If the Sheikh of al-Azhar himself says that the Niqab [the veil] is not ordained by religion at all, then it is not ordained by religion at all. Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi thus told the veiled girl to take off her Niqab because it is not a religious duty, and reminded her that he knows more about Islam than she and her parents do. The Sheikh of al-Azhar in fact knows more about religion than I or the reader do, and as such, he must have the final say in this matter. While I had expressed my opposition to the Niqab and the Burqa time and again in this column, as a personal opinion, this stance by the Sheikh of al-Azhar settles this matter once and for all, except for the stubbornness of extremist zealots who want to oppress women rather than revive religion. I read a background story related to the Sheikh of al-Azhar's statements in the New York Times, reported from Paris, about how several mayors of French towns told a parliamentary panel that the ban on the Niqab - as advocated by President Nicolas Sarkozy last June - would be hard to enforce, and that being strict in enforcing such a ban would prompt even more Muslim women to wear the Niqab in defiance of the authorities. The Hijab [headscarf] itself is tradition, and not religion. Yet, I support all women in the world if they want to wear it, provided that this would be through their personal choice and not through pressure and coercion. Moving on to other related news stories: - Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, including Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science, for their work in mapping the precise structure of the ribosome -- the cell's critical protein-making factory. Congratulations to the scientist Yonath, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry since 1964. Perhaps we will live to see the day when an Arab woman wins a Nobel Prize in science, instead of remaining a prisoner in her own home, from the kitchen to the bedroom (before Yonath, the Irish [female] novelist Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for fiction for her novel “Wolf Hall”, then the German [female] novelist Herta Mueller won the Nobel Prize in literature.) The education of women was perhaps the greatest Arab achievement, if not the only one, in the last two generations. This was in fact a doubly difficult feat that was achieved despite the religiously and humanly backward voices that continue to conceal their complexes, failures, and ignorance behind the issue of the Niqab or the Burqa. A poet once said in this vein that women and knowledge in a given country would have been much better if some men there were veiled instead. - While the controversy regarding the niqab and the hijab was still raging among Arabs and Muslims, as we bade farewell to the first decade of the twenty first century, I was following the annual conference of Britain's opposition conservative party. I noticed that the Board of Deputies of British Jews had sent a letter to the leadership of the conservative party, expressing concern over the party's pact with some controversial European rightwing parties accused of anti-Semitism. I also noticed that the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews was a woman named Vivian Wineman; I am still waiting for the day when an Arab woman becomes a member of a council and then becoming its president. It seems that I have a good observation, since I also noticed that the Financial Times had published a report about the group of intellectuals, consultants and wealthy individuals around the conservative party, which will inevitably win the next election. Among the names I read were: Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton, Anthony Browne and Neil O'Brien, Philippa Stroud, Niall Ferguson, Rachel Wolf, Tom Montgomerie, Fraser Nelson Danny Finkelstein, Rachel Whetstone, Simon Wolfson, Sir James Sassoon, and the money men, Michael Spencer and Stanley Fink. There are many Jewish names in the above, and none that are Arab or Muslim, although the latter number at least five times more than the Jews in Britain. While I am not objecting to Jews advising the conservative party or any other party, I wonder, where are the Muslims? Are they busy debating the “Niqab” and the “honour” killings? - Finally, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his candidacy for the European Union: Blair is currently the special envoy for the international diplomatic quartet on the Middle East, and is doing good efforts in this capacity, as he is trying to alleviate the impacts of the occupation on the Palestinians. However, he remains that Prime Minister who co-conspired with George Bush to wage a colonial war with forged justifications against Iraq, and which led to the death of one million Iraqis. I appreciate Blair's current efforts, but insist that this does not exonerate him from his culpability in the war which is yet to end, and I insist that he should be tried along with Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the American warmongering criminal gang. This is not my opinion alone; in fact, I read a statement by the “Stop the War Coalition”, which includes some of the most prominent British figures and names, calling for sending Blair to the Hague, the home of the International War Crimes Tribunal, rather than to Brussels, the home of the EU Presidency.
