HEAD TEACHERS’ leaders united last night in welcoming a high court decision that prevents a schoolgirl from wearing strict Islamic dress.

Mr Justice Bennett dismissed a challenge by 15-year-old Shabina Begum against her school’s refusal to allow her to wear the jilbab, a dress that leaves only the hands and face exposed. He said that to overturn the policy on uniforms risked creating the perception that Muslims were being given preferential treatment.

The judge said that the uniform policy Denbigh High School, Luton, had the “legitimate aim” of the proper running of a multi-cultural, multi-faith secular school”.

The solicitor for Miss Begum had said that the ban breached the pupil’s human right “to manifest her religious beliefs”.

The school argued that other Muslim girls relied on the protection of the uniform policy to resist pressure in the community to adopt the jilbab.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the school was right to seek to protect other Muslim pupils from fundamentalists.

“The fact that other schools allow Muslim dress is totally irrelevant. The issue is whether an individual school has the right to lay down a uniform policy that it considers to be reasonable for its community.”

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Assocation, said: “We are very pleased. The school had made a very clear effort to design a uniform within a multicultural policy, which is not to be overturned by a single pupil.

“One of the reasons we have school uniform is to protect pupils from pressure from whatever quarter. I think other schools will take encouragement from the judgment in being supportive of a uniform policy even where you have deeply held religious convictions.”

Muslim opinion was more divided. The vice-chairman of governors at Feversham College, Britain’s first state-funded Muslim secondary school, said the case was an example of growing anti-Islamic sentiment in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. Dr Mohammed Khan said: “If it was a Roman Catholic school with a strict code for their beliefs then one could understand it. But if she has a genuine religious conviction and it is a multicultural, multifaith school then one has to accept it.”

Miss Begum was sent home from school in September 2002 for wearing the jilbab, which covers all the body except hands and face. She has since refused to go to lessons and went to the High Court in London to try to get the decision reversed.

The school already allows girls to wear a headscarf with the shalwar kameez — loose trousers and tunic approved by local Muslim leaders.

Miss Begum, however, said the shalwar kameez did not conceal her arms and lower legs adequately and maintained that the school was violating her right to an education and her human right to freedom of religious expression.

Mr Justice Bennett said that by sticking to its rules on uniform the school was protecting pupils from unwelcome outside influences and contributing to “social cohesion and harmony”.

Many girls at the school did not wish to wear a jilbab and would feel “pressure on them either from inside or outside the school” if it were adopted.

Mr Justice Bennett suggested that Miss Begum may have been influenced by her older brother, Shuweb Rahman, who became her litigant-friend in court. “One wonders why it should have been her brother who articulated what the claimant was perfectly capable of saying herself,” he said.

During the trial Yasmin Bevan, the head teacher of the comprehensive, said that one of the reasons the school maintained its ban on the jilbab was to help children to resist the efforts of extremist Muslim groups to recruit them.

• Islamic rulings on dress are drawn from the Koran, which instructs followers to ensure that women are clothed modestly in public. Hands, feet and the face are the only parts of a woman’s body which may be visible to strangers to reduce the chance of being “molested”. The most extreme interpretation is the burqa, a shroud that covers the whole body with just a lattice slit over the eyes The jilbab, consists of a loose dress-like outer garment that covers the wearer’s other clothes, which some consider to make it more modest than the shalwar kameez, a tunic and trousers. A hijab is worn with both. Many Muslims believe the hijab, the scarf that wraps round the head and shoulders to hide hair, neck and chest, is sufficient as long as the rest of the attire does not hug the body, is not transparent or provocative.

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