The Sheikh of Al-Azhar Dr. Mohamed Sayed Tantawi has declared that the Niqab [the veil] has nothing to do with the teachings of Islam, and then banned it from being worn in schools and classrooms. Also, the Grand Mufi of Egypt Dr. Ali Gomaa said that the Niqab has nothing to do with Islam, and that the [female] companions of the Prophet were all barefaced in the days of Prophet, praise be upon him. Moreover, the Egyptian Minister of Endowments Dr. Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq said the same thing, and wrote against the Niqab in a book entitled “The Niqab is Tradition, Not an Islamic Rite”. Consequently, I want to say that the debate has been settled with the testimonies given by these great scholars, as no Muslim individual can be more knowledgeable than them. When a television preacher profanely attacks the Sheikh of Al-Azhar by saying, for instance, that he is “participating in a crusade against Islam”, he is not harming Dr. Tantawi at all, but rather merely revealing the extent of his own ignorance, extremism and religious and human backwardness. I know that this topic is sensitive, divisive and controversial, something that I have had firsthand experience with through the readers' mail that I receive. When I referred to the Hijab [headscarf] and the Niqab in an article I wrote last month, after the Sheikh of al-Azhar had requested a veiled girl in a girls' classroom to remove her Niqab, I received a lot of letters that defended the Hijab as a religious rite, or letters that claimed that I had a problem with the Hijab, and which asked whether nudity is synonymous to progress, and so forth. The article published on the 13th of October was about the bad Arab situation, and out of 80 lines, there was only one line and a half where I expressed the following opinion: “the crisis is not a crisis of the Niqab, but rather a crisis of ethics, and religious and human backwardness; Islam is not about the Niqab and the Hijab, but it is the religion of peace, guidance and mercy”. How can any Muslim disagree with the above? I never pick a religious argument, and try to avoid it as much as I can, not for fear from anyone but because I know that I will never be able to convince anyone of my opinion when they their minds are already made up against it. As for the reader who agrees with me, I would be wasting both of our times in such a debate since it is already settled for us. I hope that I have been clear that I am neither against Hijab nor am I in favour of it. My stance on this issue can be instead summed up with one word: “Freedom”. For this reason, when a woman wears the Hijab in an Arab city, this means nothing to me, unless this woman is doing so out of a personal conviction, without any pressures from family and society. But when I see a woman wearing the Hijab in a Western city, this pleases me because her Hijab reflects her willpower, and her willingness to defend her views and convictions among foreigners. Is that understood then? Freedom is all I am talking about here, no more and no less. In fact, I have begun to suspect that I am unconsciously a member of the Zahiri sect, since in any religious debate I seem to only cite the Holy Quran in my arguments, as the latter is the final authority in such issues. If the verse had said: “and to draw their veils over their faces”, there would have been no debate at all. But the holy verse instead said: “[...] and to draw their veils over their bosoms”, meaning the dress's opening near the breasts (at the time of the revelation, men and women did not have underwear; for this reason, the believing men were told to cover their privates, and so were the believing women). Staying with the Quran, it also says: “ask it of them from behind a curtain”, meaning a screen, as in the verse “and between us and thee there is a veil. Act, then. Lo! We also shall be acting [...]”, and “we place between thee and those who believe not in the Hereafter a hidden barrier [...]”, and also “And it was not (vouchsafed) to any mortal that Allah should speak to him unless (it is) by revelation or from behind a veil [...]”. The meaning of the word “veil” here is “curtain”, as the translation of the Quran into English suggests, and is not to mean veil as a dress that covers the body. I hope that the reader will not enter into a further debate with me since such a debate would be dead-ended, owing to my reliance on the Quran alone; I also hope that the reader will spare me from delving into a maze of heritage and traditions that can never be as credible as the Quran. Finally, I also hope that the reader will read the following paragraph since it expresses the original issue, or “my issue”, and not that of the Hijab or the Niqab. There is a campaign against Islam and Muslims that dwarfs the issue of the offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet, which include things that I cannot even insinuate at, not to mention the details a response against them would entail. In any case, the difference between me and the average reader is that I am always monitoring – with the help of the researchers at Al-Hayat's archive – the publications of the enemies of Islam and their centres and websites. As such, I have some unbelievable examples of Likudnik meanness and evil. The issue then is this campaign in particular, and how Muslims can respond to it. To be more precise, the issue is that the Al-Aqsa mosque will be lost, and I have in my possession a picture of Jewish extremists who have built a model of Solomon's temple; as such, they want to demolish Al-Aqsa in order to build the historically questionable temple on its ruins. The temple is not under Al-Aqsa, and has never been above it either. There is no actual Jewish history in Palestine, and it is all biblical myths. In fact, the history taught in Western universities today (and I have studied history at the Georgetown university) completely negates the Jewish account; however, there are those among Muslims who choose instead to overlook their enemies, and debate the Sheikh of Al-Azhar in the issue of the Niqab.
