She Musta Missed That Little Rule
…when reading through her conversion kit.
An Islamic association and two of its officials must pay more than $1.7 million to lawyers for a woman who successfully sued the organization for sexual discrimination, a judge has ruled.
The ruling is against the Islamic Society of Orange County, which runs the Orange Crescent School in Garden Grove where Zakiyyah Muhammad was principal for five years until she was fired in 2003.
Muhammad, 60, a convert to Islam, was awarded $788,000 in damages by a jury in September after she claimed she was dismissed for challenging her male bosses.
I’m glad it worked out for her. Her Islamic world sisters wouldn’t have been so lucky.
UPDATE: Seems there may have been a cultural clash at work here. An OC Register interview with Zakiyyah Muhammad.
Q. You were fired about two months after Fazal Mirza (a Pakistani Immigrant) came on board as school board president. Why?
A.That’s a good question. We concluded he chose not to work with an African-American principal. (Also) he did not appreciate the fact that I was not a subservient image who will keep very quiet.
….(Also) many (immigrant Muslims) perceive that because they’ve had their religion longer than many Muslim Americans, particularly African-American Muslims, that our Islam is not legitimate. But that is not what Islam says.
Life | tree hugging sister | 
February 28, 2006 2:21 pm
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“Orange Crescent officials promised her reward would be severely cut on appeal…”
Not having more details (and gawd I hope there are more details) this bothers me a lot. Being in management, I find challenging a boss to be (potentially, at least) a firing offense.
Especially at that level of employment (principal), employment is at will and especially at the will of higher management.
Depends what your definition of ‘challenge’ is. And, like you said, what the circumstances are. All Islamic things considered, I would like to believe she ‘questioned/challenged’ a decision like ‘only tunafish served in the cafeteria on Thursdays’.
Oh yeah, I’ll BET he didn’t like her.
Sis, at that level of management nearly any kind of challenge to higher management can be a firing offense – employment contracts are typically “at will”, so they can generally be fired for any or no reason provided it does not violate the law. I have to assume there is some proven violation here but discrimination laws being what they are, I would not be completely surprised if the “discrimination” was pretty flimsy.
I hope Dave J has some time to drop by and give some more input.
Missed the update before. It does look to be a bit more “nuanced” than the first story let on.
There’s also the whole religious school angle. This could get interesting.
Rats! You beat me to my next comment. Anyhoo, in the broader sense: in corporate America, I’m sure the “yes sir, yes sir, three bags full” would BE the absolute you stated and needfully so. I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong, but my impression (of educational administrators’ positions) has inherently included a certain amount of that ‘vision thing’ as part of the job description. A responsibility to speak up or challenge that which they deem to portend adverse consequences for the student body or the school itself ~ an “are you sure you wanna go there” built into being an ‘educator’. Now certainly in private schools, the “yes we do” can be followed immediately by a “clean out your desk” as proven time and again by people losing suits against Catholic schools for various terminations. None of which, of course, would hold water in a public school. That having been said, I would think the principle of a private school with new ‘management’ would be duty bound to question changes she/he finds distressing or injurious to the programs/atmosphere she’s helped nurture, the same as a public school principle: perhaps even more so.
Unlike the guy at the third desk over at Gulf Power who gets a new supervisor. Questioning directive isn’t part of his job description.
“I would think the principle of a private school with new ‘management’ would be duty bound to question changes she/he finds distressing or injurious to the programs/atmosphere she’s helped nurture”
Agree completely, but it’s not illegal for higher ups to act stupidly, nor should it be actionable (outside the aforementioned categories).
blech.
they want me to register to read the rest of the story.
Damn fascists.