After about a year of consultation, the Greens parliamentary parliamentary group spoke out against a corresponding project by its coalition partners CDU and FDP, its university political Lasse Petersdotter told German daily Die Welt.
The Greens state chairwoman Ann-Kathrin Tranziska justified the decision of her party with the reference to religious freedom. “A cosmopolitan and rule-of-law society is characterized by the fact that religious feelings can be worn or dispensed with.” Women are not helped if they are excluded from education, she argued.
The CDU expressed its lack of understanding of the attitude of the Greens. The full veil is “not to be reconciled with our idea of living together” and does not correspond to the notion of freedom of science, emphasized the education policy spokesman for the CDU parliamentary group, Tobias von der Heide.
In the coming week, the topic will again be the subject of the coalition’s internal deliberations. Minister of Education Karin Prien (CDU) insisted that a legal regulation on the question “is imperative”.
The background to the debate was a case at the University of Kiel. At the beginning of last year, a student had appeared in classes after her conversion to Islam, fully veiled. The university management imposed a ban on concealment and asked the state parliament for legal protection of their decision.
In the meantime, the university and the convert agreed that she would have to lift her veil from a woman before an exam so that her identity could be established. In return, she can continue her studies.
In the dispute over the ban on veils at Christian Albrechts University, the Islamic convert also counted on support from the Salafist scene. The Federal Islamic Union supported the Kiel student Katharina K. with lawyers and paid for them as well, reported Spiegel Online last year.
On its homepage, the organization advocated, among other things, “respecting Islamic clothing regulations in schools and authorities” and “permitting the loudspeaker prayer call”. The association also combats headscarf bans in the public service.
In fact, club president Dennis Rathkamp compared the Islamic face veil to the protective clothing of medical courses. So “mouth and head protection in medicine and dentistry were part of the general examination and teaching process”.
The approximately 220 signatories of an open letter to the management of Kiel University follow the same ridiculous argument. In the letter, lecturers, academic staff and students dissociated themselves from the specifications of the university management.
They also criticized the fact that the regulation, which stipulates the expression of facial expressions, discriminated against people who are unable to “recognize or use facial expressions”. These included autistic people or physically disabled people. For the latter sadly, however, this inability has never been a choice.
The constitutional protection of the state of Lower Saxony, the domestic inteligence service, has linked the main actors of the Federal Islamic Union to political Salafism, as can be seen from a small request from the FDP in October 2019.
The Kiel defended the Salafist organisation. There was a discrepancy between what the general public understood by the “demonized term Salafism and what Muslims understood by it,” she told the regional daily Kieler Nachrichten.