Council votes for Muslim school holidays, though mayor says no

NEW YORK — Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools' holiday calendar.

But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.

The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with "a very large number of kids who practice."

"If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won't be any school," he said. "Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that's the most important thing to us."

The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.

Bloomberg's stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York's fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.

Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be "catastrophic" among the city's roughly 600,000 Muslims.

"We really have confidence in the mayor's intelligence," said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. "It's an election year."

The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.

After the vote, Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. "Where are we going to end with this?" he asked.

The resolution's advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city's public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.