Lucknow, Oct. 7: Leading seminary Darul Uloom Deoband has issued an edict prohibiting Muslim women against dressing their eyebrows or cutting their hair "to look beautiful".

"Dressing the eyebrow to look beautiful is against the tenets of Islam," Maulana Mufti Arshad Faruqui, head of the Darul Ifta, the fatwa department of the seminary, told reporters yesterday in Saharanpur, 500km west of Lucknow.

The fatwa was issued yesterday in response to a question from a local Muslim man who had asked whether Islamic convention allowed women to dress (pluck, wax, thread or draw on) their eyebrows or cut their hair unless they had grown unmanageably.

"They (women) can trim the eyebrows if they have grown too long but doing it for the purpose of looking beautiful is un-Islamic. The same is expected from men too," the Darul Ifta chief told reporters.

"Hair is the beauty of a woman. It shouldn't be cut unless it becomes unmanageable," he added, exempting men from this diktat.

Other clerics in Saharanpur, home to the Darul Uloom Deoband, supported the edict.

"Women visiting beauty parlours is wrong. This fatwa makes it clear that they shouldn't do anything externally to look beautiful," said Maulana Lutfur Rehman Sadiq Qasmi.

A Muslim woman in Lucknow, who didn't want to be identified, told this newspaper: "The fatwa is ridiculous. These clerics are making a mockery of their seminary by responding to stupid fatwa seekers. Women have stopped taking them seriously."

Another recent fatwa issued by the seminary reads: "If the hair on a woman's face and hands makes her look ugly, she's allowed to cut it for her husband's pleasure."