Ghanaian Muslims in Public Schools: Religious Freedom and Minority Rights

Religious freedom is widely regarded as major achievement of constitutional democracies and liberal democratic governments across the globe because of the way the system is perceive to guarantee the peaceful co-existence of religiously plural society. Many political scientists have argued that human rights are better promoted and enhanced under liberal constitutional democracies than undemocratic governments. This may mean that Ghana’s transition from military regime to constitutional democracy will significantly improve her human rights record. But the Ghanaian context where the religious freedom of the minority Muslim students is persistently been frustrated by ‘artificial’ bureaucracies instituted by school administrators force us to reconsider the fact that guaranteeing religious freedom and liberty of a minority group is not simply the making of constitutional provisions, rather, and most crucially, national and international governments whose duty it is to protect minority groups, must endeavor to provide other social mechanisms and techniques that could, in addition to the existing laws, help in protecting the minority group from the majority ‘abuse’.In recent years, the discourse of religious liberty has become a dominant idiom in the Ghanaian Muslim struggle against policies of public schools that marginalize the minority Muslim students based on their religious identity. The Mainland Churches, which have since independence been fighting against human rights abuses are, surprisingly, the ‘culprits’ in this situation. Recommendations are made at the end of the study to enable the State and the Church to consider the immediate need to [re]solving the challenge.