Radio Islam News and Agencies | 14 Rabi ul Awwal 1439/03 December 2017

In the USA, Muslim students are getting their headscarves pulled off by teachers in the classroom, whilst across the Atlantic, inspectors in the UK will question girls who don a head covering in primary school to find out why they do so. Schoolchildren, it now appears, are the latest targets in the ongoing campaign to malign the Islamic guidelines on dressing, in the West.

Newsweek reports on school districts having reported hijab pulling incidents at schools across the United States from teachers and students in recent months.

A Virginia school district recently placed a teacher on leave for removing a student’s scarf from her head. The student took to Twitter after the incident mid-November saying that her hijab was “ripped off her head” by a teacher she appreciated and valued.

The publication cited the account that appears to belong to the student saying she was talking to a friend when the teacher pulled off her scarf from behind. To her shock, he then said: “Oh, your hair is so pretty,” she said on Twitter.

The Fairfax County Public School district released a statement calling the incident “inappropriate and unacceptable.” “FCPS takes this incident seriously and, while a thorough investigation of the incident is conducted, the teacher has been placed on leave,” the district said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations confirmed the Twitter statements from the student. “We welcome the decision to place the teacher on leave and to apologize to the student and her family, but further disciplinary action needs to be taken based on the results of the investigation into this disturbing incident,” Nihad Awad, CAIR national executive director, said. “No student should be bullied or attacked because of his or her faith. Teachers must protect students, not subject them to harassment or intimidation,”

In another disturbing incident, CAIR also in November called for the removal of a teacher from a Nashville, Tennessee, charter school. The educator uploaded a video to social media showing a student at the New Vision Academy Charter School having her hijab removed to show students. In the video, the girl is seen trying to cover up her hair as someone tries to pull off her hijab and play with her hair. A Snapchat video of the incident showed students touching the student’s hair with the caption “pretty hair.”

The teacher was later suspended without pay last week.

In May, a Bronx substitute teacher in New York City ripped off a second-grade student’s hijab because the student was allegedly misbehaving. The teacher was later charged with a hate crime.

‘Why is my Hijab your problem?’

In the UK, Muslims have responded vociferously to indications by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) that it will interrogate young girls on their reasons for wearing a headscarf. Ofsted is a non-ministerial department of the UK government, reporting to Parliament and is responsible for inspecting a range of educational institutions, including state and some independent schools.

According to the BBC, Ofsted head Amanda Spielman said creating an environment where Muslim children are expected to wear the headscarf “could be interpreted as sexualisation of young girls”.

The announcement came after Ms Spielman met campaigners from the Social Action and Research Foundation think tank recently.

In September, the foundation’s head, Amina Lone, co-ordinated a letter to the Sunday Times from campaigners arguing that the hijab has “no place in our primary schools”, and demanding action as Muslim girls as young as five were “increasingly veiled”.

“This is an affront to the historical fight for gender equality in our secular democracy and is creating a two-tiered form of non-equality for young Muslim girls,” the letter said.

Explaining her decision to act, Ms Spielman said: “While respecting parents’ choice to bring up their children according to their cultural norms, creating an environment where primary school children are expected to wear the hijab could be interpreted as sexualisation of young girls.

“In seeking to address these concerns, and in line with our current practice in terms of assessing whether the school promotes equality for their children, inspectors will talk to girls who wear such garments to ascertain why they do so in the school.”

She urged parents concerned about “fundamentalist groups” influencing school policy or breaching equality law to complain to the school or to Ofsted.

Ofsted’s announcement came in the form of a recommendation to inspectors rather than an official update to the inspectorate’s official handbook

A letter, signed by 1 136 teachers, academics and faith leaders from across the UK has slated the move.

“It is a kneejerk, discriminatory and institutionally racist response that will violate civil liberties and create a climate of fear and mistrust in schools and must be retracted immediately,” it read.

The letter – written by Nadine El-Enany, senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London, Waqas Tufail, senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University, and Shereen Fernandez, a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London – said: “We, the undersigned, ask that Ofsted immediately retract its instruction to inspectors to question primary school children wearing the hijab.

“We find the decision to single out Muslim children for questioning unacceptable, and insist that no school children be targeted for action on the basis of their race, religion or background.

“While a wider conversation about the sexualisation of girls in Britain’s culture and economy is welcome, the singling out of Muslim children for investigation is unacceptable.

“The message the Ofsted decision sends to Muslim women is that the way they choose to dress and the decisions they make in raising their children are subject to a level of scrutiny different to that applied to non-Muslim parents.

“Further, the Ofsted decision reduces the hijab to a symbol of sexualisation and ignores other interpretations ranging from a display of faith to a symbol of empowerment and resistance. Constructing women and children who wear the hijab as being either sexualised or repressed is both reductive and racist in its reproduction of colonial and Orientalist tropes about them.”

The move was also criticised as a “dangerous” decision that risked “reinforcing an anti-Muslim political culture in which Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism has been institutionalised in schools and across the public sector”.