Muslim girls must get in swim

GERMANY: Muslim girls must take part in school swimming lessons alongside boys because burkinis meet Islamic strictures governing modesty, the German constitutional court has ruled.

In a case brought by an 11-yearold from a Moroccan family, judges at Germany’s highest court said schools had a duty to promote ‘‘social behaviour’’ and that coeducational swimming was ‘‘not a particularly serious impairment of religious freedom’’.

The girl had refused to wear a burkini, a swimming garment designed to give full-body coverage for Muslim women, arguing it did not conform with Islam’s ethic of decency.

However, judges at the court in Karlsruhe ruled she had failed to ‘‘give a plausible explanation of why the burkini is not sufficient to preserve Islamic rules of clothing’’.

The ruling comes at a delicate time in Germany, amid debate about how best to integrate more than a million migrants, mostly from Islamic countries, who have arrived since the start of 2015.

At the Christian Democratic Union’s party conference this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to ban the wearing of full face-covering veils as she seeks to position herself as a defender of German values ahead of next year’s election.

The swimming case began more than four years ago when the girl, who lives with her parents in the Frankfurt area, withdrew from mixed swimming lessons on religious grounds and then objected when she received the lowest grade for the class.

She had argued her ‘‘body contours’’ would be visible when the burkini was wet.

Judges said other Muslim girls in her class wore the burkini without complaining their religious rights were infringed by the garment or having to swim near boys.

They agreed with the state court that ‘‘the textile material [of a burkini] made of synthetic fibres, even in the wet state, prevents a tight adhesion to the skin and a definition of the body contours’’.

They further found there were ‘‘no binding rules in Islam’’ to define appropriate clothing for swimming and that a burkini was sufficient to meet the general requirements regarding modesty of dress in the Koran. - The Times