LONDON: Britain's highest court on Wednesday upheld a school's decision to require a Muslim pupil to abandon the jilbab in favour of school uniform, reversing a lower court decision. The Court of Appeal in March last year ruled that Shabina Begum was unlawfully excluded from Denbigh High School in Luton, north of London, after she refused to change out of the head-to-toe jilbab.The school then appealed to the panel of five judges at the House of Lords, Britain's de facto supreme court, which ruled on Wednesday that the school had been fully justified in its actions. "It had taken immense pains to devise a uniform policy which respected Muslim beliefs but did so in an inclusive, unthreatening and uncompetitive way," Lord Thomas Bingham ruled. "The rules laid down were as far from being mindless as uniform rules could ever be. The school had enjoyed a period of harmony and success to which the uniform policy was thought to contribute."
He said the rules - drafted by a school where 75 percent of the students were Muslim and Muslims sat on school bodies - were acceptable to mainstream Muslim opinion.