It does not violate the principle of equal treatment when Danish colleges prohibit their students from praying in the school’s areas. This is the principle decision of the Equal Treatment Board, which fell on 27 April 2017.
The background is that a Muslim student at the TEC educational institution in Frederiksberg, part of H.C. Ørsted Gymnasium, complained to the Equal Treatment Board after the school’s leadership in 2015 imposed a ban on “religious rituals”, including prayer, in the school’s areas.
Director of TEC, Lone Hansen, said after the decision to TV2: “I am satisfied that we have been upheld and that the board acknowledges that the purpose of our Rules of Procedure is to create security and ensure the diversity and spaciousness that we emphasize.” As a justification for the ban, she stated in March 2017: “As it is a private matter, we do not allow either to commit or enforce specific religious moral rules. And it also means that we do not allow rituals. Rituals are to some extent an attempt to show others that it is the right way to practice a religion.”
It sounds very much like the pseudo argument that was put forward earlier this year by the Social Democratic party, when they expressed their support for a bill from the Danish People’s Party for a total ban on Islamic prayer at the country’s educational institutions. With the encouragement of politicians and now confirmation from the authorities, Muslim students are prohibited from practicing a very fundamental element of their conviction in the name of “security”, “diversity” and “spaciousness”. The sudden urgent need to declare their institution as “religiously neutral” is, not surprisingly, only seen at in institutions with a significant proportion of Muslim students. The mere practice of Islam by these students is regarded with suspicion, without any basis in reality, and as a threat to security and order in the educational institutions, while the massive social pressure in these schools, which is quite obvious when it comes to sexualized and amoral behavior, is apparently considered a part of the healthy secular education, which schools willingly facilitate.
The enormous hypocrisy and unscrupulous suspicion of Muslims is unfortunately nothing new, but the limits are constantly pushed in the institutionalized effort to forcibly assimilate the Muslims in this country, especially the Muslim youth. On the other hand, the increasing use of bans and coercion demonstrates that decades of attempting to strip young Muslims of their Islamic identity and values have failed. And the latest desperate measures will be no exception.
From the part of the leaderships of the educational institutions, they could at least maintain the last shred of credibility and say explicitly to Muslim students: “Throw away your Islam at the doorstep of the school!”
While the myth of Danish openness and tolerance is buried deeply, we urge our young Muslim brothers and sisters to safeguard their Islamic identity and firmly hold on to their duty to perform daily prayers and to comply with their other Islamic obligations.
Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Scandinavia
Wednesday, 06th Sha’ban 1438 AH
03/05/2017 CE
No.: 03/1438