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“Actually, no one is neutral. Every teacher stands in front of a class with his or her own convictions.”

Mama, you are so wrong. In free societies, teachers strive to keep their convictions away from the front of the class, so that liberal, exploratory discourse can prevail.

This woman – who has lost her teaching job because she refuses to take off her hijab while in front of a room of students in Belgium – thinks God commands her to express her religious convictions, and model female modesty, at all times. Her conviction of this is so intense that she – unlike many Muslim women – would never think of removing her scarf for the duration of her classes. She would rather ruin her life than follow the law on this. The law is secular, and in this instance that doesn’t count.

Recall Boucar Diouf:

“How would an immigrant of Palestinian origin, contesting a conviction, feel in front of a judge wearing a kippah? Inversely, how would a young driver wearing a kippah feel faced with a policewoman wearing a hijab who just gave him a ticket?”

The same anxiety pertains in the free classroom (not of course in the parochial classroom, which is set up to proselytize). How free would a budding feminist in a middle school feel to talk about cultures that hide women under hijabs and heavy robes, and call for sex-restricted swimming and other forms of gender separation?

The hijab/thick body robe is a powerful symbol of submission. Impressionable young women shouldn’t be subjected to that symbolic power from a person of authority in the formal setting of the classroom.

Margaret Soltan, September 15, 2026 5:13AM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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2 Responses to ““Actually, no one is neutral. Every teacher stands in front of a class with his or her own convictions.””

  1. Stephen Karlson Says:

    That story might say more about Belgium as industrialized tribal society dealing with hard-to-assimilate immigrants than anything else.

    I’m contemplating a middle school teacher serving the general student population, rather than special ed, in the United States. Depending on what the background of that “budding feminist,” would such a student drive her teacher crazier asking questions about intersectionality and oppression or about the implicit male chauvinism of sharia? Moreover, remembering my own middle school days, I suspect there would be classmates cracking wise about Miss Anajoud’s babushka (the nastiest ones might put an adjective or two in front of “babushka”) and somehow a scolding from the vice principal would not make it stop.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    I doubt a typical middle schooler would yet be ruined by intersectional crap.

    And of course there’s nothing implicit about the woman-burial ceremony that is sharia law.

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