Honoring Muslim religious workplace requests

The Clarion Project has another rant, this one by Eliot Friendland, about Muslims in the US:

Firms such as JP Morgan, Accenture, and PricewaterhouseCoopers are taking steps to make sure that Muslims feel accommodated and respected in the workplace, according to Bloomberg.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act stipulates reasonable requests for accommodation of religious requests must be granted, as long as it does not cause undue hardship.
Last year some forty percent of religious discrimination cases seen by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission related to Muslims, despite Muslims only making up one percent of the population.
However, Islam has more religious requirements than many other religions such as Buddhism or Christianity. Jews also have many religious requirements, but Jews have = integrated into mainstream, American-workplace culture for longer than Muslims, so many firms already have measures in place to accommodate Jewish religious requests. It therefore makes sense that there would be more litigation relating to Islam.
Many firms preempt litigation and take steps to accommodate Muslim religious requests.
This is despite complaints that American workplace culture is discriminatory towards Muslims by the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), designated as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates. “The atmosphere is so toxic now that, even having constitutionally-protected religious accommodation in the workplace can somehow be controversial,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of CAIR, told Bloomberg.
Other professionals working on issues of corporate diversity disagree. “The level of acceptance at some of the best companies is significant,” Subha Barry, vice president of Working Mother Media, which publishes Diversity Best Practices, told Bloomberg. “Even a few years ago, Muslims who wore prayer caps or head scarfs or wanted to pray several times a day would have thought ‘If I do that I won’t have any chance for upward mobility.’ They would have felt they had to check their beliefs at the door to avoid harassment.”
But Bloomberg reports a variety of measures being taken by firms to accommodate Muslims. Umar Latif, who was recently made a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accountancy firm, wears a prayer cap called a kufi, which identifies him as Muslim, but said the firm had not made an issue out of his dress, saying that “There’s flexibility here”.
JP Morgan Chase & Co. goes further, providing transportation to mosques so that employees can pray for offices too small to have prayer rooms. A New York City architecture firm recently organized an office party without alcohol so that the only Muslim employee would feel welcomed.
Accenture schedules its corporate calendar so that major events would not clash with Muslim religious holidays as well as with holidays of other faiths.
“We see more and more companies ready or asking to address issues involving religion and how to manage it,” Joyce Dubensky, chief executive of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding told Bloomberg. She said the number or corporations coming to her group for diversity advice has doubled to two dozen over the past three years.
Even where cases come to court, the courts typically side with those making the religious requests. Courts have ruled that employees who do not want to handle pork or alcohol for religious reasons cannot be fired, and last month a New York City police officer who was fired for refusing to shave his beard was temporarily reinstated after he sued.
The Anti-Defamation League provides a breakdown of the laws relating to religious discrimination in the workplace and the legal requirements incumbent upon employers.
As long as the request does not negatively impact the production of the company it is only reasonable to afford Muslims the same rights as anyone else to practice their faith freely. Time off for prayers can be made up later if it takes a long time during the day, and religious festivals can be made up by working other days, such as Christmas, when other employees might be off.
Discrimination against Muslim practices, such as France’s recent stance against the burkini, can have the opposite of the intended impact. In making Muslim communities feel threatened and under siege, discriminatory policies can make the narrative of extremists that the West is at war with Islam that much more appealing.
In combating Islamism, it is vital that we protect the liberal values of religious freedom that forms part of what makes America a free country. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the values that motivate us to fight Islamism in the first place.

Rico says the French understand the problem...