The Washington Post has an Op-Ed regarding Harvard’s seemingly controversial policy of reserving a few hours at a gym for women so that Muslim women can doff their headscarves and work out. Women-only gym hours do not seem strange to me, if I remember correctly, my undergrad school had women-only hours at the swimming pools. That there’s any debate at all probably has to do with advocacy by Muslim women at Harvard for these gym hours. And that’s probably what is bothersome to opponents, why the special treatment for Muslim women? Universities have an obligation to make special accommodations for all its students as long as those accommodations do not become an undue burden for their fellow students. I agree with the WashPost columnist that in this case this is a reasonable accommodation. Devout Muslim women have every right to a healthy life-style. It would be unfair to systematically bar them from gyms. Granted, I have hijab wearing friends who still run NYC marathons and hit the gym daily. But it must be nice for these observant women to let their hair down every once in a while. Imagine what it would feel like to think that going to the school gym is never an option.

The controversy regarding playing the call to prayer on the quad during Islam Awareness Week is ludicrous, seeing that church bells are a fact of life, and have been for centuries, on Sundays at most universities with chapels.

I do think America is far ahead of Europe in treating religious minorities with respect by granting them rights to practice freely in public. However, it is also true that it is rare to run into a full-burqa clad woman in the streets of New York. To my knowledge there hasn’t been any problems with niqab wearers as there have been in England either, precisely because Muslim women in the US mostly limit their observance to the head scarf. Would it be correct to say that Muslims in the US are generally more moderate than in Europe?

Maybe I spoke too soon, here’s another article from yesterday’s NYT on a supposed trend of homeschooling Muslim children. The article makes an interesting distinction between converts and immigrants, arguing that immigrants are less likely to home school children than converts, seeing that the US educational system is a major draw in immigration in the first place.  I’ll leave you to consider a disturbing excerpt:

In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.

Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.

“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.

Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.

As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

…

Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

Thus, she is raising the crucial issue, who is in charge of the schooling for these children? What are their qualifications? And what role is the state government playing in ensuring that these children are properly educated? We certainly hear about the homeschooling success stories, but what percentage of homeschooled Muslim children actually end up going to college?