Author: Jean-Baptiste Piggin
Publication: Monsters and Critics
Date: November 4, 2006
URL: http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/article_1218224.php/German_deputy_threatened_after_attack_on_headscarves
A Muslim woman who sits in the German parliament
has been given a police bodyguard after she received death threats over her
public appeal for other Muslims to abandon headscarves.
Turkish-born Ekin Deligoz, 35, has occupied
a Greens party seat since 1998, the year after she was naturalized as a German,
but she only gained national attention last month when she assailed the scarf
as a symbol of backwardness and submission to male dominance.
That has turned her life upside down. After
anonymous hate calls by phone, Berlin assigned two federal policemen to protect
Deligoz at all times, even when she goes out for walks with her husband and
child or to do the shopping.
'It's the little things that have changed,'
she said wistfully this week.
Recalling the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker
Theo van Gogh by an Islamist, German authorities believe they cannot be too
careful. But Muslims in Germany worry that they are once again being portrayed
in the media as violent and incapable of debate.
German authorities estimate that 3.2 million
to 3.5 million of Germany's population of 82 million are of Muslim heritage,
the bulk of them with Turkish roots. Headscarves have been making a comeback
among younger Muslim women in recent years.
Deligoz, who in the federal parliamentary
directory describes herself as Muslim, is not the first German woman of Islamic
heritage to make bare heads and hair into a political issue.
Seyran Ates, a lawyer who campaigns against
headscarves and wife- beating, and Necla Kelek, a sociologist and author who
attacks Islam as inimical to women's interests, are representing similar views
on a federal advisory panel, the Islam Conference.
Politicians on both the right and the left
have sprung to Deligoz' defence this week.
Renate Kuenast, leader of the Greens caucus
in the Bundestag parliament, hosted a meeting Tuesday with Germany's five
national Islamic organizations. She said all affirmed that Deligoz had a right
to speak without threat of violence, even if they disagree with her.
'We are doing everything we can to ensure
her safety,' said Mounir Azzaoui, spokesman for one group, the National Council
of Muslims.
But the Islamic groups are adamant in their
defence of Islamic women who choose to wear scarves.
Ali Kizilkaya, chairman of the Islamic Council,
said after the meeting, 'wearing a head covering is a rule of our religion,'
adding that it was just as applicable in Western nations as in predominantly
Muslim ones.
Deligoz was born in Tokat, Turkey and moved
to southern Germany at the age of 8 with her mother, who brought her up.
She is married to a German and has a college
degree in public administration. After moving to Berlin, her husband opened
a cafe so he could mind their child during the daytime.
Her political focus in recent years has been
on the care of young children. She believes kindergartens should cost less,
so that children are not neglected when their mothers go out to work.
'I'm also concerned about what a child who
is 5 now can expect when they are 18,' she told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper
this week. Minority children needed to be taught better German, trained in
social behaviour and offered quality religious instruction.
She said instruction was too important to
leave to the Islamic societies to organize, and closed with her appeal for
Muslim girls and women to 'come into today's world and stop wearing the scarf.'
