Austria’s parliament passed a new law on Thursday banning children from wearing headscarves in primary schools in what the country’s Islamic community called an a “dark day for Austrian democracy.”
The ban will prevent children up to the age of 10 from “covering their heads”, meaning either most or all of one’s hair, for “religious or ideological reasons” in school.
Prior to the passage of the law, the parliamentary committee that debated the bill clarified that both the kippah and Sikh patka are exempt from the so-called headscarf ban.
The coalition parties, including the far-right Freedom Party, argue the headscarf is a symbol of political Islam and the repression of women and that the ban will protect children and promote integration.
But from the indexing of child benefit and the proposed reduction in the minimum wage paid to asylum seekers to €1.50 per hour, the headscarf ban fits into a pattern of legislation and political rhetoric that targets immigrants, asylum seekers, and Austria’s Muslim population.
It also follows the so-called burka ban, passed by the previous grand coalition government in October 2017, as a law curtailing expressions of Muslim identity in public spaces.
Ümit Vural, President of the Islamic Religious Authority of Austria, is worried that the ban will lead to the “segregation of and discrimination against Muslim girls” in primary schools.
Canan Yasar of Muslim Youth Austria, meanwhile, argues that it is not “for governments or parliaments to interpret religion or religious practice. It is a dangerous violation of the separation of religion and state.”
On this point, Austria’s Muslims could have an ally in the country’s Jewish community. A senior official of the Jewish Community of Vienna (IKG) told the JC that, in principle, they oppose any ban that would impose restrictions on religious freedom.
Still, the IKG has not made an official statement about the headscarf ban and has no plans to do so. From their point of view, it is not in their interest to intervene in a debate that is far from settled — namely, whether it is indeed a religious obligation for primary school-aged Muslim girls to wear the headscarf at all.
Rather, the community has had to use its political capital to fight its own battles against the Freedom Party including on matters of religious liberty. In the state of Lower Austria, for example, the far-right last year proposed establishing a registry for those who wished to purchase kosher meat.
The ongoing European election campaign has also seen an uptick in extreme-right activity including Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache’s use of the word Bevölkerungsaustausch (“population replacement”), which bears resemblance to the Nazi-era term Umvolkung, or ethnic replacement.
It is also unclear that the headscarf ban will ever be implemented at all. Mr Vural said on Thursday that he wants to challenge the law in the Austrian courts.
Since it passed with only a simple majority, rather than the two-thirds required to pass bills that concern constitutional changes on civil liberties, and because the headscarf ban “affects several fundamental and basic rights of the Muslim faith”, Mr Vural wants to “bring this discriminatory law before the Constitutional Court,” he said.
