Mumbai: 'Issue should not be politicised,' say Muslims on Hijab ban verdict

Following the ongoing Hijab row in Karnataka and Supreme Court's verdict on the matter, the Free Press Journal spoke to a section of Muslims who said that the issue should not be politicised and a decision of the larger bench of the Supreme Court should be awaited. "The matter was being blown out of proportion," they said. On Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered a split verdict and referred the matter to the chief justice of India on the Hijab ban after the Karnataka High Court had upheld the ban.

"I would rather wait and watch. It will be an interesting judgement that will come from the larger bench of the Supreme Court. When the Karnataka High Court banned Hijab, I was for it," said Zeenat Shaukat Ali, an Islamic scholar and an author. Zeenat said that she believed that schools should have uniformity and sensitivity and be secular in that sense. "No kind of religious symbolism should be attached to a school," she said.

Some others felt that the verdict itself was reflective of the issue. "The split verdict of the SC reflected the polarised society we have become today. The question here is whether the right to an education is a fundamental right, it is also about the right to privacy and freedom of expression. We are against Hijab because it is a patriarchal imposition, not at all mandatory in Islam but to deny a girl's entry into the classroom is discriminatory," said Zakia Soman, founder of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan.

One Soman said that the new education policy was very inclusive towards all marginalized sections of society, particularly the girl child and that the ban ran contrary to it. "Schools have the right to decide uniform but social realities should also be looked into. You cannot deny entry into the class. If we educate them, they themselves will give up Hijab one day. They are wearing uniforms and tying this piece of cloth. The issue cannot be de-contextualised from the larger political reality in India and that is religious polarisation," said Soman.

Speaking to the Free Press Journal Maulana Mehmood Dariyabadi of the Ulema Council said, "what was made into a national issue was going on for a long time. They should have allowed it to run the way it was. Just for election and polarisation, they had done this."