UDUPI, India — Ayesha Shifa is a 16-year-old with a passion for playing badminton with her younger siblings, and a knack for crunching numbers. She loves math and wants to be an accountant. But her dreams — and those of millions of Indian Muslim girls like her — are on hold, thanks to a new rule her school imposed last winter.
In early February, parents of all the Muslim students at Shifa's public high school in southwest India were called into a meeting. The principal told them their daughters could no longer wear the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, in class. They'd have to remove it or stay home from school.
