American Muslims are slamming a draft law in the northwestern state of Oregon to ban teachers from wearing religious dress such as hijab at public school.
“This legislation forces Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and others to choose between their faith and entering the teaching profession,” Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a press release.
The Oregon state legislature has passed a bill banning teachers from wearing religious dress at schools and will be signed by the Oregon governor into law.
“No teacher in any public school shall wear any religious dress while engaged in the performance of duties as a teacher,” says the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act.
The bill also says education officials and schools would not be breaking the law if they “prohibit a teacher from wearing religious dress while engaged in the performance of duties as a teacher.”
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Hooper said the bill violates the right of people to wear what they like.
“Merely wearing a headscarf is not proselytizing; it’s a statement of faith,” he said.
“Practicing one’s faith is a right guaranteed by the constitution.”
Earlier this month, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg nixed a city council call to allow public schools to close on two of the holiest Muslim holidays.
CAIR, America’s largest Muslim advocacy group, has defended the right of Americans of all faiths to wear religious attire in the workplace.
Earlier this year, CAIR chapters in Oklahoma and Minnesota helped block proposed legislation that would have prohibited wearing hijab in driver’s license photographs.
Infringement
Hooper questioned if the ban would affect a Muslim woman who did not normally wear a scarf but had to undergo chemotherapy and lost her hair.
“Would she be put through an inquisition to determine if she was making a religious statement or not?” he said.
The bill has already drawn fire from Sikhs.
Hooper said the Oregon legislation directly contradicts a statement made by US President Barack Obama during a speech to the Muslim world in Egypt in June.
“Freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion,” Obama said in his landmark speech.
“That is why the US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.”
Hijab has been in the spotlight since France banned the wearing of the Muslim headscarf at schools in 2004.
Since then, many European countries followed suit.
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.
The Muslim leader said that banning hijab and other religious symbols is not the answer.
“Concerns about religious neutrality in schools can be adequately addressed through professional codes of conduct.”
-Agencies