"Another incident of forceful application of personal interpretation took place recently in a classroom in the southern town of Luxor, Egypt. According to a news report, a female school teacher was fired last week for cutting the hair of two 12-year-old girl pupils because they were not wearing the appropriate Islamic headscarves.
She defended her actions by stating that she had asked all her girl pupils “to put on the headscarf, saying it was required for girls older than 10 to do so. Our religious traditions make it obligatory,” she said. “It started as a joke with the girls when I told them I would cut their hair if they don’t wear headscarves. Last Wednesday, one of my boy students reminded me and gave me scissors from his school bag and I used them and cut small amounts of their hair”.
Her action drew immediate condemnation by a leading woman’s organisation who termed it as one of “illegal violations of human rights and the rights of children”. A human rights activist chimed: “Without exaggeration, we feel that many of the hardline Islamists feel empowered by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power to impose their strict views on society.” Many of the country’s top clerics had on previous occasions addressed the issue of head-covering as a matter of personal choice." (thanks Tariq)
