TAIF: Why don't Saudi schoolboys wear the iqaal? The swiftest glance inside a classroom at any school in the Kingdom will confirm that no pupils wear the black band that circles the skull and holds the headdress cloth in position, but when the question is put to those same pupils, as Al-Watan daily did this week, not a single one will be able to give a good reason why. “On my first day of classes I saw that all the others weren't wearing the iqaal, and I never questioned why,” secondary pupil Yasser Al-Barrak told the newspaper. “I didn't try and wear it to see what would happen as I had the feeling that the school would punish me. I've nearly finished school altogether now, but I still after all these years don't know why it's banned.” Abdul Majed Al-Nugai'i, also at secondary school, described the iqaal as “a national symbol which people of the Gulf are proud of”. “I don't understand though why we don't wear it in public schools. Students are supposed to be able to wear all the Saudi national dress to school,” he said. “For some guys school is the only time they don't wear it.” He also pointed out that many university students wear the iqaal and do not seem subject to the same restrictions. Similar musings led Nayef Al-Ghamdi, an intermediate school pupil, to wonder why “lots of old people, Islamic education teachers, and mosque imams and judges don't wear the iqaal”. “I've never had a proper answer to this question at school, and as far as I'm aware we're not banned from wearing the iqaal, but I think some avoid wearing it as if it was banned,” he said. “On exam results day I went to school wearing the full ghutra headdress and everyone, teachers and pupils, looked at me as if I was from another planet!” Al-Watan put the question to someone who should know, Abdullah Al-Zahrani, head of Media Education and Public Relations at Taif Boys' Education. “No orders have come from the Ministry of Education to ban students from wearing the iqaal in schools,” he said. “In fact the opposite is true, as the ministry orders that pupils comply with the strictures of official Saudi national dress.” The national dress code is complied with, Al-Zahrani observed, but for that one small detail. “The absence of the iqaal in school goes back decades, and the teachers who today lead the education process in schools developed the custom of not wearing it when they were at school,” he said. “That might have been something brought in at the time by the teachers and schools themselves so that pupils couldn't use them if there was a fight, or maybe to reduce uniform costs for parents, or perhaps to prevent it providing a distraction to the student in the classroom.” Al-Zahrani noted, however, that school students wear the iqaal in National Day celebrations and other occasions. “If a pupil came to school wearing it, he won't be prevented from doing so, but they seem to have simply grown accustomed to not wearing it to school,” he told Al
