Disu Kamor
17 November 2009
Lagos — The Shaykh Al-Azhar, esteemed Dr. Sayyid Muhammad Tantawi while on a recent visit to an Al-Azhar-affiliated high school stood in front of the class to teach a 16-year old teenager who was using the niqab (the face veil) some important lessons in Islamic legal rulings.
Having observed that the girl was adorning the face cover in the class, he ordered her to immediately remove the veil because niqab "has nothing to do with Islam and is only a custom". Rather surprisingly, the thoroughly embarrassed young girl rejected the order of the most senior religious cleric, stood her ground, and explained that she was uncomfortable without her niqab.
The Shaykh repeated his order but the young girl reiterated her objection to the anger of the Shaykh who must have felt that his pre-eminence status and authority were being challenged. This ex-grand jurist of Egypt who had taught in some of the most prestigious Islamic centers of learning, including the Islamic University of Medinah, then did the unexpected to put the little girl in her place, he charged: "I have already told you that the niqab has absolutely nothing to do with the religion, and it is something that is from custom......and I know the religion better than you, and those who gave birth to you (i.e. her parents)." Forced to yield under enormous pressure coming from the symbol of authority who is more that four times her age and under the full glare of the press, the girl finally removed her veil. Unsatisfied by this compromise still, the Shaykh stunned onlookers when he crudely went ahead to humiliate the girl right in front of her classmates. He remarked in a coarse Egyptian street vernacular which cannot be properly translated into English language because of its coarseness: "So if you were even a little beautiful, what would you have done then?" Feeling satisfied and vindicated, the Shaykh then let the girl to be, although only after promising to ban female students from veiling their faces on Al-Azhar premises and affiliated educational establishments. One cannot help but sympathize with the poor girl.
Although renowned for making what many have described as 'pay-as-you-go fatwas', the office of the Shaykh al-Azhar is symbolically the most senior office in the entire Sunni world, which boasts of about 87% of the world's Muslim population of 1.57 Billion, outranking even that of the grand jurist of Egypt, the position the Shaykh held for almost 10 years before being appointed on 27 March, 1996 into his current position by president Hosni Mubarak. The office is reckoned to rank higher than any other Islamic office because the person purportedly placed in this office is the most scholarly personality of the oldest and most revered Islamic University in the Sunni world. Given an impressive credential such as this, it will be easy to mistake the event which occurred on Monday, October 5, 2009 as a scholarly attempt to unravel the conspiracy of institutionalizing the 'non-Islamic and customary practice' of obscuring the face into mainstream Islam. This however was not to be the case. Infact this peculiar event shows exactly why the Muslim world does not deserve government appointed Shayukh at its oldest university.
Thank God the Shaykh restricted his claim of superior knowledge of Islamic legal rulings to the girl and her parents because Muslim scholars since the time of the companions of the prophet up till the present time have historically differed over this issue. Their difference was due to their various understandings and attitudes towards the religious texts about the subject since there is no definitive clear-cut text about it in the primary sources. Had there been any, there would have been no scholarly difference regarding it. The four classical Sunni schools of law discussing the legal status of the niqab, in numerous major work of fiqh, written throughout the centuries of Islam have only differed on the subject on the basis of its been obligatory, recommendable, or merely permissible, never as forbidden.
Among contemporary scholars, Shaykh Ali Abu al-Hasan, the former head of the Fatwa Council at the Islamic Studies Institute (ISI) in Cairo said "No official has the right to order a young lady to remove a form of dress that was sanctioned by none other than Umar ibn al-Khattab (the 2nd Caliph after the prophet (SAW)), except for the purposes of identification for security reasons." In his own juristic opinion, the eminent scholar Shaykh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi stated that: "No Muslim scholar, whether among the predecessors or contemporary scholars, has ever been reported to have regarded wearing niqab as forbidden except in the case of ihram for women... Thus it is untenable that a Muslim jurist would regard niqab as prohibited or even merely undesirable in Islam.... Those who believe that niqab is an innovation or forbidden are ignorant, and by this they lie about the Law of God. The least that can be said about the issue of niqab is that it is merely permissible." This opinion is in agreement with the views expressed by scholars like Nasir Ad-Din Al-Albani, the majority of the Al-Azhar scholars, the scholars of Az-Zaytunah University in Tunisia, the scholars of Al-Qarawiyeen University in Morocco, and many Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish scholars as well as others.
Of course, there is no unanimity among contemporary scholars that it is permissible to uncover the Muslim woman's face and hands, as there are many scholars in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, a number of the other Gulf countries, Pakistan, and India, who believe that veiling the woman's face and hands is obligatory. Among them are the late eminent Saudi scholar Shaykh 'Abdul-'Aziz ibn Baz, the late well-known Pakistani scholar Abu Al-A'la Al-Mawdudi and the famous Syrian writer Dr. Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan Al-Buti.
Cases such as this is a sad reminder of history of state dictatorship to change the public face of Islamic culture and practices, like the Tunisian President Bourguiba who ruled between 1955-1987 and tried to ban Ramadan in his efforts to increase worker "productivity" and "modernization". As part of the difficulties surrounding the use of niqab in Egpyt, on Saturday 3rd of October, scores of female university students protested outside Al-Azhar university dormitory calling for the repeal of the decision banning fully veiled women from entering the university premises. A previous directive by the Egyptian minister of religious endowment to ban women preachers wearing the niqab from mosques was hotly contested and a ban on nurses wearing full veil was announced last year, but not enforced. In the case of the university students, an ingenious means of ban enforcement have been devised: by rendering government subsidized housing and nutrition inaccessible to veiled female students in Egyptian universities.
Kamor is Director of Media and Communications Muslim Public Affairs Centre, MPAC Nigeria.
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