SHE may have been covered in black from head to toe, but there was no disguising Aishah Azmi’s mood this week as she denounced those who would dare to challenge her right to wear a veil in the classroom.

At a press conference in a smart Leeds hotel after an employment tribunal’s rejection of her discrimination claim against the junior school that had suspended her, Mrs Azmi, 24, was flanked by a team of lawyers as she faced journalists and cameras.

She spoke confidently and assertively, attacking Tony Blair, pledging to continue her fight for justice and pleading the cause of fellow Muslim women who were being “treated as outcasts” across Britain.

As her voice rose, her eyes sparkled through a narrow slit in the black cloth. Here was a woman basking in the attention and relishing the chance to score political points for Islam.

The storm over Mrs Azmi’s veil is merely the latest in a series of incidents during the past 18 months, including suicide bombers and terrorist arrests, that have turned an uncomfortable spotlight on the Muslim community of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

It comprises a small number of terraced streets, schools and mosques on the edge of Saville Town, which lies in a loop of the River Calder to the south of the town centre.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 terrorist attack on London, lived here with his wife, Hasina Patel.

The Times has learnt that Ms Patel, 29, worked at the same Church of England junior school, Headfield, as Mrs Azmi.

Khan, 30, had links to the town’s largest mosque, the Markazi, which is the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a global Islamic missionary movement.

Several of the suspects arrested in August over the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners had attended meetings of Tablighi Jamaat, which French intelligence has labelled an “antechamber of fundamentalism”. The FBI says it is a fertile breeding ground for al-Qaeda.

Mrs Azmi’s father, Dr Muhammed Mulk, was named by Ofsted inspectors as the joint headmaster of an international Islamic seminary that is attached to the mosque. One of its students was Shehzad Tanweer, another of the July 7 bombers. In an unrelated matter, a 16-year-old Muslim schoolboy, who lived a couple of streets from the mosque, was arrested at his school in June and has been charged under the Terrorism Act with conspiracy to murder.

Are these merely a series of unhappy coincidences, or do they point to a small community that is somehow nourishing and nurturing a belief system containing a deep-rooted hostility towards the West? Asians account for 24 per cent of Dewsbury’s 53,500 population. But Saville Town, home to 5,000 people, is 88 per cent Asian, almost all of them Muslims with their roots in Pakistan or Gujarat, in India.

Between 1991 and 2001, the white population of Dewsbury fell by 2 per cent. During the same period, the Indian population rose by 25 per cent and the Pakistani community by 60 per cent. And as each year passes, Saville Town moves closer to becoming an exclusively Islamic enclave. It is possible here for a Muslim child to grow up — in the family home, at school and in the mosque and madrassa — without coming into any contact with Western lifestyles, opinions or values.

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