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Veil triggers row in U.K.

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: Britain's controversy-prone Muslim community was on Sunday facing a fresh row after a Minister called for a Muslim woman teacher to be sacked for refusing to remove her veil in the classroom, and a senior Conservative leader accused the community of creating a "voluntary apartheid'' by pursuing practices that shut them off from the outside world.

The controversy erupted after Aishah Azmi, a 23-year-old junior school teacher in West Yorkshire, refused to remove her veil and was suspended pending her appeal before an employment tribunal.

In an unusual intervention for a Minister, Phil Woolas, in charge of race relations in the Blair Government, said she should be dismissed because by insisting on wearing the veil in the classroom she was denying children the right to a full education.

"She should be sacked. She has put herself in a position where she can't do her job,'' he said. Ms. Azmi, who is taking legal action against the school, claimed that her pupils never complained about her veil.

She said she was prepared to remove it, but not in front of her male colleagues.

Ms. Azmi's case grabbed media headlines at the weekend fuelling the so-called "burqa row'' sparked by Leader of the Commons Jack Straw's comments that the veil was a symbol of "separateness'' and should be shunned. Even as Muslim groups described the attack as another example of "Islamophobia.''

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