Five school teachers from the Russian town of Kara-Tyube will receive a reprimand for having allowed the Muslim schoolgirls to wear headscarves on September 1.
Translated from Izvestia.ru:
The prosecutors of Stavropol Region put an end to the conflict in the village school in Kara-Tube, where the principal forbade the Muslim girls to attend classes with headscarves (hijabs).
Prosecutors stated that the education in Russia is secular and therefore wearing of religious clothing in schools is unconstitutional. However, five teachers still will be punished – for not stopping in time “Islamization” of the school.
As stated by the prosecutor’s office taking the decision was complicated by the hype surrounding this story. Eventually, during the meeting in the District Prosecutor’s Office, it was decided to support the position of Marina Savchenko – director of the school № 12 in Kara-Tyube.
- In accordance with the Constitution and the law “On education”, the educational process in Russia is secular, – said to “Izvestia” the source in the prosecutor’s office. – It is also contrary to the school’s regulations.
However, the prosecution decided to punish the perpetrators of this contradictory situation. These are two teachers, two deputy directors of the school and the social worker. They were found “guilty” of not controlling the situation in advance and not stopping the students from appearing in hijabs on September 1.
The director Marina Savchenko, though glad that the district prosecutor took her side, is not going to punish the teachers.
- I will not bring them to account, we will not look for scapegoats, – said the principal. – I explained to the prosecutor my position, and he agreed that the teachers should not be punished. They could do nothing because on September 1 the children already came in hijabs.
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The controversial situation in the school № 12 aroused a week ago. Then the school administration urged the parents of the girls who came wearing hijabs to remove them, or at least change to the usual scarves.
The principal referred to the regulations which define the common rules for the appearance of students. Instead, the parents of the Muslims students took them home and wrote a complaint to the prosecutor’s office.
As a result, the Ministry of Education took the side of the teacher, but Pavel Astakhov [ed: Children's Rights Commissioner for the President of Russia] said that the school went too far and violated the rights of children to freedom of religion.
Comments of Russian netizens
Russian readers left more than hundred comments to this news. here are some of them.
Fred Perry (replying to the above): This refers to people, not terrorists.это относится к людям, а не к террористам.
[Note: comment about the wedding shooting refers to the recent incident in which the residents of Dagestan were celebrating the wedding in Moscow and shooting at the cars which tried to overtake the wedding motorcade]
[Note: indeed, there was a famous incident in Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad when the schoolgirl came to the graduation party in transparent dress]
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Good. Убей исламизм в зародише!
Lots of wackos going about making childish, knee-jerk, and irrelevant comparisons to Christian symbols and certain school proms.
Translating the Russian sentence in the comment above – “Kill the islamism in its infancy!”
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I myself feel strong dissonance with such kind of news.
I don’t think that secular education automatically means the ban of head scarves.
Seems to me that the compromise was possible in this situation.
While I applaud Russia’s move, I still think that if you target one religion you must target them all. By singling out headscarves and ignoring, say, yamaka’s you are simply declaring war on a particular religion. It would be far better to remove religious symbols from schools and be done with it.
Also, headscarves are a tradition in Eastern Orthodox faiths as well. Are they, too, not allowed to wear headscarves, or is the ban strictly on Muslim headscarves?
I do not see why a country should be under any obligation to target its own faith in the name of “fairness” and “equal treatment.”
It’s not like Muslim societies do anyway.
Without a school dress code, or uniform then banning people from wearing religious paraphernalia, is kind of ludicrous. In the end, you have to come up with a ban for all religious things, or have a school uniform to really crack down, because people will wear what is in style, which might be a head scarf. I wonder if they would tell Rastafarians to not have dreadlocks….