LEGALITY OF HEADSCARF BAN SPURS DEBATE IN KYRGYZSTAN

Details
Local school officials and higher government authorities in the Jalal-Abad region in southwestern Kyrgyzstan are locking heads over the legality of the ban on the wearing of the hijab, a headscarf worn by Muslim women to cover their heads and neck.
 I believe it is unacceptable to attend lessons at a secular school wearing the hijab. We find ways to make the schoolgirls remove their headscarves, said Rozia Tokhtorieva, head teacher at a school in the Distuk Nook district.

Tokhtorieva cited an incident when six pupils were put under pressure to take off their hijabs because they are children of members of the Hizb-ut Tahrir, an Islamist party with violently anti-democratic and anti-Semitic views and strongly opposed to core human rights such as religious freedom.

The same situation occurred in the town of Osh in the southern part of the country, where local officials cited concern over the Hizb-ut Tahrir as the reason for the headscarf ban.

In January this year, the Jalal-Abad City Education Department adopted a resolution introducing a single school uniform. The resolution, which was sent to the head teachers, recommended that schoolgirls should not be admitted to lessons wearing the hijab. Sharifa Zhorobaeva, head of the Department for the Protection of Childrens Rights at the citys Education Department argues, If today we allow them to go around in headscarves, there is a concern that tomorrow they will ask permission to go around in paranjas. The paranjas is a full-length robe designed to completely hide the outline of a womans body.

Chyrnasg Dooronov, head of the regional Education Administration, believes the resolution was hasty and ill-conceived because draft regulations have to be approved by the regional Justice Administration. He however thinks the practicality of wearing hijabs in school is debatable. Often, girls just think about their headscarves during lessons, and that stops them from listening to what the teacher is saying, he said.

In addition, Dooronov noted that in some cases, the parents themselves have denied their childrens rights under the law. In Kyrgzstan, citizens who reach the age of 12 have the right to make their own decisions. There have been cases where the schoolgirls themselves have been unwilling to wear the hijab, as they have felt embarrassed in front of their contemporaries, but have been made to do so by their parents, he said.

On the other hand, Mamasaly Mamotov, deputy head of Jalal-Abad city Education Department, believes the resolution is lawful because Kyrgzstan is a secular state. A school is not a mosque and pupils need to understand this. However, he admitted that the school could only put psychological pressure on parents of pupils wearing headscarves since We cannot order schoolchildren to remove their hijabs.

Meanwhile, Gulnara Nurieva, head of the Committee for the Defence of Muslim Women, said people in Central Asia still have a Soviet outlook, where they follow orders from above rather than the law. Therefore, for head teachers, a recommendation from the city Education Department is equivalent to an instruction, which they follow without wondering whether it is lawful or not.

She however confirmed that bans on schoolgirls wearing the hijab were in place even before the latest incidents, and that bans occur throughout southern Kyrgzstan.

Source: Rotar, Igor. Kyrgzstan: pressure against schoolgirls wearing hijabs, as posted in Forum 18 News Service on April 11, 2006 at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=757>.