The Muslim teacher who insisted on wearing a veil in class has been following a fatwa issued personally to her by a Islamic cleric belonging to a hardline sect. Aishah Azmi found herself in the middle of a national row about integration when she took her school to an employment tribunal after it suspended her for refusing to remove the veil in class. Tony Blair joined the debate about the wearing of veils — opened by Jack Straw, the Commons leader — and supported the school’s actions.
Azmi, 24, has maintained that her decision to wear the veil was driven entirely by her personal beliefs, rather than the advice or instruction of a third party. But this weekend it emerged that she refused to take the veil off at school after receiving a fatwa, or religious ruling, from Mufti Yusuf Sacha, a Muslim cleric in West Yorkshire. Her legal team revealed that the advice Sacha issued to Azmi ruled that it was obligatory for women to wear the niqab (face-veil) in the presence of men who were not their blood relatives.
Sacha is one of several hundred Islamic clerics in Britain with the status of mufti, entitling him to issue fatwas based on Islamic law. Although Muslims are expected to follow fatwas, they are not obliged to do so, particularly if they live in a non-Muslim state.
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