I don’t watch al-Jazeera English (although I can get it, part-time, on Freeview) but saw this clip of David Frost interviewing Taj Hargey and Salma Yaqoob over the recently-introduced ban on the niqaab in France on YouTube. The debate in this clip goes for the first 11-and-a-half minutes of the YouTube clip; I can’t guarantee that it’ll be kept up. Salma Yaqoob is a RESPECT party councillor from Birmingham (David Frost introduced her as the party’s leader, but there isn’t much left of the party nowadays), while Taj Hargey is a wannabe Muslim community leader whose ideas largely seem lifted from the anti-Islamic “Qur’an alone” school of thought.

Although he did not explicitly advocate banning the niqaab, he alleged that it was “un-Islamic” because it was based on pre-Islamic (Byzantine and Persian) customs in which men kept their “possessions” under wraps, and is “un-Qur’anic” because the terms burqa and niqaab do not appear in the Qur’an itself. This is, of course, a totally spurious argument, because even if the terms do not appear in the Qur’an, it does not mean that they were not present among the Muslims in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), but narrations from that time demonstrate that face-covering was in fact common among the female Companions, and that some of them in fact remained in their homes most or all of the time.

He also persistently alleged that the custom as practised in the West is only due to Saudi, Wahhabi and Taliban influence, yet face-covering is common in many other parts of the Muslim world where Saudi influence is minimal, such as parts of Kenya, Zanzibar, Morocco, Hadramaut and eastern Indonesia (particularly Sumbawa). Hadramaut is a well-known centre of traditional Sunni scholarship which has always resisted Wahhabism. The Wahhabis or “salafis” are well-known for their opinion that there is no such thing as good innovation in religion, yet their women are to be found wearing the modern three-layer niqaab, rather than a cloth tied round their head and across their face as was the custom in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and which is still to be found in some of the places I mentioned earlier; Hargey is thus applying a parody of their position by saying that the niqaab or burqa is un-Islamic because the female Companions did not wear it. As for the Taliban, they enforced a type of veiling that is not known anywhere else except Pakistan, i.e. places were Pashtuns are dominant.

He insisted that Muslim women who wear it in the West should “be honest” about the reason they wear it, and stop claiming that it is about religion when it is in fact a “tribal rag”. This disrespectful language echoes his friend Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s comparison of the rising popularity of hijab to swine flu, but it is also inaccurate. The niqaab is in no sense tribal to a woman of Jamaican heritage, is it? While the Arabian peninsula is indeed tribal, this simply means (in an Arabian context) that people know their ancestors going back generations; it’s not another word for a small national or ethnic group as it is sometimes used in Africa or the Americas. Much of the Arab world is tribal in the same sense as the Arabian peninsula is (Libya was recently described as such by the Gaddafi faction), but niqaab is not seen there. Calling it “tribal” also contradicts the claim of Byzantine or Persian origin, since those empires were not tribal.

He dismisses the religious argument by claiming that it is all made up by male scholars, based on hadeeth which were themselves, he said, written 300 years ago (also by male scholars) and contain an awful lot of hear-say and fabrication. The argument about male scholars is false, because a large proportion of the scholars and those who transmitted the hadeeth in the early generations of Islam were in fact female, including A’isha (radhi Allahu ‘anhaa), the wife of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), and one of the major teachers of Imam Shafi’i named Nafisa. The Qur’an itself is not, as Hargey would know if he bothered to read it, a modern feminist text in any case, but Muslims never have based their religion solely off it — it clearly states “obey Allah and His Messenger”, and without the hadeeth, that command becomes something of a dead letter. A further point against Hargey’s rejection of the hadeeth-based parts of Islamic law is that the major scholars of law were much closer to the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) than the major collectors of hadeeth, and took narrations from those they regarded as trustworthy, and they knew of the problem of people who fabricated hadeeth (they were mainly sectarians). It is not a case of modern scholars starting from scratch based on the Bukhari and Muslim collections.

The fact is that women who choose to wear the niqaab, regardless of any consideration of whether it is a socially wise choice, are do what Muslim women, particularly in cities, did for generations, from the first generation until colonial times, and are doing what is held to be compulsory by strong opinions in all four mainstream schools of Islamic thought — indeed, it is only not regarded as mandatory today because the majority of women do not wear it; that was not true in the great cities of the Islamic world until very recently. They are also not mostly “Wahhabis”, contrary to what some might imagine (and what some repeatedly claim). Anyone posing as an imam should be defending them, not slandering them to the media. Salma Yaqoob did defend the women who wear niqaab on the basis of free choice, but did not even begin to tackle his baseless claims about hadeeth, although it might have been too complicated an issue to get into.

The fact is that Hargey has no claim to be an imam, and Yaqoob should have said so — he’s the leader of a small group which conducts anti-Islamic publicity stunts for the media, some of which contradict things which are necessarily known of Islam. His status is not dissimilar to that of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — someone with no claim to Islam due to the extremity of his beliefs, but who uses a Muslim name and a similar cultural background to pretend to be one in front of non-Muslims, peddling an “Islam” which bears no resemblance to the real thing, to the detriment of people who practise the real thing. One can understand the BBC making this mistake (at least once — even John Ware did not wheel him out a second time), but there is no excuse for al-Jazeera.

What’s the difference between a one-day niqaab experiment and being a niqaabi? For one thing, a real niqaabi is doing it out of a real sense of religious commitment and gains some degree of strength from that in dealing with whatever strange looks and hostility she may encounter. She most likely lives in a place where there are plenty of niqaabis, so there is strength in numbers, and has friends who also wear niqaab. She has tried a number of different types of veil and has found one which suits her and is comfortable — there are many types, but the “three layer Saudi black niqaab” seems to be the most popular. Someone doing an “experiment” will find that they can’t breathe or see properly through the veil, that they get funny looks and might complain that they can’t express themselves properly.

Similarly, the disability-related experiments fail to represent the real experiences of everyday disabled people, not least because the experimenters jump straight into one aspect of being disabled in a way that nobody with a real disability ever does. Let’s take a wheelchair-user with a spinal cord injury, for example: these days, they will most likely have a lightweight chair which is specially made for their body and which may have been customised somewhat to fit their personality, while an experimenter will be using a clunky hospital chair that is typically used to transport an old person home in a van but not much more. The real wheelchair user will know that they will still have to use the wheelchair the next day, so they will be thinking of ways round the obstacles they encounter (and of fighting any obstacles society may put in their place), not huffing and puffing and then thinking “I can’t wait for tomorrow when I can walk”. But perhaps most importantly, before getting in the chair, the user will have spent weeks or months bedridden or attached to some immobilising device so as to let their injury heal, so compared to what they had before, using a wheelchair may well feel like freedom, which it won’t to someone who’s just walked up to the chair and sat down. Even for someone who is not paralysed but is, say, debilitated by a condition like M.E., a wheelchair may allow them to get out of their house, which they could not otherwise do.

Anyone approached for advice on such an experiment should be told very simply not to do it, and ask someone who wears a niqaab every day (or uses a wheelchair, if that’s the experiment) about their experience. There are many women around who do and many of them are more than willing to tell their stories, which will be so much more representative and meaningful than anything you would learn from a one-day experiment. We’ve all heard of walking a mile in someone’s shoes, but if your feet hurt from doing so, it’s probably because their shoes are not your size.

Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the move to ban the niqaab in France:

The national assembly’s action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate the birth of republican democracy in the revolution of 1789. Banning the burqa on the eve of the Fête Nationale provided a clear affirmation of true Frenchness.

It followed a year in which President Sarkozy included a minister of immigration and national identity in his cabinet. The title of the new post conveyed the message that if national identity were in trouble immigrants were the source. The president and his minister called for a countrywide conversation on the meanings of national identity. There were to be contests and town-hall meetings to articulate what it meant to be truly French. When that effort fizzled, they came up with more draconian measures. Sarkozy proposed, this month, to take away the citizenship of foreign-born French citizens if they were convicted of crimes such as threatening the life of a police officer. Children born in France to foreign parents (once presumed to automatically qualify for citizenship) would be denied citizenship if there were any evidence of juvenile delinquency.

This month, too, began the expulsion of the Roma, said to be illegally camped throughout the country and responsible for all manner of crimes. Despite an outcry from those who denounced the expulsions as echoes of Vichy (the government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s), these activities have made “security” a prime focus for politicians and public opinion pollsters. Whether it will deliver another term to Sarkozy in 2012 remains to be seen.

The immediate effect is to conjure a fantasy spectre in which foreigners endanger France and are made to take the blame for all its economic, social and political problems.

The people advocating bans on veils on supposed women’s rights grounds are, she says, never normally supportive of efforts to improve the lot of women; some of them have opposed laws on domestic violence and sexual harassment. It’s all about forcing people of foreign descent to adopt white cultural norms, along with white feminists thinking that they have the right to dictate what liberty means for all women.

There is also the myth (which Joan Wallach Scott mentions but does not refute) that 1789 was somehow the “birth of republican democracy”. It wasn’t. After that came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and a period of restored monarchy; republicanism did not become stable in France until the Third Republic.

So, does anyone still want to tell niqaabis living in the UK that, if they want to wear a “black sack” or a “burqa”, they should “go back” to a Muslim country? It’s always interesting how they promote the idea that face-covering is some alien tradition that really belongs “back home”, but crow when the governments “back home” make like difficult for women who wear it. While niqaab isn’t yet banned in public places in Syria, banning it would be an easy matter for the Syrian government, which is a dictatorship with its base in a minority religious community (the Alawites) and a much-feared secret police, to ban it any time they wanted. (After the Hama uprising in the early 1980s, which led to that city being bombed and left in ruins for months afterwards, the régime’s thugs pulled hijaabs off women’s heads in other places in Syria, and there were reports of rapes.)

I have read blogs on a few occasions complaining about how hard life is for non-hijaabi women in the West because Muslims are so condemnatory towards them. This one is a recent example:

I realize now, years into my understanding of my own identity of a Muslim American woman, that most frequently women who don’t wear hijab tend to be harassed, marginalized, patronized, lectured, judged, attacked, and insulted—get this—BY THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES, the Muslim community specifically.

I’ve read countless articles, blogs, books, etc where Muslim women whine about their rights to cover, to not be judged for their choices, etc. But the opposite isn’t always true. If a woman by choice doesn’t wear the hijab, she is mistreated or pressured by the community to become a hijabi. I find it interesting that Muslims tend to preach and demand rights from others, yet they fail to fulfill them themselves. Where is the respect, freedom of choice and tolerant attitudes when it comes to Muslim women who don’t wear hijab?

I’m not even sure if the majority of Muslim women in the west even wear hijaab, although far more wear it than wear niqaab. The majority of those who don’t come from families where it’s not worn and never has been, so the condemnation cannot be coming from them. Still, it’s hard to pity the poor dears who keep getting told by other Muslims that they should wear hijaab because it’s compulsory and their practice is lacking if they don’t, which is all true, when Muslim women who do wear it face prejudice from others, difficulty finding work, and the risk of being kicked out of school or college — the last perhaps not in the USA but certainly in Europe and many Muslim countries.

Believe it or not, Muslim men who fail to grow their beards to a fist’s length get called faasiqs by the scholars of whole groups of Muslims in the UK (where Indo-Pak Hanafis are dominant), so it’s not just a female problem — scholars pass down that ruling as if it were the only valid one, and ordinary Muslims judge others on it. But as far as hijaab is concerned, we commonly hear the claim that the west is so tolerant towards Muslims while Muslim countries aren’t so tolerant the other way round (always the same few countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan), and why should Muslim women be allowed to wear niqaab here when you can’t wear a miniskirt in a Muslim country, etc. The fact of the matter is that life is difficult for observant Muslim women in many of the secular dictatorships of the Muslim world.

The miniskirt remark is plain untrue: while it may be inadvisable to walk around the Fez medina in a miniskirt, you can wear much less than that on the beaches at Agadir and a number of similar resorts in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. It’s well-known that hijaab is banned in universities in Turkey. The government attempted a few years ago to crack down on hijaab in general in Tunisia a few years ago, claiming among other things that it was a foreign import. Women who wear niqaab were banned from entering universities, including al-Azhar, in Egypt last year and have also been banned from entering some public parks. In other countries, women who wear hijaab find difficulty getting employment as many organisations favour a western style of dress, even though it’s a Muslim country (e.g. Morocco).

It’s easy to be a hijaabi in many of these countries if you are content to be a housewife. The most conservative women are usually not affected: it is those who want to work and study while maintaining their religious practice who suffer. The same goes for much of the western world. However, not only do people hold up the Muslim world as the place to go if you want to live and dress as a Muslim, but they also praise the same governments when they ban Muslim dress among their own citizens, as if they have “finally seen the light” and realised that the way things are done in the west is better. The fact is that none of these countries are democracies; they are quasi-dictatorships in which a ruling party, while it may tolerate (or appear to tolerate) a certain amount of dissent, hangs on to power by corrupt and violent means. They are not representative of their population, especially the government in Syria which is based in Baathism (like Saddam Hussein, remember?).

So, a government banning niqaab is not a sign of a population deciding it’s bad; it’s a sign of a particular government deciding that there is a popular movement which is a threat to their power. It’s noticeable that some of those who opposed the ban in Syria would not give their full names, because they feared for the consequences. Syria certainly isn’t following the west in a lot of other things, such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.

There are some very familiar “security” arguments, which I have dealt with in previous posts ([1], [2]). Quite simply, there have not been many serious incidents involving women in niqaab in the whole of the twenty or so years that women have been wearing them. True, there was the stabbing attack on the MP, Stephen Timms, but that woman was caught, so her “disguise” did not help her. I don’t think these arguments hold water. One person said she got off a bus at the next stop every time a woman with her face covered got on, and there were dire predictions of “black widow” suicide bomb attacks, but since nothing like this has ever happened in the UK, the fears (or claimed fears) are somewhat premature.

There were, however, two breathless callers (one male, one female) some time after 11am who came out with a “this is Britain, do things our way” type of attitude. Steve from Twickenham, who came on after 2:14, was particularly aggressive, saying that it was only a matter of time before the “black widows of Chechnya” appear on the London Underground unless “we deal with this cancer”, insisting that this was “England, not an Islamic country” and that women who want to wear the “burqa” should “go back” to Pakistan or some other Islamic country because “we don’t want it”. Emma in Kilburn, who was on about 15 minutes later, suggested that their main attraction for coming to live in this country was the benefits system and the health service. Whether someone came on after I switched off (which was during Emma’s call) and put them right I don’t know, but it was Vanessa’s job to do so, and she chose not to.

The fact is, the majority of women who wear niqaab in this country did not choose to come here, and not all even have an escape route to Pakistan or any other Muslim country. They started wearing the niqaab of their own accord in the 1990s, and some have put it on since and stopped wearing it since, but most of them did not arrive here already wearing it, but if they did, they probably came because their families came, not because they chose to come by themselves. The whole argument “if you don’t like our ways, go home” is racist and factually wrong, and Feltz chose not to challenge it. A subsequent caller did challenge the whole argument that the niqaab is “un-British”, saying that most British people have no real idea what British culture was (and that he had, in fact, had conversations with veiled women in Regent’s Park).

I often get the impression that the most aggressive callers, like Steve from Twickenham, are actually people from the Far Right who are calling up anonymously, which is a known Far Right tactic. They sound like they have a political statement to make and that this is their platform to say it while pretending to be an ordinary Joe saying what the “man in the street” really thinks. Steve had an opinion poll on his side, which “revealed” that two-thirds of the British public support a ban, but no doubt the poll had a fairly small sample of the same people that polling organisation usually contacts. In any case, this country isn’t run by opinion polls and the whole point of representative democracy is to take power away from the mob. Even with some of the calmer callers, one never know if the stories they tell are real or made-up; could a woman really have got away with going on a school trip and saying literally nothing all day when in charge of children?

I think Damian Green’s comments over the weekend, that “telling people what they can and can’t wear, if they’re just walking down the street, is a rather un-British thing to do” are pretty much spot-on (although it should be emphasised that Green is the immigration minister; most of the women who wear the niqaab are not immigrants). He also said that France has an aggressively secular state which bans crucifixes in schools, while Britain has schools explicitly run by religious organisations. Those by Caroline Spelman (also here), the environment minister, in today’s Telegraph are somewhat less relevant:

One of the things we pride ourselves on in this country is being free, and being free to choose what you wear is a part of that, so banning the burka is absolutely contrary I think to what this country is all about.

I’ve been out to Afghanistan and I think I understand much better as a result … why a lot of Muslim women want to wear the burka.

For them, the burka confers dignity, it’s their choice, they choose to go out dressed in a burka. I understand that it is a different culture from mine but the fact is in this country women want to be free to choose … whether or not to go out in the morning wearing a burka.

However, the Afghan burqa has no relevance to the situation here because almost nobody wears that type of garment; what women wear here can be removed bit by bit, and usually reveals the eyes. It’s also true that not all women who wore the burqa in Afghanistan were forced to by the Taliban, but an awful lot were. Still, that is not really relevant as the Taliban never have ruled here; but also, whatever other problems women have in places where the burqa is found can’t necessarily be connected to it, because they are also found in places where they aren’t, Muslim or otherwise. I have always held that calling the “burqa” a symbol of oppression, much as has been said about the hijaab itself (and about traditionally female clothing in the West also), not only because what may be a symbol of oppression in one country might not be so somewhere else but also because doing away with the symbol does nothing about the oppression.

People have also imputed to Spelman the suggestion that wearing the burqa itself is empowering, which actually is not what she said:

We are a free country, we attach importance to people being free and for a woman it is empowering to be able to choose each morning when you wake up what you wear.

So, the freedom to choose is empowering, not the burqa itself, so the whole debate as to whether the burqa empowers women and whether that’s a really ridiculous thing to say (which I think it would be, if she had actually said it) looks rather pointless. In any case, women would not choose to wear the niqaab in the West if it was anything like as cumbersome and awkward (and ridiculous-looking) as the Afghan one, and I don’t think they all wear it in search of empowerment anyway. They do so because they believe their religion tells them to, because they want to practise it as much as they can rather than the bare minimum. What this is about is the right of women to practise their religion as they see fit as long as they do not harm anyone else, and the evidence over the past 20 years is that neither the garment, nor most of those who wear it, harm anyone.

Regarding the “choice” argument, Norm quotes from Hitchens’s article and then comments:

To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority…

This is sophistical. For any woman wanting and choosing to wear the burqa or the veil, a law against doing so imposes a ban. Christopher is consequently obliged to suggest that there are no such women: ‘we have no assurance’, he says, ‘that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way’. He says, again, that ‘the right of women to show their faces… easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise’. Well, I don’t know what the proportions are as between Muslim women covering their faces out of choice and those doing so because they are compelled to, but I’ll give Christopher good odds that the number in the former category is not insignificant, and for all of them the law would constitute a ban. As for ‘the right of women to show their faces’, in democratic societies this is already protected by law, and if there are men breaching that law to force women to cover their faces against their will, then it can and should be activated accordingly.

I have personally been in contact with Muslim women for a number of years, both online and offline. I do know for a fact that nearly all those who have chosen to wear it in the West (the story may well be different in the Gulf and elsewhere, but since this ban applies to women here and not there, that hardly matters) have done so of their own accord. Some have worn it for a time and then removed it, but all wore it because they regarded it as meritorious or, sometimes, compulsory in the religion. None of those I’ve come across have done it simply because someone else told them to; as with the hijaab, some faced opposition from their parents or spouses when starting to wear it. Any Muslim could have told Norm or Hitchens this.

Second, regarding niqaab in banks:

Christopher writes, second, about the state of affairs in banks: ‘A person barging through those doors with any sort of mask would incur the right and proper presumption of guilt.’ OK, so that’s banks. The burqa can be banned from banks.

But actually, does any bank ban niqaabs? Not that I have seen a woman in a niqaab in a bank recently, but I have never seen one get turned away, or seen a message on a forum from a niqaabi saying that she would not go into a bank or that she had been turned away from one in the UK. This is likely because, unlike motorcycle helmets and balaclavas, niqaab is not associated with criminals but with women innocently going about their normal business. Similarly with the argument about male criminals using them for disguise: there has been only one reported, and unproved, incident and that involved a suspected terrorist fleeing the country in one, and who was able to do that (supposedly) because airport security did not do their job properly. This past week, it was reported that a woman in a so-called burqa stabbed a Labour MP and was promptly caught and charged with attempted murder. If criminals cannot wear niqaabs and disguise themselves as women, they will resort to the time-honoured disguise of a balaclava. Nobody is talking about banning that, and in any case, criminals are likely to dress in clothes which better enable a quick getaway than does the long dress commonly worn with a niqaab.

Regarding public officials in niqaab:

Third, he writes that he ‘would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official’. He’s free to refuse to have dealings with whomever he wants to. That might or might not create a legal difficulty for him, but mostly, I suspect, it wouldn’t. However, our freedoms not to deal with certain others in life, according to principle or inclination, don’t necessarily establish a right to dictate to them how they may dress as they go about the world.

However, the debate is not about public officials in niqaab. Even for those who regard niqaab as mandatory for women in Islam, there are exceptions made for when business is being done and when testimony is given in court, i.e. when identification is actually necessary, so that women can remove their veils while doing this. Women are not expected to wear niqaab in Islam while treating a patient or representing a body (including the state) to individuals, by any standard, and those who insist on covering their faces all the time shouldn’t do a job that requires this. I’ve known Muslim women who have worn niqaab in a back office role, both in the UK and in Canada, fairly successfully for some time. Hitchens’s argument is a total irrelevance.

Norm gets it pretty much right on the ridiculous association with the Ku Klux Klan:

Fourth, ‘[w]hat about the Ku Klux Klan?’ Christopher asks. What about them? Why are they relevant? OK, they also cover their faces. But, leaving aside the issue of how that should be dealt with in terms of the permissibility or otherwise of public displays, why aren’t the differences between the Ku Klux Klan’s reasons for covering their faces and the reasons of Muslim women more important than the similarities? In one case, we’re talking about a type of political uniform and its use in the spreading of hatred, and in the other case… we aren’t.

However, he stops short when it comes to niqaab and driving:

The covered face, fifth, ‘is incompatible - because of its effect on peripheral vision - with activities such as driving a car or negotiating traffic’. Fine. If this is unavoidably so, there can be legislation to outlaw driving while wearing a burqa or face veil.

Did either he or Hitchens ever ask a woman who wears niqaab and drives whether it obstructs their vision? Women driving in niqaab is common, both in the West and in the Muslim world. Admittedly, probably fewer women drive in many Muslim countries than here (particularly in countries where driving by women is banned — but even in Saudi Arabia that only applies to highways; Bedouin women actually do drive off-road), but I have never heard of it being cited as a factor in causing an accident. It’s true that a woman was recently fined for wearing it while driving in France, but this seems to be a case of a policeman making up the law as he goes along and an example of the kind of petty harassment and exclusion that women who wear hijaab, let alone niqaab, already face in France every day. Much of it is actually illegal even there, but there is no need to replicate it anywhere else.

Hitchens concludes his article with an invocation of his supposed “right to see your face” and your right to see his. What right is this? Where did he get it from? In what country’s constitution is there a right to see the face of whoever happens to be nearby? In what UN declaration? The only time you have a right to see someone’s face is when you need to identify them. Any other time, you don’t, any more than you have the right to see any other part of their body. Hitchens has pretty much pulled this out of somewhere, since it’s not a recognised right. There is no such right.

There’s other nonsense in Hitchens’s article which Geras doesn’t take up. Regarding Muslim women’s choice to wear the “veil”, Hitchens claims:

Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states?

He offers no evidence whatsoever that a significant proportion of honour killings concern hijaab or niqaab. The usual reason for them, in fact, seems to be rumours about a woman’s conduct with men, such as losing her virginity before marriage or having relationships before or outside marriage, not with anything to do with hijaab or niqaab. Turkey and Tunisia do not ban hijaab in public buildings because of this but because of the states’ adherence to an ideology they have invented. And the countries in which niqaab is common are hardly more primitive than Tunisia, a country under a long-standing dictatorship with one of the most stringent censorship regimes even in that region and which is notorious for torture. Honour killing is rife in Turkey, particularly among the Kurdish population (among which the niqaab is not that common). Furthermore, his reference to Muslim “immigrants” is irrelevant given that many of those women who wear niqaab are those born here, some of them converts and some to mixed parentage. Muslims are not immigrants, but those who seek to criminalise Muslim customs conveniently discuss the issue in terms of accommodating “immigrants”. When Muslims in the UK were mostly immigrants, niqaab was much less common than it is now, in fact, and western cultures have tolerated niqaab as worn by Gulf Arab tourists for decades because they had money to spend. When it’s British or French citizens of Moroccan or Pakistani origin doing it, it suddenly became less acceptable.

He also makes repeated reference to common phrases like “nice to see you” which supposedly indicate how seeing people’s faces is so fundamental to our (western) culture. Well guess what folks: blind people use these expressions too, and they apply to other senses and faculties, such as when we talk of things we’ve “heard” when we mean perhaps having read about them, or something someone “said” when they were “speaking” in text over the internet or even using sign language. Still, even if it were, it wouldn’t matter, since there is no obligation to follow the dominant culture, only to avoid anti-social and illegal behaviour, and anti-social means what disturbs others rather than what they merely don’t like. A woman in niqaab who walks up to an old lady or small child and makes strange noises so as to frighten them is being anti-social; one who just goes about her business and bothers nobody isn’t.

The pattern of commentators (usually white) advancing arguments against niqaab without actually listening to Muslim women who wear it or have worn it is repeated right across the media; arguments are put forward about “the dignity of women” based on stereotypes about how Muslims in this culture or that view women (converts or second-generation Muslims of mixed parentage are hardly likely to hold opinions traditional to Arab societies or some part of Pakistan about the role of women), as if what they themselves believe about that subject is the only valid opinion. Muslimah Media Watch shares a video here of a conference in Toronto on this subject, in which the matter of stereotypes of niqaabis and the lack of input that these women are allowed to have into a discussion about their form of dress were discussed.

Norm also linked an article in the Economist which concluded by putting a strong argument against a ban, but also brought up a few irrelevant arguments of its own:

Europeans’ hostility to the burqa is understandable. It doesn’t just deprive them of the beauty of women’s faces; it offends the secularism that goes deep in European—and especially French—culture.

Secularism in France concerns the state. It does not require citizens not to display religion in other public places, such as the street. (French law also requires the state maintenance of pre-20th-century churches as “heritage”, and there are other convenient holes in French secularism such that the Catholic church is in fact privileged.)

Its spread goes hand in hand with the growth of a fundamentalist version of Islam some of whose proponents have attacked the secular societies they live in; and, at a time when those societies feel under threat, the burqa makes it harder for police to identify security risks.

No, it makes it easier to identify who isn’t a security risk, because the wearers are female and the people who are “security risks” are almost always male. The “threat” is also exaggerated: it’s true that there have been some terrorist plots, some of them hatched in Europe for execution elsewhere, and most of which have been unsuccessful anyway, and there have also been riots, no doubt prompted by such factors as police harassment and unemployment. But the main “threat” which supposedly exists is demographic — the growing Muslim population against a declining white one, which is largely the fault of white families for failing to produce enough children so as to avoid cramping their lifestyles.

For people raised outside the Gulf or Afghanistan, dealing with somebody whose facial expressions are hidden is uncomfortable. Unlike the headscarf, the burqa appears, in itself, to be a restraint on female freedom, and also symbolises what many Europeans see as the repression that women can suffer in Islam.

Oh, here we go again with the “symbols”. People who don’t know much about Islam or what goes on in any Muslim society call the Arabian-style niqaab with the name of the Afghan burqa and use it to symbolise the suffering of women in Pakistan (where most women don’t wear either) or honour killings in Kurdistan or Jordan (ditto). Of course, the headscarf is widely considered to be all the things they claim the niqaab is, so as soon as they have got the niqaab out of the way, the headscarf will be next in their sights (it is already banned in schools in several countries).

However, the conclusion is spot on. The insistence on forcing Muslim women to “do the white thing” in order to protect the supposed mass of oppressed young Muslim women, rather than providing ways out for those who need them, is always striking:

Yet the very values which Europeans feel are threatened by the burqa demand that they oppose a ban. Liberal societies should let people wear what they want unless there is a strong argument otherwise. And, in this case, the three arguments for a ban—security, sexual equality and secularism—do not stand up. On security, women can be required to lift their veils if necessary. On sexual equality, women would be better protected by the enforcement of existing laws against domestic violence than by the enactment of new laws forcing them to dress in a way that may be against their will. On secularism, even if Europeans would prefer not to have others’ religiosity paraded on the streets, the tolerance that Westerners claim to value requires them to put up with it.

European governments are entitled to limit women’s rights to wear the burqa. In schools, for instance, pupils should be able to see teachers’ faces, as should judges and juries in court. But Europeans should accept that, however much they dislike the burqa, banning it altogether would be an infringement on the individual rights which their culture normally struggles to protect. The French, of all people, should know that. As Voltaire might have said, “I disapprove of your dress, but I will defend to the death your right to wear it.”

As Muslims it’s been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but also in the UK; they include radical Zionists, secular Jews who like to police which types of Muslims the left, in particular, associates with, and Christian Zionists. Now, it’s the turn of the Jerusalem Post to basically tell the west how to deal with its Muslims: the “burka” cannot be tolerated because it is supposedly misogynistic, because it “undermines social cohesion”, and because it’s a security and crime risk. Do we really need them to tell us how to manage our own security?

In Israel, the problem is complicated by a small group of Jews who have decided that their women have to wear what they are calling a “burka” as well. There are said to be groups of Christians who adopt modes of dress nowadays associated with Islam, particularly in the USA, also. The problem is that Muslims, and for that matter Haredi Jews, living in the west do not attempt to impose their way of life on everyone else. When you travel through one of their districts in Jerusalem, the buses are segregated with men at the front and the women at the back. I have never heard of such things happening in London or any city in the Midlands or the North of England where there are areas with, if not a majority, then certainly a distinct Muslim character. (There is nowhere in London that has a Jewish majority, although the presence of Haredi Jews in places like Stamford Hill is certainly substantial.)

Their article clearly reveals their ignorance about Islam itself: they state that the niqaab, or “burka” as they insist on calling it, “is worn in more extremist Muslim traditions as part of a conscientious adherence to hijab”, before moving onto the issue of the “zealot sect” of Jews which has adopted it. Having come across a number of women who wear niqaab in my time as a Muslim, I can safely say that most are not extremists. It’s true that there are one or two groups whose members can be more reliably counted on to wear niqaab than others, but even this does not make them a threat to anyone, even if they tend to keep to their own kind. They are groups that can best be compared to the Plymouth Brethren, Jehovah’s Witnesses or some of the Haredi Jews, all of which keep themselves isolated (far more than any Muslim group does) and cause no great distress to society.

The editorial claims,

But while the objectification of women is wrong, it cannot be compared to the brutal erasing of their very presence. The burka deviates so radically from accepted Western norms that it cannot be permitted under the pretext of freedom of religious expression, just as full nudity can’t. That’s why the vast majority of moderate Muslims oppose the burka.

The niqaab does not “erase their very presence”; in my observation, many (though not all) combine the niqaab with overclothes which do not totally erase their femininity, much less their presence, and are often nicely decorated abayas and coloured scarves rather than single-coloured “tents”. Muslims did not come here on the condition that they obeyed western “norms”, only local laws, and generally laws do not enforce norms but forbid harms. As for “moderate Muslims”, if what is meant by this is the Melanie Phillips definition (which, judging by the talk of “social cohesion”, is what is meant) of Muslims who are pro-Israel, perhaps this is true! But no Muslim can fail to respect women who wear the niqaab because its religious merit is well-established.

They continue:

The burka also undermines social cohesion. Women who wear the burka in Western countries send out a strongly anti-integrationist message. It is part of a wider rejection of Western values by radical Islamists who insist on full communal autonomy and the official recognition of Sharia law, including the imposition of the niqab (full veiling of the female face), and sometimes the right to perform female genital mutilation.

Here we see them thrashing about looking for connections where there are none. The majority of Muslims in the UK are from north India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the vast majority of women are not circumcised and never have been. It is just not an issue with them; it is an issue with Somalis and other Africans (not all of them Muslims). The niqaab has nothing to do with “radical Islamists” but with women who regard it as part of perfecting their religion, most of them not at all influenced by “radical Islamists”. Not all of the women associated with the radicals wear niqaab; before al-Muhajiroun became what it is today, it was rare to see women in niqaab at functions they organised. Mostly they wore the normal hijaab with a long dress coat. However, it is more common to find women in niqaab (and men in traditional attire) in areas where they feel safe doing so, meaning areas where Muslims are numerous.

They also mention that the niqaab “can be a security or crime risk”, hiding the identity of “a potential terrorist or criminal”. They should consider the experience of the UK, where women have been wearing niqaab in large numbers since at least the 1990s, and the fact remains that robbers who want to conceal their identities wear balaclavas, not niqaabs, and will no doubt continue doing so even if Muslim women are banned from wearing niqaab. Niqaab and the clothes commonly worn with it are best suited to walking around gracefully, not making quick get-aways from scenes of crimes. The best-known “incident” of a niqaab being used for such purposes has in fact never been proven to have happened, but involves a failed terrorist supposedly using his wife’s niqaab and passport to flee the country in 2005 — not to actually perpetrate an act of terrorism. This could have been averted by the security staff at the airport doing their jobs properly and pulling him (if that’s who it was) over to ask a few questions. If something is known to be used as a means of concealing a threat, then there is a case for restricting it, but in the twenty years that the niqaab has been commonly worn by some Muslim women in the UK, it hasn’t been. That somebody in Israel thinks it could be has no relevance to the UK.

Those who support such legislation realize that an easygoing multiculturalism works only when there are basic shared values and a willingness to integrate. But European multiculturalism has deteriorated into rudderless moral relativism and a pusillanimous reluctance to criticize radical Islamic customs for fear of being branded an Islamophobe.

This is a piece of nonsense which has been discredited many times before. The press in this country are certainly not shy of being called Islamophobic — why would some newspapers have printed front-page attacks on the niqaab if they had any such fear? Articles hostile to Islam and aspects of Muslim culture appear in the western press all the time. Where did they get this nonsense?

Sadly, some Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, chief rabbi of Moscow and leader of the Conference of European Rabbis, have helped foster such unfounded fears. “Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz,” wrote Goldschmidt in the New York Times in February, in an op-ed opposing the idea of bans on the burka, “Europeans can permit themselves to be squeamish about how things start and how things, if left unabated, can end.” As a rabbi, he added, “I am made uncomfortable when any religious expression is restricted, not only my own.”

Goldschmidt has got it wrong. Europeans have a right to feel uncomfortable. But not, as Goldschmidt argues, because Europeans are being too hard on Muslims. Rather, because they are being too soft.

So, Goldschmidt should stop behaving like an downtrodden, self-hating diaspora Jew and treat Muslims like what that author considers Muslims to be: the enemy. Jews and Muslims living in the west have various things in common, such as being a religious minority with dietary customs in particular which aren’t shared by the majority population, and with differing dress codes in some cases and a well-founded fear of discrimination and persecution, particularly in Russia where there is a long history of anti-Semitism, of hostility to religion, of an aggressive dominant Christian church, and a recent upsurge of fascist and racist violence. It is an environment where religious minorities have to stick together, not fight each other in the interests of a foreign power. That is not the case in Israel, where Jews are dominant but the Muslim (and Christian) minority they have occupied are the enemy. Why does this writer not just do the honest thing and tell Goldschmidt to move to Israel?

It’s impossible to escape the feeling that this author simply wants Europeans to stick the boot into Muslims because he or she fears them as an Israeli Jew. Israel is reliant on America and Europe to support it by both buying its agricultural exports and by paying for its defence. It is a myth that Israel is some sort of vanguard for western interests in the Middle East; it is a subsidised armed encampment in hostile territory that the West could actually do without. As it happens, Israelis do not particularly welcome foreigners, including diaspora Jews, telling them how to run their country and how to deal with the Palestinians, so why on earth should they expect the west to change the way they deal with Muslims simply to suit their interests? Of course, an Israeli op-ed writer is not the only foreigner who could tell the west that he or she “knows all about the Muslims” — the leaders of the Indian BJP and its associated organisations, various Serbian religious figures, Peter Akinola and his fellow-travellers in the Church of England; would the west be taking their advice also? None of the arguments presented here stack up, and while it may be true that only a tiny percentage of women on the continent wear niqaab, the experience in the UK is of large numbers wearing it over a 20-year period without any significant problems.

The author, Margaret Nelson, linked a number of articles, one of them a study of rickets in South Asia which indicated that it was very common in northern Pakistan, where women tend to spend most of their time in homes which are “almost closed to sunlight” and go out only in a burqa, and an article from the Lancashire Telegraph, issued in October 2007, which reported that 56 cases of the condition had been identified in the Blackburn with Darwen district, almost all among Asian families (and those that were not had some kind of underlying condition). The local primary care trust (PCT) was to introduce Vitamin D supplements, as was already being done in other parts of east Lancashire. The local director of public health, Dr Ellis Freedman, said that the cases were “caused by a combination of skin colouration, diet and dress, not poverty”, and that it wasn’t happening in deprived white communities. It is worth noting that vitamin D supplements are targeted at the Asian community generally, not just those who wear the niqaab.

I don’t dispute that lifestyle factors contribute to this problem, but niqaab alone cannot be blamed for it. The report doesn’t mention whether all the mothers of the children concerned wore the niqaab, for example. If the mothers are spending most of their time indoors, in a poorly-lit house or flat, they are surely more likely to be deficient than anyone with an active lifestyle. It is worth pointing out that many women who wear niqaab in the UK, at least, spend a lot of their time outside the home as they study or work, and that their veils do actually leave some flesh exposed (and their veils are usually not quite opaque, so some light will get through to the rest of their faces over time). There was a report (published here on the National Secular Society website) which noted a similar problem in “some minority ethnic communities” in Birmingham, but even that stipulated that “confinement in the home, diet, mal-absorption syndromes and liver or kidney disease” may also contribute.

The incidence mentioned in the report on Blackburn is fairly low, anyway — 56 cases, in a community of many thousands. Rickets seems to be a common weapon used by anti-religious activists, but if it were that common in Muslim countries, this would surely be well-known. Still, traditionally, houses in many Muslim countries had courtyards, which would mean that women would get plenty of sunlight even if they left the house fully covered, and the roofs were considered the women’s domain (and still are, even in the smaller blocks of flats in some Arab cities today). So a lifestyle that was healthy enough in 19th-century Morocco might not be so suited to modern northern England.

Still, I don’t believe that in the current political climate, a “full scale, in your face campaign to persuade Muslims to abandon the burqa” will have the desired effect; it will feed tabloid hysteria and far-right hostility and make Muslims feel more oppressed than they already do (consider the dawn raids on Muslim families after a few bottles and other missiles were thrown at a protest outside the Israeli embassy, and the draconian “deterrent” sentences handed down subsequently — [1], [2]). Far more effective would be to quietly encourage more active lifestyles among these women, to encourage uptake of vitamin supplements (freely provided or otherwise) and to stress the importance of getting at least some exposure to sunlight.

(More by sister Ayah on YouTube.)

I must admit that I groaned when I heard of the whole concept behind this programme. In Islam itself, there is no issue with women driving, and it is legal in almost all the Muslim world even if fewer women drive than men. Speaking as a convert, I wouldn’t even think of stopping any wife or daughter of mine from driving or learning to drive; particularly if we have a long drive, or there’s an emergency, it makes sense to have more than one driver in the family. However, there are some very conservative men who think they should drive and women shouldn’t, and perhaps this stopped many women learning in the more conservative communities in the north. The male instructor said that the proportion of female customers had risen dramatically in the last decade or so.

There were a few seconds of footage of the imam/instructor frantically instructing one of the ladies on what pedal to push, but the most interesting part was the story of Aisha, formerly Stacey, who had converted a week after meeting the niqabi instructor, after working with the latter’s husband on a car wash. She eventually went to Pakistan and brought back husband Naseem, with whom they had a son. Her father was unruffled by her choice of dress although she was afraid to show it to her mother, who disliked her conversion entirely. Both women wore it of their own choice for religious piety, but Aisha also wanted to distance herself from her old friends, who would encourage her back to her old life of drink and drugs. I hope we see more of these ladies’ progress in part two, not only in the driving but also in Aisha’s reunion with her mother.

One irksome thing I saw in this programme was Imam Ramazan telling the camera that there was “nothing in the Qur’an” that says women can’t learn to drive. That was actually the second time today I’d heard that line, because Nigel Farage of UKIP, which has proposed to ban the niqab, used the same excuse on Salma Yaqoob on the Politics Show this afternoon, repeatedly demanding that she answer, “is it in the Qur’an”. And it’s not, but the fact is that the Qur’an is not the only source of Islamic law, so “it’s not in the Qur’an” is not a valid argument. The Qur’an is not the Bible and isn’t some sort of encyclopaedic, quick-reference lawbook. It is a source of guidance to the ordinary Muslim but not a ready source of law.

Farage and Salma Yaqoob were interviewed after a clip of a very well-spoken and pleasant lady in what looked like east London in niqab (and not with a long black abaya but with a colourful scarf and very western-looking other clothes) explaining why she wore the veil (you can watch the programme on iPlayer if you are in the UK). She said that, if security is the issue, women already remove their veils in such circumstances. Farage compared the covering of the face to wearing balaclavas on the District Line or motorcycle helmets in a bank. Of course, such helmets have to be removed because they are the favourite disguise of bank robbers, but that does not prevent anyone wearing them in the street. Niqabs are not currently banned in banks because robberies by niqabis are currently not known to be a problem in this country.

Farage’s reasoning was typical of this kind of bigotry, jumping from argument to argument and drawing connections where there are none:

What we are saying is, this is a symbol. It is a symbol of something that is used to oppress women, it is a symbol of an increasingly divided Britain, and the real worry, and it isn’t just about what people wear; the real worry is we’re heading towards a situation where many of our cities are ghettoised, and there’s even talk of Shari’ah law becoming part of British culture. That’s a real worry.

How many red herrings can you squeeze into a single sentence? My own experience is that, outside places like the Edgware Road where there are a lot of Arab ex-pats, niqabis are more likely to be young, and modern in their outlook, than many Asian women who wear a loose head-wrap (or none) and shalwar-kameez. They are more likely to speak English, for one thing. He has thrown out an assumption that the niqab is oppressive to women without considering the opinions of women who wear it in this country, which is what is relevant, as opposed to the supposed oppressed masses in Saudi, Yemen etc., who are forced to wear it against their will. The places in this country which are ghettoised have been for years, and it predates the popularity of niqaab by many decades, but even so, that is no bad thing in my opinion; it provides a safe space for Muslims (or any other minority) to be themselves and see people like them every day, which is what suburban whites like myself enjoy all the time. As for Shari’ah law, that is an utter falsehood, and irrelevant to the matter of niqaab.

He also claimed that it would be difficult to identify who the woman in the clip they showed was. In my opinion, that was a very distinctive way of wearing the niqab as long black abayas are much more common. She would stick out a mile in a crowd of women wearing every other type of recognisably Muslim dress.

This is pretty typical of UKIP’s nasty politics: they are trying to appeal to a slightly higher class of voters than those who would otherwise vote BNP, but are just as bigoted as they are. People who claim “niqaab oppresses women”, and for that matter those who say the same about the plain headscarf, repeat this claim without bothering to listen to the women who wear it, and tirelessly call it the “burka”, a term Muslims in the UK never use anyway, and talk of Muslim women wearing “sackcloth” and other untruths. They feign concern for Muslim women, but conveniently forget about women like Stacey/Aisha, for whom niqab works (at least, in places where it’s common) as a way of cutting herself off from “friends” who only want to share drugs with her. While it’s true that some Muslims do isolate themselves from others, such groups are usually no more threatening than Haredi Jews or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and for all people talk to each other while out and about, particularly in London, we might as well all wear niqab. Niqab is not a real issue; it’s something that causes some people momentary annoyance, and that is no reason to ban it.

Three years ago this month Jack Straw argued his case for urging Muslim women who attend his MP’s surgery to remove their niqab. He said that he wanted to start a debate. In this, at least, he was successful.

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said “the veil is an invitation to rape”; the Daily Mail columnist Allison Pearson said women who wear “nose bags on their faces … have no place on British streets”; the then shadow home secretary David Davis argued that Muslims were encouraging voluntary apartheid.

And 16-year-old Daniel Coine insisted he felt threatened: “I’d go further than Jack Straw and say they should all take off their veils. You need to see people face to face. It’s weird not knowing who it is you’re passing in the street, specially late at night when someone might jump you.”

And so Muslim women passed, in the public imagination, from being actually among the group most likely to be racially attacked to ostensibly being a primary cause of social strife – roaming the land in search of white teenagers to physically harass.

However, Jack Straw is hard of hearing, so perhaps he would have some right to ask a woman to remove her niqab if that got in the way of his understanding her, a reason no other man would have. The Express — or Daily Spew as it’s known in these parts — had no time for any such subtleties, and ran numerous front pages attacking Muslim women who wear niqab. While I don’t dispute that Jack Straw shouldn’t have been telling the world what goes on in his MP’s surgery meetings, the blame for the rise of the BNP lies squarely with the press, and the Spew in particular, for promoting bigotry in order to sell copies.

Then again, what about the poisonous effect of all the tabloids on British political culture? Has anyone tried discussing any political matter with a Sun reader, for example? They will simply repeat what they read in that rag and not question it at all.