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Calcutta Calling New York City
The New York City Council last week voted to add two Muslim holidays to the city's public school calendar, citing the annual observance of Christian and Jewish holidays. Mayor Bloomberg objects, saying the city isn't obligated to accommodate all faiths: "If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won't be any school." Who's right? In a country with so many faiths, should public schools observe any religious holidays?
Michael Bloomberg is mayor of New York City. But maybe it would be better if he would trade places with his counter-part in Calcutta--just for a while. Maybe then he'd reconsider his position against adding two Muslim holidays to New York's public school calendar.
New York reminds me of Calcutta. If I had said that back in the 1970s, everyone would know what I meant: crowded, grungy, and maddening. But perceptions of both New York and India have changed much since then. The reason why New York reminds me of Calcutta is its diversity.
I've lived in India for a total of four years, off and on. And when I first arrived in India in the mid 1980s, I was not prepared for the diversity I encountered. There were multiple languages and dialects. Indians themselves had a wide range of identities for themselves that they would deploy in differing contexts. As my first year in India progressed, I often charted my own appreciation of India's diversity by understanding the background behind its national and public holidays. On one level, India has national holidays that celebrate important milestones in India's development as a secular democracy. On another level, specific states have other holidays that reflect the culture and practices of the area. Often these public holidays mark religious celebrations, such as the festival of lights (Divali) for Hindus, the birth of the Prophet Muhammad for Muslims, and Christmas for Christians.
As one would expect in India's tough and tumble democracy, there is heated debate over the status of these public holidays: whether they should be mandatory or optional, whether there are too few or too many, and whether such public holidays violate the secular character of the nation as a political entity.
Issues of religious identity in India have often been written in blood. For this very reason, many Indian legislators have understood that recognizing the diverse character of their constituencies is crucial to developing a functional civil society. Of course, since India's political system is no less corrupt than America's, religious differences are exploited at least as often as they are celebrated. But, in theory at least, India's eclectic array of public holidays is meant to recognize that a secular civil society ignores religious diversity at its own peril.
It's important to understand that Michael Bloomberg is not totally wrong in his opposition. It does not necessarily follow that religious liberty entails a right to a public religious holiday, unless not having the holiday infringes upon a religious practice in a demonstrable way. By this standard, as a Catholic Christian, I do not have an inalienable right to Christmas vacation--I can always go to midnight mass and Disneyland is fine any time of year. But what the mayor of New York City perhaps does not recognize fully is how appreciating religious diversity can appropriately inform and enrich the democratic process.
There can be no question that Muslims constitute a substantial minority in New York's public school system. To recognize their cultural and religious practices through official school holidays simply acknowledges that in order to serve Muslim students well, the school system needs to be reasonably attentive to their needs. In this sense, good pedagogical sense and democracy go hand in hand. Of course, school holidays will proliferate to recognize other religious traditions but there are a variety of democratic mechanisms in place that can allow a reasonable balance; it all might be messy, but diversity and democracy always are.
By
Mathew N. Schmalz
|
July 8, 2009; 12:48 PM ET
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Posted by: clearthinking1 | July 14, 2009 11:10 PM
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To clearthinking1, this is a first. Check and see if the point of view you espoused is supported by your faith. I do not think that it is.
What a wonderful comparison the panelist makes. I agree that accommodating and celebrating diversity is both "messy" and "tough" but we can and should work toward achieving it. The addition of these two celebrations on the school calendar would be a continuation of a good thing.
Posted by: safiyah111 | July 14, 2009 3:04 PM
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Why don't you'al just combine your holidays of Winter and Spring breaks and call them the Bi-Annual-Intolerant-Religious-Festivals of your collectively small and shallow god of Abraham? Then you can join hands, bake, decorate, party, dance, sing, pray, hate, judge, condemn and exclude others together in pleasant harmony. I'm sure Coca Cola would re-write their little holiday commercials for you.
Posted by: coloradodog | July 14, 2009 8:29 AM
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The tolerance and diversity in India and Calcutta is not new, and it did not arise in a vacuum. Tolerance has existed there for many millenia because of the underlying philosophy of Vedanta which defines Hinduism.
In contrast, tolerance and diversity is not consistent with the history and culture of Islam. Islam is a supremacist religion (like Shmaltz's Catholicism) which promotes the idea that one God (Allah) or one book (Koran) is superior and must dominate.
Abhab is right and Decentdust is naive. Be very wary of destructive and supremacist ideologies like Islam.
Posted by: clearthinking1 | July 14, 2009 4:26 AM
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edbyronadams: Thank you! you are the rare On Faith reader who posts a comment that is ACTUALLY RELATED to the panelist's view!
abhab: seriously, must we turn every article that even MENTIONS Islam into a hate-fest?
Posted by: decentdust | July 13, 2009 5:50 PM
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The test for school holidays should be an easy one. The school board should establish a threshold of attendance that makes economic sense. If 10 or 15 percent of your student body will be absent because of religious observance, then making those days school holidays makes sense. It doesn't make economic sense to staff schools when they are that significantly impacted by absence of the students.
Of course another instructional day must be added to compensate but teachers' contracts are based on instructional days.
Posted by: edbyronadams | July 9, 2009 9:19 AM
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Schmallz pontificates thus:
"To recognize their cultural and religious practices through official school holidays simply acknowledges that in order to serve Muslim students well, the school system needs to be reasonably attentive to their needs."
If you had lived in a Muslim majority society for any length of time you would be more aware of how minorities are treated there. Most of New York Muslims are immigrants from such societies that not only subjugate but also oppress their minorities. It would not be farfetched that many of those same immigrants took part in persecuting their minorities. They come here and instead of adapting to the culture of the host country they try to change it to look like the cesspools from which they had escaped. They are using our freedoms against us in the same way they had used our technology to destroy our Twin Towers.
Posted by: abhab | July 8, 2009 1:56 PM
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The comments to this entry are closed.
Safiyah111,
Tolerance does not mean submission. It does not mean acceptance of injustice, violence, or supremacist and destructive idealogies. The Bhagvad Gita is an important book in Hinduism, and it is unequivocal in supporting right action (dharma), especially when confronted with injustice and evil.
You wrote: "this is a first. Check and see if the point of view you espoused is supported by your faith. I do not think that it is." The "first" will be when you actually learn about other belief systems with an open mind and respectful manner. Pretending to be for diversity is not the same as being truly tolerant of other beliefs.
The fact is that Islam is a nontolerant and supremacist belief system. Do you know any true believing Muslims who would say that all religions are equal? That one is free to choose their spiritual path even if it is not Allah or Islam?
The oldest (~7000 years) known religious text in the world, the Rig Veda (1.64.46), states: "That which is One, the sages call by many names."
This is why Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroasterianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha'i have found refuge among Hindus for 2,500 years. It is no accident that tolerance, pluralism, nonviolence(ahimsa), vegetarianism, Yoga, Vedanta, and concepts of Nonduality and Unity arose in this environment.
So if you check, you will see that my point of view is supported by Hindu and Vedanta philosophy, which is not a blind faith or supremacist ideology.