Germany, Islam, and Education: Unveiling the Contested Meaning(s) of the Headscarf

Abstract

Few religious symbols have ignited such public and widespread debate as the headscarf; since the 1980s, controversies in the political, judicial, and educational realms have reached across the European continent. In Germany, the headscarf debate, or Kopftuchstreit, is intrinsically connected to the country’s notions of secularism as it applies specifically to teachers; teachers who wear headscarves are denied teaching jobs not only because they are civil servants and supposed to represent German culture and ideals but because their religious beliefs are seen as threatening and incongruent with the German value system. The German Kopftuchstreit centers on two defining court cases: in one, a naturalized German educator is denied the right to wear a headscarf in the classroom because the courts defined the headscarf as inherently political, while the other grants the native-born educator the right to her headscarf because it was not perceived as a threat to the students. By framing my examination of the current literature on these court cases through the lens of intersectionality, this chapter posits that female Muslim teachers who are not ethnic Germans experience multiplicative oppressions based on their ethnicity as it intersects with their gendered religious identity, which contribute to the differing verdicts in these otherwise very similar court cases. By identifying the structural elements contributing to the invisibility of female Muslim educators, this chapter seeks to disengage hegemonic educational practices while simultaneously engaging the intersectional identity of this population.