact as ritually defiling to them? Are we really obligated to accommodate people in religious practices that are so blatantly discriminatory and contrary to our own social principles of fundamental equality?
Convenience stores where I am give the side-eye to people wearing big sunglasses. Anything that obscures someone’s face is seen as a safety risk to the employees, and I can understand that. In Canada maybe there are fewer armed robberies of places like that? We’ve had cases of niqabi being asked to remove their veils before coming inside to pay for gasoline, even. But that’s up to an individual shop owner, I think. It’s a reasonable thing to say “an individual I cannot identify is a risk to me in this circumstance” when that circumstance is a place where many crimes take place, typically perpetrated by people who do, indeed, try to obscure their appearance.
Of course she did. That’s the entire point of niqab. Telling a niqabi to unveil herself specifically so that men can see her is a complete disregard and disrespect of why she’s wearing it to begin with.
There are a lot of instances of men failing to treat women with courtesy and respect. Hell, there are businesses built upon the male gaze and women as objects of it. So a vanishingly rare number of women choose to not allow that, this is not a threat to the fabric of western society.
There are reasons why religious groups that have specific dietary restrictions run their own cooking schools, because those of us with religious restrictions don’t expect accommodation in the greater sphere. I wouldn’t go to a general cooking class and expect my vegetarianism to be dealt with, let alone my adherence to kashrut. But that’s not what this is, by a long shot. Learning to speak a language doesn’t require seeing anyone else’s face. It requires hearing. Unless you’re suggesting that a blind student would be disadvantaged in this class because he couldn’t see the faces of other students when they spoke?
Well, as I said, I would condone veil banning in cases where a serious safety risk is involved, and if that’s how business owners and law enforcement see it here, that’s their call.
Yes, I’m aware of that. And my point is that that means that the practice of wearing niqab when voluntarily interacting with strangers in the public sphere, in a gender-egalitarian culture, inherently involves not showing equal respect and courtesy to men and women.
Rather, it’s a statement that in this society, the cultural principle of giving equal acknowledgement to members of all races and genders etc. within the public sphere outranks the religious principle of not permitting women’s faces to be seen by any men to whom they’re not related.
That’s very true, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Then there’s no need for a student to enroll in an on-campus classroom-environment language course where she will be expected to interact face-to-face with strangers. But if she does, and if one of the class requirements is to give an in-class presentation to the other students, then in our society, declaring that some of the students may see your face and others may not is a failure to show equal respect and courtesy to all.
Yes, the school has the right to give him the boot (assuming that the curriculum says he must participate. We haven’t seen the curriculum of the course to know if this was valid for the woman in question. If it isn’t then my argument if invalid).
If the rules are known to the student before they apply, then yes.
She wouldn’t interact with the men in the class the same way as with the women. It would be like a white guy turning his back every time he was told to address a black one. By not addressing the issue then the school is open to complaints by other students based upon creating an environment of sexual discrimination.
I’m not arguing that it is disruptive. I’m saying that the school and teacher thinks it is disruptive. They are the ones who know. Not us.
There should be no special protection of religious belief. If someone says they are required to do something because of their gods commandments then produce the deity in question so that we may all know the truth and follow his dictates, too.
As long as everyone is treated equally then that should be the acid test. You want to wear funny head gear that precludes wearing a motorcycle helmet? Then you don’t get to drive a motorcycle. A school has a rule that everyone who attends must have their head exposed with no coverings. I guess you don’t go if it is a problem. Oddly enough, billions of people manage to get through the day and go to school without wearing them. Many of them are of the same religion that these people are saying they are a part of.
Yet, oddly I, who also teach languages, find wearing a veil while speaking or driving no trouble. In fact most of the world has come to that conclusion. Odd a school would come to a contrasting conclusion, isn’t it?
Missed the edit window (that you Saudi Telecom!). My comment was directed at Uzi’s
I’m not arguing that it is disruptive. I’m saying that the school and teacher thinks it is disruptive. They are the ones who know. Not us.
So the say-so of some two-bit teacher’s good enough to deny someone a government sevice?
We live in a pluralistic society. The onus should be on the school to prove WHY a veil is disruptive, and “because we say so” isn’t good enough. Let’s hear a real reason.
I honestly don’t think you have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.
The (stupidly, blindingly obvious) difference between a motorcycle helmet law and a law against headscarves is that the former law has a genuine public purpose related to public safety and has nothing to do with religion. The latter law is obviously meant to enforce cultural norms, and has nothing to do with safety or any other legitimate government interest. One isn’t meant to discriminate, though as a side effect it happens to. The other is passed by shitheaded bigots to pick on Muslim women.
Yes, many Muslim women don’t wear veils. So what? Some want to. Give me a good reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to or get out of other people’s business.