Egypt’s top cleric to ban veils in schools

An announcement today from the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) asking Ottawa to introduce legislation to ban the wearing of masks, niqabs and the burka in public.

This arises from an announcement 2 days ago from Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of al-Azhar university,  considered Islam's chief teaching universities.

Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of al-Azhar university, called full-face veiling a custom that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, said that burqas are "not welcome" in France, in June of this year.

Sarkozy stated that:

"In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity."

The burqa has been banned in French public schools since 2004, and we should ban it here in Canada too, but I doubt that any Canadian government would have the cojones to do it. I hope I am wrong, but it is hard to imagine it happening; yet it is an essential law that we need to set a level playing field in our schools and on our streets.

This post from Faith Freedom International

Egypt’s highest Muslim authority said he plans to bar female students who wear face veils from entering the schools of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s premier institute of learning, according to local reports.

Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, Sheik of al-Azhar, made his plans public during a weekend visit to a Cairo school, where he told a middle school student to take off her niqab, according to the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The niqab, a face-veil with a thin opening for the eyes, “has nothing to do with Islam and is only a custom,” Tantawi is quoted as saying.

While most women in Egypt wear a head scarf, only a few wear the niqab, which is more common in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

A security official also told The Associated Press on Monday that police have standing verbal orders to prohibit girls covered head to toe from entering al-Azhar’s institutions, which include middle schools, high schools and several universities.

The move appears to be a crackdown on overt manifestations of ultraconservative Islam in Egypt.

Tantawi’s office was unavailable for comment, but Abdel Moati Bayoumi, a scholar in an al-Azhar affiliated research centre, said al-Azhar’s scholars would back Tantawi if he issued the order.

See the whole piece here.