Beyond the Body of Belief

Beyond the Body of Belief
a publication of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
3000 K St. NW, Suite 220, Washington, DC 20007

About The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is a nonpartisan, interfaith, legal and educational institute dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions. We operate in three arenas: in the courts of law, in the court of public opinion, and in the academy.

What Do We Believe at the Becket Fund?
Freedom of religion is a basic human right that no government may lawfully deny; it is not a gift of the state, but instead is rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person. Religious expression (of all traditions) is a natural part of life in civilized society, and religious arguments (on all sides of a question) are a normal and healthy element of public debate. Religious people and institutions are entitled to participate in government affairs on an equal basis with everyone else, and should not be excluded for professing their faith.

Acknowledgements:

We gratefully acknowledge the contribution made to Body of Belief by the following individuals and organizations:

Neal Tew Photography
Amar Singh Photography at Suntrastudios
United Sikhs
Merve Kavakci
Elizabeth Petnuch
Catherine Clark

Copyright:

No part of this exhibit can be reproduced without permission.

About Body of Belief:

Many countries ban different types of religious clothing and distinctive religious symbols. These bans are in violation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants and laws. The types of prohibition range from the well-known laïcité laws in France, which ban ”ostensible” religious symbols in public schools and buildings, to even more punitive bans in totalitarian countries.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has conceived and coordinated an interreligious exhibit on banned religious clothing and other distinctive symbols featuring museum-like holdings of actual artifacts and photographs of individuals wearing those artifacts.

We hope that this exhibit will convey the meaningfulness of religious symbols to religious adherents on a pre-articulate level that will ultimately stimulate more nuanced discussions on the issue. We think it is particularly important that the exhibit displays personal testimonies from people of various faiths. Not only does this establish the universality of the desire for religious expression, but we hope it will also create an opening for interfaith dialogue and cooperation. The collection will travel around the world and grow as we acquire more images and artifacts.

If you or your organization wants to participate in this exhibit by contributing a religious artifact, photograph and/or related testimony to accompany the symbol, please call Kristina Arriaga at US (202) 349-7217 or email her at karriaga@becketfund.org.

Members of Parliament forced Kavakci out. She was stripped of her Turkish citizenship, and repeatedly ostracized and threatened. Ilicak, a secular Muslim, was accused of ”threatening the secular state edifice” for accompanying and supporting Kavakci’s right to wear a headscarf.

Courtesy of Merve Kavakci

Muslim Politician Expelled from Parliament for Wearing Headscarf
(Istanbul, Turkey)

The ability to draft legislation, negotiate compromises and advocate vigorously are skills one might expect would determine the length of an aspiring politician’s term in Parliament. But the career of Merve Kavakci, a representative of the Muslim Virtue Party, was ended by her decision to wear the hijab, the Islamic headcovering.

Kavakci entered Parliament in May 1999 to serve the voters who elected her. Fellow parliamentarians, male and female alike, greeted Kavakci, not with handshakes, but with shouts of ”Get out, Get out!” The hostile cries continued for forty minutes and were stopped only when Prime Minister Bulent Eceveit raised his hand, pointed in her direction, and bellowed, ”Put this woman in her place.”

”I was terrified,” Kavakci remembered.

Eleven days later, Kavakci lost her citizenship as a Turkish citizen and was accused of ”instigating hatred amongst people” and ”striving to destroy the laic (secular) structure of the Turkish state.” Kavakci was banned from running for office for five years. She subsequently moved to the United States with her two daughters.

It was not the first time that members of Kavakci’s family faced discrimination for their religious beliefs from Turkey’s aggressively secular government. Kavakci’s mother was coerced to resign from her teaching position at Ataturk University because she chose to wear the hijab. And her father, Prof. Dr. Yusuf Ziya Kavakci also had to resign his deanship of Islamic studies at the university for supporting the right to wear the headcovering.

Unbowed, Kavakci explained her decision to continue wearing the hijab. ”For women who choose it, the headscarf is an indispensable part of their personal identity, one that should not be compromised.” Now a professor at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs in Washington D.C., Kavakci has defended the right to wear the hijab at the United Nations, on CNN, and at Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Kavakci has not given up on changing the policies of the government of Turkey, filing a lawsuit against Turkey in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

”States themselves can indeed be secular,” said Kavakci, but ”can or should people be forced into being secular? Is it legitimate to demand from one to leave his or her religious convictions at home as he or she walks out the door?” Kavakci believes that the struggle of aggressively secular governments with women who want to wear the hijab will not end soon and that this struggle reflects a ”deep and growing misunderstanding between Muslim women and the rest of the world.”

Turkish police removing headscarf of junior high school student.

Courtesy of Merve Kavakci

European Court of Human Rights Upholds Turkey’s Ban on Headscarves
(Strasbourg, France)

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld the headscarf ban in a case presented by Leyla Sahin and Zeynep Tekin against the Turkish Higher Education Board (YOK). In 1988, during her fifth year of medical school, Sahin was refused entry to an examination because she was wearing a headscarf. She was later denied access to a course because of her insistence on wearing it. Tekin was banned from the Nursing College of Ege University because of her headscarf.

Sahin and Tekin told the ECHR, ”The headscarf ban in the Turkish schools forces students to choose between their religion and education and this leads to discrimination between `believers and nonbelievers`.”

But in a unanimous ruling, a panel of ECHR seven judges upheld the Turkish government’s ban: ”Measures taken in universities to prevent certain fundamentalist religious movements from pressuring students who do not practice the religion in question or those belonging to another religion can be justified.”

The court framed its ruling as a defense of secularism, but Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch stated that the decision would in fact foster religious separatism. ”It’s not clear why this is supposed to encourage pluralism,” she said. ”It’s going to push women into separate institutions or force them to abandon what they consider to be their religious obligations.”

Thousands of women have had their access to higher education curtailed, said Jonathan Sugden, a researcher on Turkey for Human Rights Watch. Women who choose to cover their head, he said, ”either can’t get into university or are expelled, or they’re forced to do things like wear the scarf under a wig.”

The appeal is likely to be heard by the court’s appellate grand chamber within the next 18 months.

The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, was established by the Council of Europe, a political organization of 45 member nations.

Arionakeha Elijah, a junior at Salmon River High School, was suspended for wearing a red bandanna to mark his rite of passage as a member of the Iroquois, a Native American tribe.

Courtesy of Arionakeha Elijah

Three Months of Solitary Confinement for Wearing Native American Religious Symbol
(Fort Covington, New York, USA)

Punishment was the last thing on his mind when Arionakeha Elijah, a junior at Salmon River High School, decided to tie a red bandanna on his head to mark his rite of passage as a member of the Iroquois Native American tribe.

But school officials said the symbol violated a rule against bandannas and ordered him to remove it. When Elijah refused, the school put him in a classroom called ”the box.” ”He was just left to sit there,” said Derek Gaubatz, an attorney from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the family. ”He’d have to go to lunch separately so nobody would see the headband. They said he could come back if he stuck an eagle feather in the headband. I guess it was their own unique way of saying that would make him truly Indian.”

School officials ignored the family’s own explanation of the red bandanna’s significance. The color red has ancient meaning, especially for the Oneida tribe to which his father belongs. ”The color was significant,” explained Elijah’s father, Alec. ”Good medicine. A long time ago, they put a red mark on a rock or tree. They used it in a lot of different ways. Even their medicine bags had red on it. The wampum was tinted with red dyes for good mind, for good medicine.”

His mother, Angela, found the ordeal difficult. For her the hardest day was when she went to school and saw him in ”that little room.” ”I couldn’t believe they could do that to someone,” Angela said. ”I’m just glad he’s out of it. He’s back in class where he wanted to be in the first place. At least he’s back in civilization.”

His father is familiar with the sting of discrimination. ”It brought back a lot of what I saw during my time in school,” Alec said. ”It brought out a lot of negative stuff.” Elijah himself chose to focus on ” the struggles our people . . . always went through,” he said. ”They had to go through a lot harder stuff. This wasn’t as hard. I’m still alive.”

During his three months of confinement, Elijah, an accomplished lacrosse player and cross-country runner, was suspended for the entire athletic season, jeopardizing his chances for a college athletic scholarship.

Elijah’s reinstatement occurred after Becket Fund attorneys Derek Gaubatz and Robert Greene met with school officials regarding Elijah’s constitutional rights to practice his religion freely.

U.S. public school officials suspended 12-year-old Nashala Ahearn for refusing to take off her headscarf.

Courtesy Nashala Ahearn

Muslim Schoolgirl Describes Battle Between Obedience to God and School Dress Code
(Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA) 10 June 2004

Nashala Hearn, a 12-year-old Muslim schoolgirl from Muskogee, Oklahoma, told a panel of United States senators that she was in a ”battle between being obedient to God by wearing my hijab to be modest in Islam versus the school dress code policy.” When Nashala wore her religious headscarf to school, officials suspended her twice, once for three days and once for five days, for refusing to remove it.

Nashala told a panel of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, ”This experience has been very stressful, very depressing and very humiliating.’’ Her testimony came during a hearing focused on the issue of ”hostility to religious expression in the public square.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, organized the hearing and said Tuesday that hostility to religion in public places is ”pervasive” and wrong. ”The constitution nowhere requires government to expel expressions of faith from the public square,” Cornyn said.

In Nashala’s case, Muskogee Public Schools reached an agreement last month to settle a lawsuit filed on the girl’s behalf by a Virginia-based civil liberties group. The school district agreed to change its dress code to accommodate attire worn for religious reasons. The U.S. Justice Department also intervened on her side.

These five Sikh children are unable to attend school in France because they wear turbans. Laïcité laws in France ban, among other things, students’ clothing that “ostensibly manifests a religious appearance.”

Photo credit: United Sikhs

Sikh Boys Refused Entry to Schools for Wearing Turbans
(Bobigny, Paris, France) 4 September 2004

Fourteen-year-old Jasvir Singh marched to school to purchase his textbooks for the school year. Jasvir never got that far because teachers turned him away at the school’s gate for wearing a turban, a symbol of the Sikh religion.

Jasvir and his father, Gurdial Singh, met with the school’s principal and explained that there is no alternative to the turban, which Sikhs must wear in accordance with their faith.

Mr. Singh also informed the principal that the Government of France had repeatedly told the Sikh community that it would find a solution to the matter. The principal, however, would not agree to a compromise and Jasvir no longer attends his school.

In the town of Drancy, seven-year-old Sumeet Singh, accompanied by his mother, was stopped at the gate by teachers of the Jean Jaures School. Sumeet Singh, who was wearing a handkerchief to cover his hair, was stopped at the gate and was not allowed to enter until the mother removed the handkerchief from his hair.

Photographs and exhibits have been supplied by UNITED SIKHS, a global non-profit, human development non-governmental organization ( www.unitedsikhs.org) which has been in the forefront of the ”Right To Turban” campaign since the French ban was announced in December 2003.

French Schools Expel 48 Students for Wearing Religious Clothing

(France) 20 January 2005 Agence France-Presse reported that ”A total of 48 students have been expelled in France since September for violating a new law that bans the wearing of religious insignia in state schools, Education Minister Francois Fillon said Thursday.

Most of those barred from attending classes were Muslim girls who refused to take off their headscarves, but three Sikh boys were also ordered out of the classroom for wearing turbans.

Although the law does not single out any specific faith - Jewish skullcaps, large Christian crosses and Sikh turbans are banned along with headscarves - many in the country’s five-million-strong Muslim community believe the hijab worn by teenage girls is the main target.

Fillon said that while some 1,500 students had ”conspicuously” displayed their religious faith in state-run schools last year, only 639 had done so this year, following the adoption of the new law.

Muslim Police Officers Allowed to Keep Beards
(New Jersey, USA) 3 March 1999

The United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that a law which would force Muslim police officers to shave off their beards violated their religious freedom under the First Amendment.

The City of Newark issued an order requiring police officers to be clean-shaven. It provided a medical exemption for not shaving, but offered no equivalent religious exemption. Two Muslim police officers, required by their religious beliefs to wear beards, were thus forced by the city to choose between their faith and their jobs.

The Court of Appeals decided that the failure to grant an equivalent religious exemption from the rule violated the Constitution. ”When the government makes a value judgment in favor of secular motivations, but not religious motivations, the government’s actions must survive heightened scrutiny.” The court rejected the city’s justification that to preserve ”morale and esprit de corps,” it must maintain a ”monolithic force” of beardless policemen.

Any attempt by the police department to obscure diverse religious beliefs through enforcing uniform physical appearance was impermissible, stated the Court: ”if this is the Department’s thinking . . . that Sunni Muslim officers . . . are prohibited from wearing beards precisely for the purpose of obscuring the fact that they hold those beliefs and that they differ in this respect from most of the other members of the force . . . , if this is the real reason for the distinction that is drawn between medical and religious exemptions, we have before us a policy the very purpose of which is to suppress manifestations of the religious diversity that the First Amendment safeguards.”

English Schoolgirl Wins the Right to Wear Muslim Gown
(Luton, England)

In a landmark ruling, an appeals court has decided that a school that forbid a Muslim girl from wearing a full-length gown in observance of her faith, violated her right to manifest religious belief which is guaranteed by England’s Human Rights Act.

In September 2002, Shabina Begum was a student at Denbigh High School in Luton when she decided to switch from wearing a regulation shalwar kameez (tunic and trousers) to a full length gown called a jilbab. Denbigh High School officials forbid Miss Begum from wearing the jilbab to school and she transferred to another school which tolerated her religious attire.

The court ruled that while Denbigh High School had an interest in maintaining uniformity in student dress, Miss Begum also had a right to exercise her religious freedom which Denbigh High School violated.

The appeals court ruled that the onus lay upon the school to justify interference with Miss Begum’s religious practice. Speaking for the court, Lord Justice Brooke said that ”Instead, it started from the premise that its uniform policy was to be obeyed: if the claimant did not like it, she could go to a different school.”

The ruling has widespread implications for the right to wear religious clothing in England. The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed the decision as a ”common sense approach.” The Council’s Secretary-General Iqbal Sacranie said ”The British Muslim community is a diverse community in terms of the interpretation and understanding of their faith and its practice. Within this broad spectrum those that believe and choose to wear the jilbab and consider it to be part of their faith requirement for modest attire should be respected.”

Miss Begum did not seek either damages or the right to reenroll at Denbigh High School. She described the court’s decision as a victory for all Muslims who wanted to ”preserve their identity and values” and expressed surprise that her decision to wear the jilbab had created so much controversy. ”It is amazing that in the so-called free world I have to fight to win the right to wear this attire.”

French laïcité laws forbid a child wearing a yarmulke to attend a public school.

French rabbi: Wear baseball caps, not skullcaps, in public
19 November 2003

Haaretz News Service reported that in the wake of an anti-Semitic arson attack on a Jewish school on the outskirts of Paris, France’s Chief Rabbi urged members of the French Jewish community to wear baseball caps instead of skullcaps “to prevent being attacked in the street.”

”I do not want young people traveling alone on trains or the Metro to become easy targets for attackers,” Rabbi Joseph Sitruk said. ”Covering one’s head is an important religious dictate, which should not be overlooked. On the contrary, today, more than ever, the Jewish community cannot shut itself off in a ghetto; it should be open, at ease and safe.”

A close aid to the rabbi tried to downplay his comments to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. ”The Chief Rabbi has always said that head covering is an important commandment, and that the covering itself is not important. In the current climate, there is no point waving a red rag in public places.”

In recent years, French Synagogues and Jewish schools have been attacked repeatedly.

Catholic Chaplains Kept Out of State Schools for Wearing Religious Clothing
(Toulon, France) 8 October 2004

France’s ban on religious clothing has been applied to bar Catholic chaplains from entering schools in the Var region. Local schools have prevented five Catholic priests from entering state schools to meet Catholic pupils, according to diocesan spokesman Fr. Charles Mallard.

One school barred a priest, Father Antoine Galland, from entering because he was wearing a cassock, a traditional black robe that he wore without problem before the new law barring religious symbols came into force.

A local Bishop, Dominique Rey, stated that “[t]hese decisions were taken unilaterally without consulting the chaplains.”

The exclusion of the chaplains has raised questions about the loophole in France’s strict secularism that allows chaplains to work at state schools. The decision to prohibit chaplains from entering schools was supported by the teachers’ union. The union, SNES, issued a statement, saying, “The law on secularism applies not only to pupils, but to teachers and other personnel who are part of the teaching or logistical staff of a school.”

“How can you explain to pupils that the law is the same for everyone if we make an exception like that?” asked Jean-Pierre Andrau, a history teacher at the lycee which turned away Father Antoine Galland.