THE niqab (full-face veil) dispute between Minister of Higher Education and female university students has reached its climax, with the Minister's refusal to comply with the ruling of the Higher Administrative Court allowing students to attend the endof- term examinations wearing the niqab. The controversy started at the beginning of the academic year with a shocking decision by Minister of Higher Education Hani Helal to ban the niqab in governmental university student hostels. The decision came shortly before the start of the academic year when thousands of female students (coming from different governorates) were reserving their places at the hostels in the capital. According to this decision, the students had to choose between removing their niqab to have access to the affordable university hostels or to pack their luggage again and abandon their dreams of university studies. The Minister's decision was based on certain security grounds, that is to protect the girls living in these hostels from the possible encroachment of men concealed by wearing these all-concealing clothes. However, it still raised the anger of a large segment of society, because it coincided with a similar stand taken by the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar Sayyed Tantawi against a young schoolgirl in one of Al-Azhar institutes. This corner dealt with this crisis when it first erupted and criticised the stance of the Sheikh of Al-Azhar as representing an overdue step. It should have been adopted years earlier before the wide spread of the niqab phenomenon, not only in Egypt, but also ��" and even before that ��" in the schools and academic institutions of Al-Azhar, the prestigious and moderate Sunni authority in the Islamic world. Secular groups in society accused the top Muslim cleric of taking a harsh stance against a young girl for wearing the niqab at school, considering it a matter of personal freedom. Responding to their pressure, Al-Azhar, through the Islamic Research Centre,made a fatwa (religious indict), banning the niqab in classrooms or during exams, provided that the teacher or the supervisor is a woman. This means allowing the full-face veil to be worn in other places or when the teacher is a man. This fatwa represented the apparent defeat of Al-Azhar in the face of the fundamental thoughts of some groups. They are insisting on imposing the Saudi version of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) on Egyptian society, despite the opinion of a majority of scholars, who affirm that niqab is not the correct Islamic dress of female Muslims. During the past three months, there have been more developments on the full-face veil, when university students took a case to court and obtained a ruling from the Higher Administrative Court, which allowed them to wear the niqab on the university campus and even when sitting exams. Instead of submitting to this court ruling, out of respect to the judicial authority, most presidents of different public universities, backed by the Ministry of Higher Education, have refused to comply with it, noting that this ruling is individual and not applicable to all girls wearing the niqab. In other words, the governmental universities request each girl to have a ruling in her name to be allowed into the exam room! Despite our disapproval of the niqab and its major threat to the moderate nature of the Egyptian society, one still couldn't approve this illegal stand taken by the State against the university students nor the disregard of such prestigious academic institutions to the rule of law. On the one hand, the minister and the reputable university presidents could not be ignorant of the legal basis of ‘generalising the principle based on all similar cases'. This means that issuing a court ruling for a single girl, allowing her to wear the niqab on the university campus, gives all her peers the same right to dress accordingly at the university. On the other hand, one should wonder about how the universities benefit from exhibiting this rigidity against these young people. They feel that the State aims to deprive them of their basic right of education or to negotiating with them one of their religious principles (as they think that the niqab is). Would it not have been better to spend these past three months trying to convince these girls of the actual teachings of the great religion of Islam? This could have been done through different forums and lectures given by some noted scholars and Muslim thinkers. They could have presented more than one piece of evidence that the majority of Muslim women during the early days of Islam did not veil their faces and cover their hands and positively contributed to all aspects of life in their society. These girls need to know that even if some women, including the wives and daughters of the Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) wore the niqab in those days, such dress could not be acceptable in our society today. This is not out of modernity or of giving up Islamic identity in favour or Western life style, but for the fact that it is not suitable for large and highly populated cities, where a person's identity should be revealed to everyone on security grounds. Meanwhile, this sense of anger that has risen in the minds of our youth could intensify their withdrawal from the political life in the society, a dilemma about which we keep complaining. A university should always be a place of dialogue, freedom of expression and interaction between students and their professors and not a symbol of state dictatorship against young people. All the same, it is not really clear why most of our influential religious leaders avoid dealing with this phenomenon. Is their attitude related to their good and friendly relationship with some Saudi clerics, who adopt such a fundamental approach to fiqh? Or is it because of their disapproval of the secular image Egypt, at the official level, insists on adopting even if violating some of the basic Islamic principles? It is no wonder then that we have an eminent sheikh, although believing that the niqab is not the appropriate Islamic dress for righteous woman, never accepts its criticism because he is unable to publicly criticise the offensive dress. To resolve this dilemma, which threatens the social peace of Egypt, universities, as well as Al-Azhar should either join hands to acquaint young people with the right image and teachings of Islam or take the courageous step of issuing another court ruling to ban this way of dress, according to a constitutional article to preserve national security.
