Niqaab and rickets in the UK
Today I found a post at the blog The Answer’s 42 alleging that the so-called burqa was to blame for the increased incidence of vitamin D deficiency in Asian women in the UK and...
Category: Niqab (face-covering)
Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round...
How the 2006 niqab affair popularised the BNP
Gary Younge in today’s Guardian traces the upsurge in anti-Muslim bigotry to Jack Straw’s attack on the niqab in 2006: Three years ago this month Jack Straw argued his case for urging Muslim women...
Shelina Zahra takes on anti-hijabists
Last Friday and last Sunday, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed appeared on BBC Radio debating the issue of hijab with two foreign anti-hijab agitators. One of them is part of London’s small but well-connected Iranian exile...
Tantawi: the Italian bigots’ imam
Much as I suspected that the snake Tantawi’s words would be thrown in the faces of Muslims in the West, this has now happened, as an MP from Silvio Berlusconi’s political machine “People of...
A powerful man humiliates a young girl
Yesterday it was reported that Muhammad Tantawi, the dean of al-Azhar University in Egypt, announced that he was going to issue an “edict” banning the niqab or female facial veil. This happened after he...
Digital Niqabi on fitna and niqab
The sister known as Digital Nomad has posted two interesting entries recently, the most recent on this nonsense of condemning mobile phones as a cause of fitna and fornication. This is not just within...
What are the shibboleths of ignorance about Islam?
I’ve been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women...
Khadija Ravat and the niqab’s good name
The contrived controversy over the Channel 4 “Alternative Christmas Message” dragged on today, with the Daily Mirror featuring an interview with the lady in which she told the interviewer that she, being a patriotic British citizen, will be watching the Queen rather than her own message. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, however, comes out with the usual attack on the niqab, alleging that Channel 4 “has decided to glamorise and validate the veil, showing cool indifference to the meanings of one of the most violently contested symbols in the world today”. The article appeared in the Evening Standard, which does not generally publish its opinion pieces online.