Packed into a small hall inside Cairo University’s Faculty of Arabic Language and Literature and guarded by security personnel, Muslim girls covered from head to toe began to cry, slap their cheeks in grief, asking to be allowed to attend the exam, which had just started.
After several rounds of phone calls between the guards and their superiors, the guards asked a female policewoman for assistance. In turn, she asked the girls to remove their niqabs (full-face veils), checked their IDs and finally let them enter the examination hall.
"We suffer like this on every exam day, despite the fact that we have court rulings that allow us into the exam hall wearing the niqab," said Nagguia Abdel Wahab, a third-year student.
She and many others were shocked on Sunday when a Cairo administrative court upheld a decision by heads of the Government-run universities to ban veiled students from attending the exams with the niqab on.
“How can this happen? We have court rulings enabling us to attend the exams. This is judicial chaos,” said Radwa Sameh, another veiled student.
She added that they were not hurting anyone by wearing the niqab. "We are adhering to the Islamic Shari’a (Law) and follow the example of the wives of the Prophet Mohamed," Sameh said.
The Faculty of Arabic Language and Literature has at least 200 students wearing the niqab. This fact led the late Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the Minister of Waqfs, and Egypt’s Grand Mufti to publish in conjunction a booklet explaining that the niqab was not part of Islamic Shari’a, stressing that it was a tradition.
One thousand copies of this booklet were distributed to the university students.
Nizar Ghorab, a lawyer for 70 veiled students at the faculty, said that Sunday’s ruling, to ban students who wear the niqab from attending their exams, was unlawful, because it ignored a previous ruling by the Higher Administrative Court that allowed them to attend exams with the niqab on.
"The problem is that, the universities want each student who wears the niqab to get a ruling from the Higher Administrative Court. This is nothing but red tape," Ghorab said.
He has appealed the ruling again. "The surprising thing is that the court, which banned the niqab in examination halls on Sunday, is the same court, which ruled to allow it in February and April," he expressed in wonderment.
Hani Helal, Egypt’s Minister of Higher Education, denied that the niqab-wearing students were banned from the university campus.
"All we wanted was that these girls should attend their exams with their faces bare, in our attempt to fight cheating using the niqab. We then eased this and let them. However, they should uncover their faces when the proctors ask for it," Helal told a parliamentary panel on Sunday.
This case, and that of a religious edict banning the niqab in girls' school dormitories, has bounced back and forth between various courts since the Minister of Higher Education imposed the ban last October, which resulted in appeals by 55 students.
The Government said it enforced the ban in part because students, both male and female, were sitting exams disguised as other candidates by wearing a face veil.
