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 French Catholic Church warned Paris against banning burqa:
The French Catholic Church has warned Paris against banning
Muslim full-face veils. It said France must respect the rights
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Montreal:
After France, the niqab controversy has now hotted up in Canada,
with a Egyptian Muslim woman refusing to remove her veil in her
French language class in a local college.
When
the college and the provincial government asked her to remove the
veil, she opted to quit the class.
The
unidentified Egyptian woman, a mother of three who is a new
immigrant to Canada, has now filed a petition with the human rights
commission of Quebec province for violations of her religious
rights.
According to the principal of the college, CEGEP de Saint-Laurent,
they first accommodated the woman’s demands by allowing her to wear
the veil or niqab - which covers her from head to toes and allows
her to see only through a slit in her garment - when the first
session started in August.
The
woman was given the front seat in the class, with all male students
behind her. She was even allowed to make presentations from the rear
of the classroom with her back to the class which had three male and
17 female students.
Hostility grew one day when the woman asked male students to move
away from her. For one-on-one exercises, the woman would retreat to
a corner with her female instructor, the Globe and Mail newspaper
quoted college principal Paul-Emile Bourque as saying.
Things changed even more radically for the Muslim woman in the
second session which started in October as there was now no female
instructor and the entire class was supposed to sit around a
U-shaped table to converse and learn French pronunciation.
But
the Muslim woman opted to leave when the college and the provincial
immigration ministry insisted that she remove her veil.
The
principal said it is not possible to learn proper pronunciation if
the teacher can’t see the mouth of the student. “We tried certain
arrangements, but the demands just became too great,” said the
principal.
Justifying the steps by the college, Quebec immigration minister
Yolande James said, “We could not accept the objectives (of
integrating immigrant in society) be compromised and neither could
we accept to jeopardize the learning environment in the classroom.”
But
the Muslim woman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
Wednesday that she wore niqab because of male students in the class.
“I
have three kids, and now, I am very nervous, and they’re crying, and
I have quite a problem,” she said, adding that her religious freedom
has been violated by the authorities.
The
human rights panel will give its verdict later in the spring. Canada
has more than a million Muslims.
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