Have there been problems in this University with Muslim students demanding sex-segregation, Muslim only classes, discrimination against Jewish and Christian students etc? I have heard that reactionary demands from Muslim extremist students have been problems elsewhere.

Also, the debate about so called 'Muslim' dress is incomplete. People should be allowed to choose what they wear, but within certain limits, and arguing that the veil is a religious requirement is nonsense - it appears nowhere in the Koran and was invented in the mid to late 1970s by a radical Iranian cleric.

...but I was wrong. The Bund lives on in the Netherlands. The burghers who founded the United Province to throw off the yoke of religious oppression imposed by their Spanis rulers will be spinning in their graves.

Perhaps we should insit that dutch people living in the UK should only eat cheese with some flavour and ban their stupid hats.

Researcher,

While it is true that the word "veil" is not used anywhere in the Qur'an several aya make it clear that a women should dress in a way which only leaves her face hands and feet visible. Sura 35 stipulates that wives of the Prophet(SAW) should also obscure their faces when in public. Different Schools of jurisprudence interpret the dress requirements in different ways, but adherents of the Hanbali School recommend that all women wear a veil (niqab) as the example set by the Prophet's wives (SAW) should be followed.

"People should be allowed to choose what they wear, but within certain limits"

Nice definition of freedom there! Free expression except for Muslims, is that it?

The main post here would boggle my mind, except this sort of oppression in the name of liberty is becoming all too frequent. We need to protest! You can't defend freedom by banning people from making choices (and certainly not by forcing eye contact, what sort of madness is that?)

You wrote:

"Nice definition of freedom there! Free expression except for Muslims, is that it?"

OK, is anything acceptable? Anything?

1) Teachers attending school every day in full SS uniform
2) Paramedics wearing T-Shirts that say 'Rape a Muslim for Jesus'
3) Students taking classes wearing Klan hoods

A Klan hood or an nazi uniform - it's just a bit of cloth! What's all the fuss about?

If the University in Holland is considered part of the state, religion should be excluded. There is no place for out dated repressive cults like Islam, Christianity and Voodoo in state institutions.

If not, the University is a private insititution and the Islamists, and their fellow social reactionary bullies, can take their brand of sexist, homophobic, intolerant, racist trouble making somewhere else.

I'm sorry but that's well out of order.

Take a good look at what you're saying, you're equating Muslims (all Muslims, our friends, neighbours, colleagues, roughly a quarter of the world's population) with tiny genocidal fascist groups like the KKK or SS. What's happened to your humanity?

Banning headscarves doesn't lead to integration but segregation. Relatively few Muslim women will take off the scarves and continue at state schools, more will transfer out to private schools where they aren't told what (not) to wear. The long-term consequences of different faith/ethnic groups attending different schools are bad: just look at the Bradford riots a couple of years ago.

There is nothing (0, zero, nil, nada) AT ALL in Sura 35 (al-Fatir, 'The Creator') about coverings of any kind, or anything related to rules of dress. Did you mean Sura 33 (al-Ahzab, The Confederates) which mentions the wives of the prophet (al-Fatir doesn't - at all)?

BUT!! There's nothing there that relates to coverings either. That's because there is NOTHING IN THE KORAN ANYWHERE that requires women to cover their heads or faces. It was invented by an Iranian cleric in the 1970s as a method of misogynistic repression. It is not Islamic.

Please quote the relevant sections, if you believe there is ANYTHING in the Koran about covering the head, or the face. Or you could just admit that you're wrong, and save yourself the embarassment.

33 or 35 you are probably right. When I posted in response to your ill informed rant I did so from memory as I wasn't in a position to refer to my own copy of the Qur'an. Unlike the salafis and wahabis of Saudi Arabia most muslims agree that the relogious practices of Islam are derived not only from the Qur'an but also from the Sunna, that is the traditional sayings of the Prophet (SAW). These have been passed down over 14 centuries, transmitted by throught the lineage of traditional scholars. These all agree that from the time of the earliest muslims it has been a requirement that women and men adhere to a certain code of dress - they should wear clothes which obscure the shape of the body and women should also cover their hair. How this has been put into practice has always been a matter of both culture and fashion.

It might have been possible to take you seriously had you not made the rediculous assertion that hilab was invented by Iranian clerics in the 1970s I may have been tempted to take you seriously. I suggest you invest some money in a critical appraisal course, duruing which you will be taught that not everything you read in the internet is true aand how to distinguish fact from opinion and the obviously absurd.

If you have any verifiable information relating to the hijab being widely adopted a significant time before the rise of the Islamist totalitarian regime in Iran, be my guest - I would be genuinely interested to see it, as my own enquiries have drawn blanks at every turn - everywhere I see a consensus that the hijab was invented in the 1970s, by either a Lebanese or an Iranian cleric. If you know different, let me know - like much about Islam, the history of the hijab appears to have been desperately obfuscated to disguise its true origins. It makes a big difference - did the hijab originate as an expression of solidarity with a brutal Islamist fascist regime, or as an expression of meek, submissive piety to Muslim men?