At the University of Hamburg, new rules leave it up to lecturers to decide whether the full face veil disrupts their teaching.
Complaints about students praying loudly in the library and flooding bathrooms to ritually wash their feet have forced the University of Hamburg to draw up a religious code of conduct, a first for a German university.
As many universities throughout the world grapple with how to accommodate an increasingly religiously diverse student body, a philosopher and a group of religious scholars at Hamburg have drawn up the rules for handling religion on campus.
The university’s executive board had received an increasing number of complaints about religious students “disturbing university life”, explained Dieter Lenzen, Hamburg’s president. “External Salafists” had been pressuring female Muslim students to wear traditional Islamic dress such as the veil, he said.
Asked which groups were causing the most difficulty, he said: “To date, there have been no complaints about Buddhist students, just a few about Christian students, but a great many about Muslim students.” [Times Higher Education] Read more
