Religion: Year In Review 2010

Church-State Issues

In July the Syrian government issued a ban against wearing the niqab, a face-covering Islamic veil, at both public and private universities. An official said that the order was intended to protect the country’s secular identity. In October, France’s Constitutional Council approved a newly enacted law that banned full-face veils in public while cautioning that it could not be enforced in places of worship. Although the law did not mention Islam, it had been promoted as a means of protecting women from being forced to wear such veils as burqas and niqabs. The resolution that had been passed by the French Parliament in May had declared that the ban was necessary “to ensure the protection of women who are subjected to violence and pressure,” although it did not specify the source of such pressure. Eleven European countries and 33 members of the European Parliament urged the European Court of Human Rights to overturn its ruling of November 2009 that banned the display of crucifixes in schools. The court had declared that such displays could be disturbing to non-Christian pupils and would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called the case “a great battle for freedom and for the identity of our Christian values.” The setting up of a cross in a public square outside Poland’s Presidential Palace in Warsaw in April shortly after Pres. Lech Kaczynski and other officials were killed in a plane crash in Russia stirred controversy, as did initial attempts to have it removed. Polish officials relocated the cross to the presidential palace chapel in September and later installed it permanently at a nearby church. A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in April assisted efforts to keep a cross erected as a war memorial in the Mojave National Preserve in California. In a 5–4 decision the court ruled that a federal judge had erred in striking down a federal law that authorized transfer of the land on which the cross sits to a private party. In the majority opinion the high court said, “The goal of avoiding governmental endorsement does not require eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm.”

In another 5–4 ruling, issued in June, the Supreme Court upheld a requirement at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that registered student organizations had to accept any student as a member or potential leader. The case involved an appeal by a campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society, which barred homosexuals and non-Christians from joining. U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled in April in Madison, Wis., that a federal law authorizing a National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional. The judge, who stayed her injunction pending appeals, said that by enacting the law “the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”

Indonesia’s Constitutional Court ruled in April that a 45-year-old law banning blasphemy was constitutional. The law allowed the attorney general’s office to ban religious groups that “distort” or “misrepresent” the country’s officially recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. In May the European Parliament adopted a resolution in Strasbourg, France, asserting that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were “often used to justify censorship, criminalization, persecution and, in certain cases, the murder of members of political, racial and religious minorities.” A week later three UN human rights investigators said that official discrimination in Pakistan against the Ahmadi sect of Islam had led to violent attacks against its adherents there. Human Rights Watch issued a report in New York in April urging the government of Senegal to act against Islamic schools that it said forced tens of thousands of children to beg and kept them in conditions “akin to slavery.” Although the government passed legislation in 2005 that outlawed forced begging, the report concluded that the authorities had failed to implement it.

A court in Uttar Pradesh, India, ruled in September that the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya would be split between Hindus and Muslims, with Hindus receiving two-thirds of the land, including a temple that had been built over the demolished dome, and one-third going to Muslims. The destruction of the mosque in 1992 by Hindu nationalists, who claimed that the spot was the birthplace of the deity Rama, led to riots in which about 2,000 people were killed. Farouk Hosni, Egypt’s minister of culture, announced in March that his government agency would restore the country’s 11 synagogues because it viewed Jewish sites as much a part of Egypt’s culture as mosques or churches. Britain’s Charity Commission granted charitable status to the Druid Network in October. The action gave the pagan group official recognition as a religion and entitled it to tax breaks, although leaders of the organization said that it did not earn enough revenue to benefit from the action. In Jerusalem in June the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate a state-funded ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls’ school led to a massive protest. Sephardic (of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean ancestry) parents complained that their daughters were being discriminated against by being kept separate from Ashkenazic (eastern and central European descent) students. Ashkenazic parents countered that the difference in ritual traditions rather than ethnicity was the reason for the separation. In Chicago in November a U.S. appeals court ruled that a 50-member group calling itself the Orthodox Bahaʾi Faith (OBF) could continue to use that name and Bahaʾi sacred symbols despite a challenge from the mainstream Bahaʾi organization. The appeals court struck down a 1966 court decision, which a justice called a “wrongheaded” attempt at resolving a religious dispute, against a previous splinter group. Bahaʾi faith, which claimed more than seven million members worldwide, had sought to prevent the OBF from using both the name Bahaʾi and traditional symbols that its adherents consider sacred.