As Russia’s Supreme Court prepares to discuss hijab ban in schools, the country’s grand mufti has sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin, urging him to defend the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in schools and universities.
“I address you as a mufti and as a father – please protect our traditional values, protect our daughters and granddaughters – the future of our great and beautiful Eurasian state,” Ravil Gainutdin wrote in the open letter published earlier this week on the Russian Council of Muftis’ website.
“Hijab simply means “veil” in Arabic and Islam doesn’t demand that everyone wears some sort of uniform, it only declares the principle of modesty and non- nudity,” he wrote.
“It is neither a sign of some confession nor a challenge to society.”
The Mufti explained that his letter was prompted by the Supreme Court plans to discuss the ban on Muslim headgear in schools introduced earlier in the Russian republic of Mordovia next February 11.
The scholar also reminded the Russian leader that February 1 is marked around the world as “International Hijab Day”.
He added that women’s veil existed in other Abrahamic religions and traditional cultures.
He went on to blame foreign influence for the recent controversies surrounding the Muslim women attire.
“Through the ‘headscarf issue’ certain foreign forces are imposing on us intolerance, anti-democracy and disrespect to Eurasian traditions of inter-ethnic friendship. They are politicizing a completely household, family issue. Through tearing off modest clothing they seek to tear the beautiful and complicated patterned cloth of the Russian world,” Gainutdin stated.
The Russian Federation is home to some 23 million Muslims in the north of the Caucasus and southern republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan.
Islam is Russia's second-largest religion representing roughly 15 percent of its 145 million predominantly Orthodox population.
In January 2013, the Russian Federal Migration Service issued a decision allowing expatriate Muslim women working in Russia to wear headscarf without covering their faces in their identification papers.
The wearing of hijab triggered a controversy in Russia in October 2013 after five Muslim students were banned from attending classes in their school in the village of Kara-Tyube in the southern Stavropol region.
Though they were initially allowed to attend their school in September while donning hijab, they were told later that they would not be allowed in unless they took off their headscarf.
At that time, Putin backed banning the Muslim headscarf in schools.
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one's affiliations.
source : On Islam
Sunday
8 February 2015
6:58:11 AM
669820
As Russia’s Supreme Court prepares to discuss hijab ban in schools, the country’s grand mufti has sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin, urging him to defend the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in schools and universities.