When al-Azhar's Grand Imam restricted niqab in all-female classrooms
In 2009 Sheikh Muḥammad Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī, then Grand Imam of al-Azhar, instructed a schoolgirl to remove her niqab and al-Azhar later restricted the wearing of niqab in its all-female classrooms and dormitories. He described the niqab as a custom rather than a religious obligation. The scope was narrow; the backlash was not.
Most restriction stories on this site come from governments. This one came from inside the Muslim scholarly establishment — from the head of al-Azhar itself.
What happened
On 5 October 2009, during a tour of al-Azhar-affiliated schools to check their swine-flu precautions, Sheikh Muḥammad Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī, then Grand Imam of al-Azhar, visited the Ahmad al-Libi girls' institute in Nasr City, Cairo, and found a second-year preparatory student wearing niqab in her all-female classroom. He ordered her to remove it, reportedly telling her the niqab was "merely a custom, with no connection to Islam whatsoever." According to Egyptian press accounts, he followed it with a personal remark about her appearance. He then announced his intention to bar niqab-wearing students and teachers from entering al-Azhar's affiliated institutes altogether.
What was actually adopted was narrower than that initial announcement: al-Azhar's supreme council settled on a policy under which female students could enter the premises wearing niqab and continue wearing it where men were present, but not inside all-female classrooms and dormitories.
The scope, and why it was misread
The restriction, as implemented, was deliberately narrow — applying to women-only settings, where the stated rationale for face covering does not arise. Ṭanṭāwī stated that women remained free to wear niqab at home, in the street, and in places where it was not specifically restricted.
The narrowness did not prevent wider controversy. Many interpreted the move as a general position against niqab. Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Nujaymī, a professor at the Saudi Higher Judicial Institute and a member of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, disputed the "mere custom" framing directly: the niqab, he said, is mentioned in hadith, not simply cultural, and called barring niqab-wearers from al-Azhar "a grave danger" to respect for different religious schools of thought. Separately, Ḥamdī Ḥasan, an MP and assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, objected less to the ban itself than to how Ṭanṭāwī treated the student: his reported remarks to her were, in Ḥasan's account, humiliating in front of her classmates and lacking the compassion expected of a religious scholar.
Why it still matters
Ṭanṭāwī's "custom, not religion" position is closely related to the view that ʿAlī Jumʿah would later express in a more developed form. The episode also shows how a limited administrative rule concerning all-female classrooms became remembered publicly as "al-Azhar banned the niqab". The debate reached Malaysia too, where religious figures differed over whether the ruling was defensible.
Sources. ABC News (Australia) · Dawn · Arab News · Al Arabiya (Arabic) · Al-Ittihad, via dpa (Arabic) · Soscili (Malay summary)
The full narrative above — the specific institute and occasion, Ṭanṭāwī's remarks, the initial announced intent versus the narrower policy actually adopted, and both named critics (al-Nujaymī, Ḥasan) — is drawn from and confirmed across the Arabic and English contemporaneous reporting listed. The Malay summary's own named critics (Youssef al-Badri, Sheikh Ali Abu al-Hasan) could not be independently re-traced to a primary report and have been replaced above with the critics this site could verify.