Anglican leader wades into Muslim veil debate

BEIJING, Oct 23 (Reuters) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said today that he had no problem with Muslim women wearing a veil but that there could be questions of practicality.

The issue has come to the fore in Britain after a Muslim teaching assistant was suspended from work for refusing to remove her veil.

Even Prime Minister Tony Blair has stepped into the highly charged debate about Muslim women's use of the full veil, last week calling it a ''mark of separation''.

''My own bottom line is that there ought to be no problem about the visibility of people proclaiming their religious allegiance,'' Williams told a press conference in Beijing, at the end of a two-week visit to China.

''There may be any number of practical questions about the degree of veiling that is socially acceptable, and I don't think there are quick answers for that. But the bottom line would be about acceptability,'' he said.

A British tribunal ruled on Thursday that 24-year-old Aishah Azmi from West Yorkshire in northern England had not been discriminated against when the school where she worked asked her to remove her veil.

Headfield Church of England Junior School in Dewsbury had said Azmi should remove the veil in order to communicate. When she refused, they suspended her.

''If there's a practical question about, for example, the visibility of the teacher to hearing impaired children, or children with behavioural difficulties, where you need to see the face, that's a question that has to be faced in those terms, not in terms of what is religiously acceptable in public,'' Williams said.

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