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Veil dispute begins in Florida courtroom

By Matt Bean
Court TV

Freeman is fighting for her right to wear a veil on her driver's license photo.
Freeman is fighting for her right to wear a veil on her driver's license photo.

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A Florida woman's fight to remain veiled in a driver's license photograph began with testimony from her husband and a local expert on Islamic law. CNN's Susan Candiotti reports (May 28)
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(Court TV) -- A Florida woman's fight to remain veiled in a driver's license photograph began Tuesday with testimony from her husband and a local expert on Islamic law.

"It's your opinion that if Sultaana Freeman were required to remove her veil ... that would be a violation of her religious beliefs?"  asked ACLU-backed lawyer Howard Marks of the local scholar of Islam, Safil Islam Abdul Ahad.

"Yes," Ahad said.

Freeman, 35, sued the highway department in 2002 after her driver's license was revoked when she refused to take an unveiled photograph to replace the veiled picture on her 2001 license.

She claims the suspension violated the state's Free Exercise of Religion Statue, which bars the government from interfering with a person's religious practice, and wants her license reinstated.

But lawyers for the State of Florida say the events of September 11 made driver's license photos more important than ever.  After the attacks, the state made photo licenses mandatory for most drivers.  Prosecutors will attempt to show that there is a "compelling interest" for Freeman, and other motorists with veiled photos, to submit to full-face photographs.

Freeman's civil hearing may be, on the surface, about a driver's license.  But Tuesday's proceedings showed that it could help define the balance between state security and religious expression in post-September 11 America.

In his opening statement, Assistant Attorney General Jason Vail referred both directly and indirectly to the September 11 attacks.

"Any ruling in favor of the plaintiff will open up the possibility of people coming in and claiming [exemption from a picture license] on religious grounds," said the prosecutor.  "You can only imagine what might happen as a result of that."

Vail has argued that Freeman's rigid interpretation of Islamic law is only one of a "multiplicity of opinions," and set a confrontational tone for his case when cross-examining her husband, Abdul-Malik Freeman, the first witness on his wife's behalf.  Calling Freeman by his given name, Mike Freeman, the attorney used his final question to ask about one of the more assailed elements of the strict Islam belief.

"Do you believe that in Islam a wife is to be obedient to her husband?" he asked.

"Yes," said Freeman, nodding.

Sultaana Freeman's lawyer, Howard Marks, said in his opening statement that the interpretation of Islamic law was beside the point.  "I guarantee you your honor if my client Sultaana Freeman was a member of a majority religion in the state of Florida then I would not be here today and she would not be here today," he said.  "We do not want to get in a position of interpreting Islamic law ... obviously you're going to have scholars that disagree on certain passages as well as any religious text."

But Marks, anticipating a battle on the role of the veil, nonetheless called religious scholar Safil Islam Abdul Ahad, an adjunct professor of history at the University of Central Florida, to discuss the role of the veil in Islam.

"My opinion is that it is mandatory for a woman to wear a veil," said Ahad, reciting a passage from the religion's holy book, the Quran.

Ahad, whose beard appeared to be partially dyed red, said only a life and death circumstance could justify the lifting of a Muslim woman's veil.

Freeman took the stand and began testifying just after the lunch break.


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