A Muslim group has offered to help fund a school’s legal battle over its refusal to let a pupil wear the niqab in class. In an unprecedented move, the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (Meco) has written to the head teacher to say it is prepared to contribute to a fighting fund. Taj Hargey, Meco’s chairman, said he was also willing to organise a campaign among Muslims nationally to resist “this largely Saudi-driven campaign to make the niqab a compulsory requirement for Muslim women”.

Daily Telegraph, 5 February 2007