Meloni Pledges Veil Ban in Schools, and an Island Weighs Its Classrooms

Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said on Sunday that she would move to ban the burqa and the niqab in Italian schools and to limit the number of foreign students in classrooms, according to Al Jazeera and Politico Europe. "Italian children cannot feel like a minority in the classroom," she said, in the words Politico carried. Al Jazeera noted that she leads Italy's longest-serving government since the Second World War and faces an electoral threat from a rival party on her right.

The announcement is a national one, made from Rome, and its consequences will be read first in the cities where Italy's Muslim communities are largest — Milan, Turin, Rome, Bologna. The foreign wires have not reported any Sardinian dimension to the pledge, and none should be assumed: the island's Muslim population is small and its foreign-born schoolchildren are, in the main, Romanian, Moroccan, Senegalese, Chinese and Albanian by family origin, not wearers of full face veils.

What the island can say, honestly, is that it knows something about the arithmetic of a classroom. Sardinia's interior has spent two decades closing schools for want of pupils — the opposite problem to the one the prime minister describes. Whether a rule drafted for dense mainland cities would ever touch a village school in the Ogliastra or the Barbagia is a question the foreign coverage does not answer, and this bureau will not invent one.