Accommodations

Earlier this week there was a story of American public schools acceding to requests by Muslim students for special accommodations for their religious practices:

Some public schools and universities are granting Muslim requests for prayer times, prayer rooms and ritual foot baths, prompting a debate on whether Islam is being given preferential treatment over other religions.

The University of Michigan at Dearborn is planning to build foot baths for Muslim students who wash their feet before prayer. An elementary school in San Diego created an extra recess period for Muslim pupils to pray.

At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., Muslim students using a “meditation space” laid out Muslim prayer rugs and separated men and women in accordance with their Islamic beliefs.

Critics see a double standard and an organized attempt to push public conformance with Islamic law.

“What (school officials) are doing … is to give Muslim students religious benefits that they do not give any other religion right now,” says Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center, an advocacy group for Christians.

There was also a story about Muslim factory workers being harassed or fired for taking prayer breaks:

Donald Selzer, an attorney for Greeley, Colo.-based Swift, said only three Somali workers were fired for reasons relating to the issue, and that it was for walking off the line without permission, not for praying.

Unscheduled breaks can force unplanned shutdowns of lines, Selzer said.

“That is a significant number of employees, and there is not much of a way to accommodate that consistent with keeping the production online,” he said.

The complaint reprises issues that boiled over in May, when 120 Somali workers abruptly quit for similar reasons. About 70 returned a week later, but union officials worried the issue would resurface through the late spring as sunset came later in the evening shift.

“For three days it was all good and we were praying; there was no hassle, no interference, nothing at all,” said Ali Schire, 30, who said he returned to the plant but was later fired for trying to pray.

“All of a sudden after three days it just all got loose, and they were suspending people, they were firing people,” Schire said through an interpreter. “Some of the people even had to give up praying at all for fear of being fired.”

Said Selzer: “These people are absolutely entitled to pray, and they should not be interfered with for doing so. But on the other hand, the only situations that I’ve been made aware of are people that walk off the job without permission, and that’s a different kind of an issue.”

Dan Hoppes, president of Local 22 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said he had not heard of many Somali workers being fired or harassed since May. Prayer breaks are not in the contract, he said, but he hopes to revisit the issue in negotiations in 2010.

Today there’s a story of three “Arab princesses” refusing to sit near men with whom they were not acquainted on a commercial airliner:

Three Arab princesses were thrown off a packed British Airways flight after refusing to sit next to male passengers they didn’t know.

The dispute – in which the three princesses from the ultra-conservative Qatar royal family demanded segregated seating – left the London-bound plane delayed on a baking Italian runway for nearly three hours.

Furious passengers whistled and clapped as the row intensified before the captain eventually ordered the women to be escorted off the plane.

The princesses, wearing traditional Arab dress, were returning from a day’s shopping in Milan. They arrived at the city’s Linate airport and boarded Heathrow-bound flight BA 563, which was due to take off at 4pm on Thursday.

The women, all relatives of the oil-rich emir of Qatar, Bader Bin Khalifa Al Thani, were booked into business class in a party of eight which included the emir and an entourage of cooks, servants and other staff.

After passengers had fastened their seat-belts and the plane had taxied on to the runway, two male passengers in the entourage got up to protest about where the women were sitting.

According to the customs of Qatar and other Gulf states, women are not allowed to mix with men who are not relatives.

There’s a common thread running through these stories. In each Muslims are asking for accommodatations beyond those accorded to non-Muslims to satisfy their religious or, possibly, cultural requirements.

I’ve been pretty consistent in my take on such things in repeated posts. I think that both hosts and guests have obligations. Hosts have an obligation to take reasonable actions to ensure the comfort of their guests; guests have an obligation to respect the customs of their hosts. “Si fueris Romae…”. And I think that such things apply just as much to Americans travelling and living abroad as they do to non-Americans here.

I have no problem with private companies making special accommodations to satisfy the needs of their Muslim employees but I think it’s foolish and presumptuous for employees to assume that employers will do so absent some pre-existing agreement. It will be interesting to see how far non-Muslim union members will be willing to go to satisfy their Muslim union brethren.

I find the situation with the Somali workers somewhat puzzling. Are there no assembly lines in Somalia? If there are how are they handled? Do the lines shut down to accommodate times for prayer? I think it’s more than likely that this was these workers first exposure to assembly line work, that their wishes in this matter would be no more respected in Somalia than they were in this story (maybe even less so), and that they were trying the boundaries—an activity I find simultaneously childish and arrogant. Perhaps some person better-informed than I would care to comment.

As to special accommodations in public schools, again, I have no problems with schools making accommodations for the religious requirements of their students so long as all religions are treated with equal consideration but that hasn’t been the trend in the way the courts have handled these sorts of matters over the period of the last forty years or so. My understanding is that the courts have generally ruled that such accommodations were unconstitutional.

It will be interesting to see how the ACLU, which has been a champion of the latter view for quite some time, will react. Will they be willing to oppose a minority asking for special treatment? Or will they demonstrate that they’re no respecters of civil liberties, merely anti-Christian?

I found the last case, that of the Qatari aristocrats, particularly baffling. Surely they were aware of the Western customs in these matters and the practices of the airlines. They are no secret. Couldn’t they have made the necessary arrangements beforehand? This strikes me as mau-mauing, pure and simple.

One often reads of polls suggesting that the Muslims’ opinions of America and Americans are worsening. I’m sure that there are trends in Amercans’ opinions of Muslims, too, and boorish, arrogant, or childish behavior probably won’t improve those much.

11 comments… add one
  • I’m closer to the French on this: we have a secular standard, the religious accommodate to that, not the other way around. Do Mormons on a plane demand to be separated from drinkers? Do Jews insist that everyone eat kosher? Do Hindus have the right to demand that the traditional airline choice be educed to chicken and . . . nothing?

  • As I tried to suggest gently in the post, I think a lot of this is street theater and I also think it’s irresponsible.

  • The Qatari thing particularly. Like they couldn’t afford to charter a jet?

  • That was my precise reaction. Note, too, that the report says that male members of the party complained.

  • A Qatari Emir doesn’t own a private jet ? The government of Qatar owns no airplanes ? As Michael said, nothing was available for charter ?

    If they cannot minimally adjust to Western customs for the duration of a weekend jaunt – and this is a hoot considering the jetsetting Gulf elite that populate European beaches and nightclubs – go shop in Dubai instead.

  • As noted above, Mark, I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t theater—deliberate provocation.

    In answer to your question, there’s more status in shopping in London than in shopping in Dubai.

  • Having just taken relatives to Newark, I can tell you tha Qatar now has its own airline. They needn’t have hired a private jet, their own country is now aggressively marketing its own airline! (Which, by the way, flies to many desirable locations, though not, apparently, Tel Aviv.)

  • Roy Lofquist Link

    I spent two years in the Middle East and Africa (Turkey, Libya, Pakistan, Kenya, Madagascar) in the early 1960’s. I neither saw nor heard of anything like an assembly line. Everything there is “hecho a mano”. Organization is not their strong suit.

  • Fletcher Christian Link

    No concessions to the barbarians. NONE. None at all – that is the correct response to this nonsense.

    “This is our country. This is the way we do things here, and we like it that way. If you don’t like it, the airport is over there.”

  • Muslims Against Sharia denounce the decision by the Indianapolis International Airport to install footbaths. The controversy will further alienate the non-Muslim population. Footbaths will be used as urinals, which will provoke tensions, and more importantly, installing religious ritualistic devices on public property clearly violates the separation of Church and State.

    That’s one small step for Islamists towards Islamization of the West, one giant leap for Americans towards Dhimmitude.

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