Denmark: Home Guard bans headscarves due to political pressures

Denmark: Home Guard bans headscarves due to political pressures


Update:

Following Lou's comment below, 180 Grader reports:

Sappho.dk reports that Maria Mawla wrote the following in the book "Muslimsk-dansk dagbog: 19 dagbøger fra Muhammed-krisen" (Muslim-Danish diary: 19 diaries from the Muhammad crisis):

"Call me a fundamentalist, but I put Islam above my own life and so-called democracy, we practice in Denmark. I refuse to be 'democratized', if democracy includes persecution and oppression of people of a certain religious denomination."

In book Mawla expressed anger that the Muhammed cartoons associate Muhammed with 'oppression, terrorism, misery and death, everything that our prophet fought against and in the end died for.'

She adds that people don't take a minute to understand the frustrations of Muslims - "We are not worth a minute", and that this conflict is not about freedom of speech or democracy, as Naser Khader and his beloved Democratic Denmark make it to be, but about respect and acceptance.


She also appeared on DR's show "Oraklerne" where young Muslim women discussed various issues of the day.

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Maria Mawla (27), was born in Lebanon and came to Denmark when she was four months old. She loves to break a pattern and show that Muslims woman are different than the headscarf they wear. She describes herself as a strictly practicing Muslim.

She says she dreams of being deployed at some point. She is Danish and also wants to contribute somewhere in the world. She is married to a Dane and her father-in-law is a former Home Guardsman, who was happy to hear of her decision.

The Home Guard removed their article, but it's still available on Google Archive.





The Home Guard was forced to publicly announce a ban on headscarves this weekend, after it emerged that a Muslim volunteer had carried out her training exercises wearing one.


Maria Mawla and her camouflage headscarf were featured in one of the Home Guard’s own news articles. That article has since been removed from the guard’s website.


Ulrik Kragh, MP for the Danish People’s Party and head of the Home Guard Committee, underscored that uniform guidelines have to be upheld and that Mawla will be expelled from the guard if she refuses to remove the headscarf while at the training camp.


Kragh that while he was pleased to see Muslims aking an interest in the Home Guard, headscarves are incompatible with official military approved uniforms.


‘It was an error that the woman in question was allowed to conduct her courses wearing a headscarf,’ he stated on the Home Guard website. ‘Uniform regulations apply to all guard members, primarily for security reasons.’


(more)


Source: Copenhagen Post (English)

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