DARMSTADT, Germany, 11 October 2003 — Muslim women teachers in Germany will be banned from wearing headscarves in some states but allowed to do so in others, after the country’s education ministers failed to agree on the issue yesterday.

The arrangement leaves Germany without a national policy on an issue causing controversy across Europe and highlighted stark divisions over integrating Muslim citizens. “Legal bans are not the way to promote the integration of more than three million Muslims living in Germany,” said Juergen Micksch, head of Germany’s Intercultural Council.

Education ministers from Germany’s 16 states issued a statement saying seven would pass laws banning teachers from wearing head scarves, or “hijab”. Eight states saw no reason for new laws and one, the city state Bremen, was undecided on the issue.

Germany’s constitution obliges the state to maintain strict religious neutrality but it does not enshrine a formal separation of church and state. A recent challenge came from traditionally Catholic Bavaria where authorities battled for the right, won in 1999, to display crucifixes in the classroom.

The row over head scarves began after Afghan-born teacher Fereshta Ludin was barred in 1998 from a job teaching English and German in Baden-Wuerttemberg on the grounds her head scarf violated the state’s duty to be neutral on religion.

Ludin took her case Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, which said last month the authorities had been wrong to bar her from wearing a head scarf at school because the law as it stood did not ban the practice.

But the top court added that federal states were free to pass legislation on the issue, prompting some states to indicate immediately they would seek bans.

Baden-Wuerttemberg was among the seven states which said yesterday they would ban head scarves. The others were Bavaria, the capital Berlin, Brandenburg, Hessen, Lower-Saxony and Saarland.

Attitudes elsewhere in Europe are mixed.

In France a state commission is debating whether Paris should forbid Muslim girls from wearing a scarf to class. But the British generally shrug at head scarves as just a sign of a multicultural society.