Posted on 11/12/2004 8:22:29 AM PST by knighthawk
The southern German state of Bavaria has become the latest of the country's federal states to ban Muslim school teachers from wearing headscarves. The Bavarian parliament approved the measure after Culture Minister Monika Hohlmeier argued that the headscarf was a symbol of the repression of women.
Three other German states - Lower Saxony, Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saarland - have already imposed similar bans.
Displaying Christian and Jewish symbols will still be allowed in Bavaria.
More than three million Muslims live in Germany and many have complained that the laws restrict their freedom to express their religion.
In the state of Hesse, the headscarf ban applies to all civil servants.
But Ms Hohlmeier said the headscarf had become a political symbol which was widely abused by Islamic fundamentalist groups and was not consistent with democracy, equality and tolerance.
"It's true that the veil of Islamic fundamentalist groups as a political symbol has been massively abused," she told German television.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens, who rule in a coalition on a national level, voted against the ban in the Bavarian parliament, adding that it was questionable from a legal point of view.
Religious freedom
The issue has been fiercely debated in Germany since Fereshta Ludin, who was denied a job in Baden-Wuerttemberg in 1998 because she wore a headscarf in school, went to court.
She argued that the German constitution guaranteed her religious freedom.
Last September, the federal Constitutional Court ruled by five votes to three that, under current laws, she could wear the scarf.
But it also said new laws could be passed by individual states banning them if they were deemed to unduly influence pupils.
In France, there is similar controversy about a ban on the wearing of religious symbols by pupils in state schools.
Is it a symbol of repressed women or one of modesty. A difficult thing to determine on a broad basis.
http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en&lp=ende&search=
HODEN!=Testicles
Ball is the same in German ie foot golf etc
From what I understand about German politics, is that Bavaria is Germany's most Conservative state. Is this true?
The Christian Social Union - the ruling party in Bavaria -is the most conservative, states' rights and pro-church party in Germany.
They detest the Secularism and Materialism (The best term for it would be Jacobinism) of the Socialists in Berlin.
Tolerance need only be extended to those who are themselves tolerant. Muslims, by their own teachings, must be intolerant. So we owe them no special accomodation, and only fools would give them any slack.
For those of you that still don;t understand how insane Islam is I invite you to take a look at Ask the Imam.
And yes, it's a real site. Not a joke.
I'll quote Maimonides as much as I like.
He much preferred Islam, a strictly monotheistic religion, to Christianity which was tainted by the smell of politheism
He preferred neither. His occupation and residence in a Muslim country made it wise for him to make conciliatory comments about Islam. In fact, sadly, he converted to Islam briefly when it became necessary in order to avoid physical harm.
That's the one blemish on the RamBam's record.
I'll point out that Rashi, who lived in Christian territory, made conciliatory comments about Christianity to be polite.
And in his age, Islamic civilization was far more advanced than Christian civilization
Except, of course, it wasn't.
In terms of technology and science as well as military technique the Greek and Italian Christians were as accomplished or more accomplished than their Islamic counterparts.
The main distinction was that Islam was still significantly wealthier due to the spice and silk trades that Islam had practically cornered in the Mediterranean.
The RamBam was the greatest mind in the Mediterranean world when he died. His successor in learning and brilliance was an Italian, not an Arab.
It has changed since...
Absolutely. I would argue that Averroes - the most brilliant Arab philosopher and thinker who ever lived, represented the high-water mark of Islamic intellectual achievement. Before he died, six years before the RamBam, his works were already being destroyed by Arab censors. He had no followers and some of his works survived only in Latin, translated by Christian monks or in Aramaic, translated by Jewish rabbis.
The banning of headscarves in France and other European countries is an valid attempt to integrate Muslims into the mainstream society. Muslims love the headscarf as it forces their women to look so different as to be unreachable by mainstream society. That way they can control women without outside influence.
How do you know what the Rambam wrote and why? Same with Rashi...
And please try to learn about the Islamic civilization when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages... You seem not to know a lot about it!
I hope the brave Culture Minister has adequate security.
"The one good thing about the German constitution is that is truly federal."
If I could I would swap with the federalism in the U.S. or in Switzerland.
Schools, cultural issues and the adminstration are the only fields which remains an exclusive affair of the states, the rest is chaos.
The Laender can't even impose (or better abolish) taxes. They've a powerful representation in the upper chamber (Bundesrat) which is controlled by the conservative parties. The problem is that the Laender mostly can't act on their own but only collectively.
In this case it's 1-0 against the extremists but let's wait and see what our Supreme Court will respond. I guess you Americans know this problem too well.
There are numerous translations of and scholarly works about the RamBam. All one needs is access to a good academic library.
As far as Rashi goes, since I read Aramaic I've had the opportunity to read a good portion of his commentary on the Torah.
And please try to learn about the Islamic civilization when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages... You seem not to know a lot about it!
Seeing that I hold an advanced degree in medieval history from the University of Chicago, I can reliably say that I know between ten and twenty thousand times as much about the subject as you do.
Shabbat shalom.
The headscarf is associated with rape (when not worn). IMO the entire west should ban these things in all government schools and offices. Would work wonders.
I know there are good translations... But their motives aren't written there... :-)
Do you tell me that my alma mater is teaching such idiocies about the Islamic civilization? I may reconsider the donation for this year! Just got the form in the mail!
Yep, Bavaria is conservative, mostly Catholic state. Their conservative party, the Christian Social Union, has led the state since the end of World War II. In the last state election, they received over 60% of the vote, while Schroeder's Social Democrats got less than 20%. Incedentally, they also have had the strongest growth in Germany as of late.
I can understand that sentiment. But compare Germany's federal constitution with France, for eample.
Unless you live in Paris it's almost as if you don't exist.
Ditto for the Nordic countries.
Isn't Bavaria the more conservative, wealthier part of Germany?
I am not sure about Germany, but in France it is quite a different reason...
In 1905, the French government passed a law that established a strict separation between religions (then Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism) and the state. The ban forbade any religious symbol in public places, and was so strict that it had to specifically allow it in museums and cemetaries, if not you couldn't have religious paintings in museums or crosses on graves (in France cemetaries are all own by the state).
Public schools were included in the ban. This ban was always respected: when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, girls with crosses were asked to put them below their shirt so they wouldn't be seen.
Starting in the 1970s, Muslims started to flout this law, which is a kind of taboo in France by coming to schools with the hijab. The teachers were appaled and tried to get a legal opinion that was quite murky, saying that the decision was left to school principals (the decision was in 1989 I believe). This was the background for the readoption of the law that bans religious symbols in school this year.
If you had read the post, you would see that I referred to scholarly critical works and not just translations of primary texts.
Anyone who knows anything about the RamBam knows that he was not just a private scholar but functionally a liaison between Jewry and the entire the Muslim world while serving as personal physician to the Sultan.
Everything he said and did had great import for the safety and prosperity of Jews in the Islamic world and he did a very good job of maintaining significant Jewish autonomy largely by managing his relationship with the Sultan.
All his comments about Isl;am occurred in an historical context and any serious scholar will view them in that context.
Do you tell me that my alma mater is teaching such idiocies about the Islamic civilization?
Let's point out of few facts of which you are apparently ignorant:
(1) Islamic civilization was a conflation of (a) ignorant Arabic tribes, (b) the learning of the ancient Persian civilization conquered by those tribes, (c) the learning of the ancient Greek civilization largely conquered by those tribes and (d) the ancient Jewish civilization which in large part fell under the jurisdiction of those tribes.
(2) Almost all of the cultural achievements claimed as Islamic by modern-day Muslims were cultural achievements taken over from Jews, Greeks and Persians.
Some examples: the greatest Islamic biologist, Ibn Sina, was a Persian who based all his research on the work of the Greek physician Galen and the Greek biologist Aristotle.
The greatest Islamic mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was a Persian who learned his science from Persian sources and the Greeks, especially Diophantus.
The greatest Islamic speculative thinker, Averroes, was a follower of the Greek Aristotle.
After the deaths of these men there was almost no development in philosophy, mathematics or biology in the Islamic world. If Islamic civilization was so incredibly advanced, why did it make no discernible progress in the arts and sciences after 1200?
(3) The fact is that Persia and Greece were incredibly wealthy and full of learning, but that they were soft from long years of peace and lacked the will to resist the invader. Islam militarily captured almost all the wealth of those two vast empires while Europe was still recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Europe did not have the benefit of Islam's incredible wealth and military might, yet in the period between 1200-1600 Europe went from being a disorganized backwater with a tenth of Islam's population and a twelfth of its wealth to being the undisputed power of the world.
How?
Europeans, unlike Islam, did not abandon the insights of Averroes and Ibn Sina and Al-Khwarizmi but intensified and broadened the scope of their intellectual inquiry with each passing generation.
Islam's prominence in the early medieval world was not due to its own attainments, but to the spoils of war. Christendom's achievements starteed with borrowed materials, but soon became homegrown while Islam's achievements, also borrowed, were never replaced by native Islamic inquiry.
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