Niqab Debate in Egypt: Divided Scholars

clipped from en.qantara.de the Grand Imam of Cairo University and the Al-Azhar Mosque. Mohammed Sayed al-Tantawi, one of the most senior legal scholars in Sunni Islam, declared that a veil that covers a woman's face leaving only a slit for the eyes is not religiously permissible. "A woman's face is nothing to be ashamed of!" "These are traditions that have nothing to do with religion," There are two sections of the Koran (Sura 24, verse 31 and Sura 33, verse 59) that make references to the covering of the female body. Neither passage can be unequivocally interpreted as an instruction that a woman must wear a head covering, or exactly defines the parts of the body that have to be concealed. al-Tantawi describes the niqab as a tradition from a pre-Islamic era. But this view has not made the theologian The Saudi Arabian Sheikh Mohammed al-Nojaimi from the Institute of Islamic Law contradicted his Egyptian counterpart Tantawi's claim that the face veil has nothing to do with Islam

Hijab, chador, burqa or niqab? The veiling of Muslim women continues to provoke controversy. This time it is the niqab, or face veil, at the center of the conflict-charged fundamental debate within the Islamic world.