Richard Jeffrey Newman

Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Steven Green­house in The New York Times, that’s around 25% of the 3,386 reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion claims filed with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion (EEOC) in the year end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2009 – an awful lot con­sid­er­ing that Mus­lims make up less than 2% of the pop­u­la­tion in the United States. It’s also 20% more com­plaints than were filed by Mus­lims in 2008 and 60% more than in 2005.

The com­plaints allege harass­ment and other forms of dis­crim­i­na­tion that range from name-calling to the dis­rup­tion of prayer breaks. The EEOC has filed some pretty high pro­file law­suits in response to some of the com­plaints. In August, for exam­ple, the EEOC brought a suit against JBS Swift on behalf of 160 Somali immi­grants, claim­ing that “super­vi­sors and work­ers had cursed them for being Mus­lim; thrown blood, meat and bones at them; and inter­rupted their prayer breaks.” Other com­pa­nies against which the EEOC has filed include Aber­crom­bie & Fitch and a Four Points by Sher­a­ton Hotel.

Green­house ends his piece with a story about Imane Boud­lal, who is from Casablanca, Morocco. My own sense is that Ms. Boud­lal is being unrea­son­able, but I am curi­ous what oth­ers think – and let me also say here that any­one who tries in dis­cussing this post to use Boudlal’s story to under­cut the over­all point of this post or of Greenhouse’s arti­cle will be banned from this thread. Here are the last three paragraph’s of the article:

Imane Boud­lal, a 26-year-old from Casablanca, Morocco, had worked for two years as a host­ess at the Sto­ry­tellers Café at Dis­ney­land in Ana­heim, Calif., when she decided she would begin wear­ing her hijab at work dur­ing Ramadan last month. Ms. Boud­lal said her super­vi­sors told her that if she insisted on wear­ing the scarf, she could work either in back or at a tele­phone job. She refused and has not worked while the dis­pute continues.

Dis­ney offi­cials said her head scarf clashed with the restaurant’s early-1900s theme, and they pro­posed a period hat with some scarf that would fall over her ears. Ms. Boud­lal rejected that as un-Muslim. “They wanted to hide the fact that I looked Mus­lim,” she said.

Michael Grif­fin, a Dis­ney spokesman, said the company’s “cast mem­bers” agree to com­ply with its appear­ance guide­lines. “When cast mem­bers request excep­tions to our poli­cies for reli­gious rea­sons, we strive to make accom­mo­da­tions,” he said, adding that Dis­ney has accom­mo­dated more than 200 such requests since 2007.