Integrating Islam Into the West

TW: What to do when parents object to liberal democracy? Some folks like the concept of managing schools locally with minimal federal or outside participation. What happens though if the locals wish to create an environment which rebukes some of our most cherished ideals? I suppose here the folks below would be shunted off to private schools with a religious orientation.

From Economist:
"n recent years, a growing number of schools in Antwerp...have banned outright the wearing of Muslim veils and headscarves by female pupils. Karin Heremans, headmistress of the Antwerp Atheneum (a prestigious sort of secondary/high school) tried another approach. Ms Heremans is described in the local press as a champion of cultural diversity in the school system, who fought for nine years for the right of her pupils to wear headscarves if they wished. She wanted her state school to be a place of “inclusive neutrality”, in which religions are not excluded from the curriculum but “cohabit” with it. She took seriously the idea of Antwerp as a diverse city, which it certainly is: a large and growing Muslim community co-exists with a smaller but highly visible Hassidic community, a fairly radicalised nationalist Flemish white population and a rather tolerant, intellectual bourgeoisie.

...Alas, as her school became a rare place where veils were permitted, in addition to girls taking refuge in her liberal policies came girls from families dominated by radical Islamism. Instead of being a beacon of tolerance, her school became a “ghetto” in the words of one supporter. The proportion of headscarf-wearing girls went from 50% to 80% in three years, and girls who did not wear scarves found themselves under stronger and stronger pressure to cover up. The school found itself “targeted” by Islamist hardliners who began questioning certain lessons, school excursions, and trying to block the organisation of mixed gender parents’ meetings,

...Finally, when term began this month, she banned the headscarf. She described this as a “difficult and frustrating” decision.

...It is a bad idea to draw broad conclusions from a single case. By instinct, I am strongly secularist, as it happens. I quail a bit at the French solution, ie, banning all headscarves in all schools, by law.

...I do not share the doomy predictions of the Eurabia crowd. Europeans are not sleep walking into the abandonment of western civilisation. They are trying to work out how to adapt to fast changing societies, and they have their eyes wide open. And societies have always evolved. Immigrants in previous centuries and decades have prompted remarkably similar fusses, and are now well integrated. Young Spanish women did not have much freedom in the villages of their native Andalucia, 50 years ago.

Yet the arrival of traditional, pious immigrants in Europe does clearly test the liberal values that I hold dear. In short, how should a liberal, tolerant society protect the rights of a less liberal minority in its midst? Anyone with a quick answer to that one, I would suggest, is a fraud or a demagogue."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/09/muslim_headscarves_the_controv.cfm