On 1 July, the Kafr Al-Sheikh Administrative Court (AC), headed by Counselor Mohamed Abdel-Wahab Khafagi, issued a ruling that allows working women who wear the niqab (the face veil prescribed by Wahhabi and Salafi strands of Islam) the right to wear it in public and at their place of work. The ruling cancels an earlier decision by former minister of health Maha Al-Rabbat, who had banned the plaintiff, a nurse named Amal Mohamed Ibrahim, from wearing the niqab during work hours. According to the court ruling, the face veil is a matter of personal freedom provided that the employee otherwise abides by the work uniform. The ruling has been seized on by various human rights organisations in Egypt and the Arab world as evidence that Egyptian courts will go a step further than the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which upheld France's niqab ban in a case brought against the French government last November. The case involved a Muslim French plaintiff who felt the law restricted her freedom to live according to Islamic regulations. The ECHR stated that the ban did not breach the European Convention of Human Rights. France's ban of the niqab went into effect in April 2011, sparking fierce debate between believers in religious freedom and those who think the veil is a restrictive measure that contravenes France's secularism. The French court's ruling came a few days after France's Cour de Cassation, the country's highest court, upheld the firing of a nursery worker for “serious misconduct” after she arrived for work wearing a veil. The woman says she will appeal to the ECHR. The ECHR had previously upheld France's ban on the wearing of headscarves in educational establishments, and its regulation requiring the removal of scarves, veils and turbans. The woman who filed the niqab case with the ECHR, who hasn't been named, drew upon several articles of the European Convention of Human Rights, which the court was set up to protect, citing the right to private and family life as well as freedom of thought, conscience and religion. She added that no one had forced her to wear the niqab. France charges a fine of €150 or $205 for anyone wearing the face veil, which can be substituted with community service. The French ruling argued that the full-face veil runs contrary to six articles of the European Convention. They argued that it was “inhumane and degrading, against the right of respect for family and private life, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of speech and discriminatory.” The claim was that the law did not target niqab in particular but also applied to hoods and helmets worn by individuals when not on motorcycles. The court further justified its ruling by pointing out that an estimated 1,900 out of five million Muslim women would be affected by the ban. French officials told ECHR judges this figure had since dropped by half due to a major public information campaign. Fouad Riyad, a professor of international law at Cairo University, went so far as to say that the AC's ruling is “a slap in the face of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as all westerners who have bored the world with their hollow claims” regarding human rights. “AC's ruling is a documented response to allegations of US Human Rights Watch on human rights violations in Egypt as being a definitive guide for revealing the European situation regarding misconceptions about Islam and erroneous claims of the violation of human rights in Egypt,” Riyad said. He believes that the French woman is a patriot. “She was absolutely not pressured either by her family or relatives to cover herself. While she did not mind uncovering her face for identity checks, the authorities insisted on depriving her of her simplest rights,” Riyad said. The European court declared that the preservation of “a certain idea of living together” was the legitimate aim of the French authorities. But for Khafagi, “The [AC] ruling is a great victory for Islam. Westerners are the ones who bluntly violate human rights, not Arabs. They drawl and enunciate the term human rights but only in the service of their welfare.” Khafagi affirmed that the legislator acknowledged that the principles of Islamic Sharia are the country's main source of legislation and monitored the personal rights in the crucible of natural human rights without prejudice. “All citizens, whether male or female, Muslim or Christian, are equal in rights and duties is a reference to the freedom of religious belief and the freedom to practice religious rituals,” said Khafagi. “Arabs and Muslims thus truly respect human rights and personal freedoms, unlike the west.”
