Four years ago, I wrote about some school girls who refused to take communal swimming lessons in the Swiss city of Basel.  As a recap, from my previous article: In Basel, the families of five Muslim girls in elementary school were fined upon appeal to the Swiss Supreme Court for refusing that their daughters take […]

A year ago I wrote an article here on Muslimah Media Watch about Swiss headscarf bans and mentioned while sharing the link on Facebook that “It is 2015 and I am still writing about this.” It is now 2016, and I am STILL writing about Switzerland and populist fringe politicians trying to crap on Muslims […]

So the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino’s burqa ban (voted on since 2013) now involves fines for those who dare venture into Ticinese streets in burqas. I always joke that Switzerland is about twenty years behind its neighbors politically and here we are with Swizerland catching burqa ban fever. Things that get voted in Switzerland take […]

This week’s Friday Links were compiled by Eren and Samya.  Australia Racism and sexism is creating a toxic mix for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim women living in Australia, says Dr. Mehreen Faruqi as they have become the most likely targets of those retaliating and venting their anger in the aftermath of terrorist incidents. Dr. […]

Canada: MMW’s own Shireen Ahmed was on the CBC radio show The Current talking about what this week’s Canadian election results mean. One take away in Colorlines from the obsession with the niqab in the Canadian election is the #doimatternow campaign, which highlights the relative silence of the major candidates on the issues affecting a […]

  Le Temps is the French part of Switzerland’s newspaper of record, and one of the newspapers I read daily. I am a huge fan of their literature section, I have acquaintances who work there, and (full disclosure) I have even had the honor of being citied in that paper. So in other words, I […]

  So apparently Swiss politicians, lacking in creativity, have nothing better to do than copy what is going on in France. After the burqa ban in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino and some local issues in the German-speaking cantons, the latest part of Switzerland to jump on the “policing women’s clothing” bandwagon is the Canton […]

The optimism in my last post, at least for Switzerland, has been tempered with news coming out of Switzerland last week. In Switzerland (where niqab is already banned in Ticino since 2013), the German-speaking newspaper SonntagsBlick recently cited a survey saying that 62% of the Swiss population would be in favor of a burqa ban. […]

The Swiss federal government gives a lot of leeway to cantons, cities and even schools and professional associations (for those of you who remember the Sura al Shawk case, where the original decision of basketball association, Probasket, was allowed to stand by the courts) to decide their hijab policies on a case-by-case basis. So despite […]

Courts in the Swiss canton of Thurgau have overturned on appeal the cantonal school district’s decision to forbid two Albanian girls from wearing the headscarf to school.  The story begins in 2011, when two 14-year-old girls were forbidden from wearing their headscarves to classes.  What ensued was a two-year legal battle that saw the school’s […]