A Catholic schoolgirl has been branded a truant for refusing to wear a headscarf and trousers to visit a mosque.
The way this story is presented seems unduly alarmist to me.
If I visited a Christian church that had certain modesty requirements (e.g. Orthodox churches in Greece), I would comply with them out of respect to that tradition, even though I am not a Christian. Surely Christians can pay the same courtesy to other religions, even if they don't agree with them.
When I have visited mosques, gurdwaras etc I have sometimes been asked to cover my head, sometimes not, but whilst I am not keen on doing so (for feminist reasons), I comply with the request out of courtesy.
The Catholic girl was not asked to take part in Muslim worship.
On the other hand, I suppose that whether or not you are prepared to visit the religious buildings of another faith is up to your own conscience. I would decline to visit a Wahhabist mosque, for instance; and I know some Pagans who won't go into Christian churches. So I would support the right of a member of any faith to choose not to visit the religious building of another faith, even if I disagreed with their reasons for declining to visit. The schoolgirl in this case could have learnt about Islam in another way. So I think the school has overreacted. Parents have to the right to withdraw their children from religious assemblies; surely this is the same sort of choice, and the pupil in question is entitled to make it?
I once accompanies a group of theological students from the local Orthodox seminary on a visit to the local jammi (mosque). We all took our shoes off and listened to the hoxha (imam) explain how he saw the differences between Islam and Christianity.
ReplyDeleteIt is a part of the world where disrespect and violence are quite common. A few weeks later we visited the town of Voskopoje, where some of the ikons in churches that had escaped communist vandals had been defaced by those attending a Muslim youth camp, incidted by their Iranian teachers. The Albanian government, to its credit, deported the Iranians for encouraging people to destroy Albania's cultural heritage.
But it works both ways -- the seminarians were taught to show respect for the jammi, and thus could expect respect in return.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I smell a rat. I shrewdly suspect that Dear Mum doesn't want her daughter exposed to any religion other than Christianity (preferably RC), and that the dress issue was the excuse rather than the reason.
ReplyDeleteI mean, come on! Wearing trousers is not "dressing like a Muslim," for Pete's sake. And, despite the photo in the article (captioned "for illustrative purposes only"), I doubt that the female students were expected to wear a niqab. They were expected to cover their heads. Now, I would not be at all surprised if Dear Mum wore a hat to church on Sunday. Aunt Agatha would no more have gone to Matins without a hat than she would have without shoes.
By-the-bye, according to its "About" page, "The Christian Institute is a nondenominational Christian charity committed to upholding the truths of the Bible." 'nuff said.