Many Muslim women feel pressured to change their appearance to get a job. Employers must question their own assumptions

For many Muslim women, the struggle is to downplay ethnic or religious difference in order to find acceptance – and employment. A recent parliamentary report found that Muslim women often feel pressured to change their appearance or anglicise their name in order to access employment.

Often, it is the “triple paralysis” of being a woman, migrant, or perceived as such, and Muslim. While in some cases, the barriers are cultural, linguistic or educational, research suggests that 25% of the ethnic minority unemployment rate for both men and women could be explained by prejudice and racial discrimination.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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Turkey has lifted a ban on female students wearing headscarves in schools providing religious education, in a move drawing criticism from secularists who see it as fresh evidence of the government pushing an Islamic agenda.

Education has been one of the main battlegrounds between religious conservatives, who form the bedrock of support for the AK party of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and secular opponents who accuse him of imposing Islamic values by stealth.

Under the latest regulation announced on Tuesday, which takes effect in the 2013/2014 academic year, pupils at regular schools will also be able to wear headscarves in Qur’an lessons.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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The number of racist acts against Muslims in France is increasing “alarmingly”, according to the country’s National Observatory of Islamophobia, whose president has called for overt Islamophobia to be taken as seriously as anti-Semitism, which is a criminal offence in France.

According to a report by the Observatory, which claims to fight “all forms of racism and xenophobia”, “in 2011 the number [of anti-Muslim attacks] was up 34% on the previous year … but what is happening in 2012 is alarming. Between January and the end of October there were 175 reported Islamophobic acts, a 42% increase compared with the same period in 2011.”   »»» FRANCE 24

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A court in Pakistan has dropped a controversial blasphemy case against a Christian girl accused by her neighbour of burning pages from the Koran.

Her arrest followed accusations by a Muslim cleric who is now facing allegations that he planted evidence.

Rimsha, who doctors said had a younger mental age than her 14 years, was arrested in August in a Christian area of the capital, Islamabad, after a furious crowd demanded she be punished.

Following an outcry over the case, she was released on bail in September – an extremely rare move in blasphemy cases.

At Tuesday’s hearing, all charges against her were thrown out by the Islamabad High Court for lack of evidence, lawyers said.

The case against the Muslim cleric accused of framing her will proceed, say local police. He will be tried for making a false accusation.    »»» BBC News

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Saudi judges who enforce sharia (Islamic law) have condemned what they see as “the stench of Western ideas” in sweeping legal reforms pushed by King Abdullah, underscoring friction between government modernizers and religious hardliners.

In a letter to Justice Minister Mohammed al-Issa seen by Reuters, eight judges complained about foreign trainers who shave their beards contrary to purist Islam, the minister’s meetings with diplomats of “infidel” states and plans to let women practice as lawyers.

The authenticity of the letter, which did not directly criticize either the king or Issa, was confirmed by a source in the Justice Ministry who said it was sent late last month.

Saudi lawyers and political analysts say the judicial reforms announced by King Abdullah in 2007 and supported by Issa are needed to make the legal system more efficient and modern.   »»» Reuters

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Leading bishops have voiced alarm at a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment in France and admitted that hardening attitudes within the Roman Catholic church are fuelling the trend.

In comments that will add to pressure on President Francois Hollande to respond to demands from France’s large Muslim community to speak out on the issue, the Bishop of Angouleme, Claude Dagens, said he was profoundly concerned by recent developments.

“It is with much pain that I notice the emergence of a Catholic Islamophobia, in the same way that there has been a Catholic anti-semitism for centuries,” Dagens told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of an assembly of French bishops here.   »»» iafrica.com

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A court in southern Egypt has convicted a teacher of child abuse and given her a six-month suspended sentence after she cut the hair of two schoolgirls for not wearing the Muslim headscarf.

The incident last month in the village of Qurna sparked criticism from rights groups and local officials. The case falls into a broader debate in Egypt over personal and religious freedoms amid the rise of Islamist political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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More than 10,000 ultraconservative Muslims have demonstrated in central Cairo to demand that Egypt’s new constitution be based on the rulings of Islamic law, in the latest tussle over the role of religion in the country’s future.

The rally was called for by a number of minority Salafi groups, but neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the main Salafist Al-Nour party backed the protest.

The writing of the constitution has been fraught with controversy since last year’s political uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak and ushered in the rise of formerly repressed Islamists to power.

But Islamists themselves are not in agreement over the interpretation of Islamic law and its place in the document.

Demonstrators in Tahrir Square demanded on Friday that the panel tasked with writing the constitution override liberal and secular objections and include language that could see religious scholars influencing legislation.   »»» Al Jazeera English

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An Egyptian-American man behind the inflammatory film “Innocence of Muslims” on Wednesday was sentenced to one year in federal prison after admitting to violating the terms of his probation from a 2010 bank fraud case.

Mark Basseley Youssef also was ordered to serve four years of supervised release after his prison term. The sentencing by Judge Christina Snyder came in a Los Angeles federal court after a hearing Wednesday in which Youssef admitted using an alias, which prosecutors said violated his probation.

The amateur filmmaker from Cerritos, California, was identified in initial news accounts in September as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the name used in the bank fraud case. But the probation revocation case lists the defendant as Mark Basseley Youssef, which the filmmaker stated in court is his legal name.

Youssef garnered international attention following protests against the “Innocence of Muslims” film throughout the Muslim world. The amateurish film portrays the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer, buffoon, ruthless killer and child molester. Islam categorically forbids any depictions of Mohammed, and blasphemy is an incendiary taboo in the Muslim world.   »»» CNN.com

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Burma’s president, Thein Sein, has admitted his country’s Rohingya Muslim population has been subjected to an unprecedented wave of ethnic violence. Whole villages and large sections of towns have been destroyed.

Thein Sein’s admission follows release of shocking satellite images showing the scale of the destruction in one coastal town, where most – if not all – of the Muslim population appears to have been displaced and their homes wrecked.

The pictures, acquired by Human Rights Watch, show destruction to the town of Kyaukpyu on the country’s west coast. They reveal 14.4 hectares (35 acres) of destruction, in which some 811 buildings and houseboats have been destroyed.

According to Reuters, dozens of boats full of Rohingyas fled Kyaukpyu, an industrial zone important to China, and other recent areas of violence and were trying to reach overcrowded refugee camps around the state capital, Sittwe.

Some 3,000 Rohingyas were reported to have been blocked from reaching Sittwe by government forces and landed on a nearby island.

Rohingyas are officially stateless. The government, controlled by Buddhists, regards the estimated 800,000 Rohingyas in the country as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and not as one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups, and denies them citizenship. But many of those expelled from Kyaukpyu are not Rohingya but Muslims from the officially recognised Kaman minority, said Chris Lewa, director of the Rohingya advocacy group, Arakan Project. “It’s not just anti-Rohingya violence any more, it’s anti-Muslim,” Lewa said.   »»» The Observer

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