Woman loses job as she refuses to shake hands

She was awarded Dh16,000 after court ruled that she was discriminated.

A Swedish Muslim woman has been awarded £3,426 (Dh16,000 approx) after Swedish court ruled she was discriminated because she refused to shake hands with her male potential employer.
Farah Alhajeh, 24, had been invited to interview for a job as an interpreter in Uppsala, north of Stockholm in May 2016, and did not shake her male interviewer's hand citing the rules of her faith. Instead, she greeted him by placing a hand over her heart, as is common among Muslims.
However, Alhajeh was led out of the room and rejected during the interview. She told the Swedish Labour Court that the interviewer, an executive at the company, had become red in the face and told her, 'Here, everyone must shake hands'. "As soon as I got into the lift I started crying. It had never happened to me before, it didn't feel good at all. It was awful," Alhajeh said.
She reported the matter to Sweden's Discrimination Ombudsman who took her case to court. "Of course it's reasonable for an employer to ask employees to treat all colleagues the same, but you have to be able to greet people in different ways," Daily Mail quoted a Discrimination Ombudsman spokesperson as saying in Swedish news website, SVT.
This week, the Labour Court ruled in her favour, and ordered the company to pay Alhajeh 40,000 Swedish kronors in compensation.
"In my country... you cannot treat women and men differently. I respect that. That's why I don't have any physical contact with men or with women. I can live by the rules of my religion and also at the same time follow the rules of the country that I live in," Alhajeh said.