Today I was scrolling through twitter when I stumbled upon a post by @theGrio. theGrio.com is a news website that "is a community devoted to perspectives that affect and reflect the African-American community.", According to their twitter bio. The tweet said "A teacher joined students bullying a Muslim student and caught on tape pulling her hijab off to see her "pretty hair:"," and had an accompanying link to their website with a video from news channel 4 in Nashville. The video was recorded in a classroom and circulated through social media like snapchat and twitter. The video showed a student having their hijab being taken off by students while she covered her face, and other students were playing with her hair. The teacher is now on suspension without pay. In this weeks reading by the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Ā second major premise states: "One of the most troubling and urgent consequences of religious illiteracy is that it often fuels prejudice and antagonism, thereby hindering efforts aimed at promoting respect for diversity, peaceful coexistence, and cooperative endeavors in local, national, and global arenas" (pg 5). I believe that the students were very interested in seeing the students hair, as they had never seen it before, but their religious illiteracy did not allow them to realize that what they were doing is wrong. From my understanding, hijab is worn when women are around men who are not close relatives, and is viewed by some as a way of having people focus on their inner qualities rather than their external characteristics. This action was astonishing to me, but also not that unpredictable. Another idea from the AAR was, "One example of the negative consequences of religious illiteracy is that...in countries where Muslims are in the minority is the widespread association of Islam with terrorism and the consequent justification of individual hate crimes against those perceived to be Muslim." (pg 5-6). While this individual act was not violent, it is still seen as disrespectful to the Muslim faith and could have been solved by a simple conversation about the importance of the hijab in the classroom.
Posted by: Randy S













