balkan analysis.com
January 20, 2011
By Professor Kristen Ghodsee*
Editor’s note: In this new article, Balkanalysis.com contributor Dr. Kristen Ghodsee explores the intricacies of Bulgaria’s current debate on head scarves in schools.
The controversy over banning Islamic headscarves in public schools has, until now, largely focused on the situations in France and Turkey where secular governments are carefully trying to maintain a thick wall between church and state. In 2006 this controversy hit home in Bulgaria: the EU member state with the largest Muslim minority (estimated between 13-15%). Complaints regarding discrimination against Islamic religious symbols were filed with the Parliamentary Commission for Protection from Discrimination, the national body that deals with human rights violations. The Commission’s decisions in two key cases as to whether girls should be allowed to wear headscarves in schools have created a legal limbo wherein the state has abdicated its responsibility for interpreting the Bulgarian constitution. Instead, individual headmasters are now allowed to make their own policy regarding religious tolerance in public institutions.
In the first case, two high school students were forbidden to wear headscarves to the Karl Marx Professional Economics secondary school in the southern Bulgarian city of Smolyan. A heated national debate was ignited as two girls challenged a decision of their school’s headmaster. The girls claimed that their rights were violated because they wanted to obtain a secular education in economics while as devout Muslims also continue to wear Islamic headscarves in the classroom....more...
*Kristen Ghodsee is the John S. Osterweis Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, and has been conducting ethnographic research on Bulgaria for the last fourteen years. She is the author of two books on post-socialist Bulgaria; The Red Riviera (Duke University Press 2005), and Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press 2009), which won the 2010 Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Heldt Prize for best book in the field of Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women’s studies.
Professor Ghodsee’s forthcoming book, Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, will be published by Duke University Press in fall 2011)....more....
Professor Ghodsee’s forthcoming book, Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, will be published by Duke University Press in fall 2011)....more....
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