Women teachers in schools and colleges should cover their faces if they are teaching pre-pubescent males, according to a new fatwa issued by the Libyan Dar Al-Ifta (the Mufti’s office) and signed by three of its sheikhs, in addition to the signature of the Mufti himself.

Women teachers in schools and colleges should cover their faces if they are teaching pre-pubescent males, according to a new fatwa issued by the Libyan Dar Al-Ifta (the Mufti’s office) and signed by three of its sheikhs, in addition to the signature of the Mufti himself.

Rida Arhouma, Secretary General at the Ministry of Education said the ruling came following a request for advice regarding complaints from inspection administration and officials in the education sector as well as from parents, saying that teachers with veils on their faces was having a negative impact on students’ abilities to properly interact.

“Before taking any decision regarding this complaint, we thought it important to ask Dar al-Ifta for its opinion,” Arouma said. “For this reason, we wrote to the Dar al-Ifta to get an answer from a religious perspective.” 

Journalist Fathi Ben Issa said the language in the fatwa was unclear. “Our sheikhs (Ahmad al-Ghiryani, Muhammad Kraidan, Ghayth al-Fakhiri), and the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Sadik Al-Ghariani, have chosen from among all jurisprudence and interpretations that the face and the palm of the hand should be covered for fear of sedition.”

“What is the age of the women targeted in this fatwa? Are they between 18 and 30 years old? Or should they be 35 because women today are getting married at this age?” he questioned about the fatwa’s ambiguity.

Ben Issa also noted that the term “should” was used in the fatwa. “This term has its jurisprudential significance (“should means a religious obligation unless in the Hajj).”

“What about the attractive male teacher? What should we do about him (the Sura of Prophet Yusuf for example)? What are the bounds of this sedition? Are we going to witness the issuance of a similar fatwa targeting all female public sector employees?”

Bypassing the inquiry

The response of Dar al-Ifta, which is published on its homepage, did not only cover the inquiry of the ministry but also bypassed it. The question of the ministry was about the negative impact of the veil covering the face on the educational process. It was about the possibility of abandoning the veil in order to overcome this educational problem. However, the Fatwa said that “the ministry needs to take the necessary measures to separate girls from boys in every classroom, starting from primary through to university.”

Dar al-Ifta added: “If that is not possible, they must at least be segregated during break times, in halls and corridors and have separate entrances for boys and girls. Schools should have male teachers to teach boys and female teachers to teach girls.” 

The negative impact

In the educational field it is known that communication (the transfer of information) is the basis of all of the educational processes because it aims at transferring a variety of experiences, knowledge, skills and emotions to the students.

The process of educational communication, as illustrated by specialists in education and psychology, require the use of a communication language between the one who is transferring knowledge (the teacher) and one who is receiving this knowledge (the pupil). The communication is composed of two types: verbal—through words and phrases— and facial expressions— the movement of the eyes and eyebrows and the direction and way of looking.   

Educators confirm that the use of non-verbal communication methods, such as signals and gestures contribute to increasing memory capacity.  It was found that the capacity to remember increases whenever the senses get more involved in receiving the messages. The eyes are on top of human communications organs but also the hands (signs and gestures) and the face have a big impact in the non-verbal communication between people.  One reason why students lose interest when a teacher leads a lesson without having any expressions on his face.

Therefore, specialists in education and psychologists stress the importance of the use of non-verbal communication methods and their role in delivering the message to the students, stressing that it is impossible to separate verbal and the non-verbal communication.

“The teacher’s veil is a significant impediment to effective communication with others, because the veiled teacher has difficulty in communicating her gestures, body movements and facial expressions correctly,” says Dr. Faraj Daroder, an educational expert. “It is not possible for her to show her smile, there is no eye contact, the lips are covered and expressions of Joy, sadness, cynicism, satisfaction are not clear.”

Supporters and opponents

In a poll we conducted on a sample of 65 people from the media, parents, teachers and educators, about whether they would like their sons or daughters to be taught by veiled teachers (with faces covered) 74% of the participants questioned said they wouldn’t like it and 26% said that they would. 

“The veil, regardless of wearing it during the educational process or not, is a practice that has nothing to do with religion at all,” says Ezzedine Abdul Karim, a writer and a journalist. “Marketing the veil as an Islamic teaching is a trap that everyone should be aware not to fall in. The mere discussion of this issue is part of the falling into that trap.”

Hala al-Assad does not want her son or daughter to be taught by a teacher wearing the veil. “This practice will make the society adopt the idea that women are strange creatures and will alert it to sex and all of its details because everything forbidden is desirable,” she said.

Najiya Sabkha, the head of the elementary school curriculum at the Ministry of Education, was one of the participants in the questionnaire and she stressed that she is against the wearing of veils during the educational process.

Informed of all sciences

The Libyan Dar al-Ifta has issued several statements in the past, denouncing what was going on in educational institutions, especially the mixing of males and females. It wrote letters to the Ministry of Education, on more than one occasion, asking it to change the curricula of National Education, cancel music from the curricula, and segregate males and females.

“Religious scholars should not interfere in issues they do not know anything about, in the same way that other specialists and experts do not interfere or argue with them in their field of specialization,” educational expert Dr. Faraj said.  

He added that “that the controversy in Yemen between those who refuse the veil in schools and those who do not has impeded the well-functioning of the educational process in the country, especially when some of the extremists started to enter into confrontations with education officials.”  He wondered if “the Dar al-Ifta is aware of the risk of raising such an issue that could be used by some extremist militias as an excuse to impose the veil on teachers, claiming that they are guided by this fatwa? 

Meanwhile, the decision banning the veil inside classrooms, which was issued by the Gaddafi government, is still effective and has not yet been canceled.