London: As a major controversy raged in Britain over the veil issue, film actor and activist Shabana Azmi on Thursday suggested a debate on the question of Muslim women wearing the controversial veil, saying that as per Quran a woman does not need to cover her face.
"The Quran speaks about women wearing clothes to cover her modesty. A woman is supposed to cover herself to be modest. She does not need to cover her face. A time has come for a debate on the issue," Azmi told reporters shortly before receiving the International Peace Award instituted by the London-based Gandhi Foundation.
"The fight today cannot be between the Christian and the Muslim, the fight cannot be between the Hindu and the Muslim. The fight needs to be between ideologies -- the ideologies of the liberal versus the ideologies of the extremists." It is within this paradigm the debate has to be carried out, she said.
The controversy over Muslim women wearing veils was sparked three weeks ago by Commons' leader Jack Straw when he said he had asked Muslim women to remove veils while visiting him at his Blackburn constituency office. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said last week that the garment was a 'mark of separation' and makes people from the outside community feel uncomfortable.
A Muslim teaching assistant in the UK last week lost her bid to wear a veil in class with an employment tribunal ruling that the school was within its rights to suspend her from work on the issue.
Asked what inspired her to involve herself in the welfare of the slum dwellers in Mumbai, Azmi said it was her film Paar, for which the shooting had taken place in Kolkata, where she developed friendship with a slum dweller at Nehata.
She found that the slum dweller lived in a 225-sq-metre one-room tenement without any electricity, water and air. She live there with eight people. It was that which made her think of the plight of slum dwellers, she said, adding she was firmly of the view that mere demolition of the slum would not solve the problem unless the government provided them alternative dwelling places.
"We have managed to impact on the policies of both the Centre and the state government and 13,000 families which were displaced in the Sanjay Gandhi Park in Mumbai have now been rehabilitated." Answering a question on India's economic reforms and the strides the country was making, she said "no doubt there was great economic boom but at the same time poorest of the poor are yet to reap the benefits of reform."
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