Sania Mirza had offended Islam. Such was the judgement of a group of Muslim clerics. It was September of 2005, and Mirza, then 18 years old and the No. 34-ranked tennis player in the world, was on her way to Kolkata, India to play in the Sunfeast Open.

Then came the fatwa. It would be Mirza’s first brush with radical Islam, but not her last.

Issued by Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui, a leading cleric with the little-known Sunni Ulema Board, the religious order demanded that Mirza, a practicing Muslim, stop wearing “indecent” clothes to play tennis.

Instead of standard-issue t-shirts and skirts, the board ruled, she should wear long tunics and headscarves, like a group of female Iranian badminton players. Or else.

“She will be stopped from playing if she doesn’t adhere to it,” Siddiqullah Chowdhry, a cleric with a Kolkata-based Muslim group Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Hind, told Reuters. The threat was vague, but still alarming. … Read More

(via Vice Sports)