Recently in Niqab (face-covering) Category

Sister Ardo from Ottawa (whom you may remember contributed to my coverage of the Jack Straw niqaab affair of 2006) has responded to sister Aaminah's article on observing niqaab while interacting with others over the internet, as a reminder of Islamic etiqutte. She talks about why she took up the niqaab and the enticements to remove it. (As an aside, sister Aaminah's article was not the first time I have heard the argument about niqaab as a physical reminder about Islamic behaviour; I wonder how that works for us men, though.)

Last week the Royal United Services Institute, "the leading forum in the UK for national and international Defence and Security" founded by the Duke of Wellington, published a report from a panel which included, according to this report in the Sunday Times, Field Marshal the Lord Inge, Lord Salisbury, former Tory leader in the House of Lords, General Sir Rupert Smith and Gwyn Prins, historian at the London School of Economics. The report, according to the BBC, "is based on the findings of former military chiefs, diplomats, analysts and academics". Joseph Harker, in the Guardian yesterday, called these people "ranting old colonels" with an outlook which resembles "Alf Garnett with a degree" (Alf Garnett is the character on whom Archie Bunker was based). To begin with, we should deal with an aspect of the Sunday Times's coverage of the report.

The Conservative Party leader David Cameron wrote in today's Observer about the "British values" issues which were under much discussion this past week. Of merit is his debunking of stupid suggestions like having a Veterans' Day (when we already have Remembrance Sunday and have done for decades) and putting flags out on the lawn. On the other hand, he and his party's vice-chairwoman, Sayeeda Warsi, are on the offensive regarding Muslim girls being forced into marriages and being denied education by their families. I wonder how they intend to tackle this - perhaps they might do away with tuition fees and re-institute grants for promising students whose parents just don't want to pay? Or perhaps he just prefers to lecture.

And the Observer can think of no better way of illustrating this than ... a picture of a woman in niqab on the front page of their website (view image). It's not really illustrative of women being denied education, though, because you'll find plenty of women in niqab in many British universities. I intend to complain to their readers' editor (reader@observer.co.uk) and suggest you do as well. Besides the fact that a lot of white Brits aren't all that patriotic anyway, the Muslims who most offend "British values" are the idiotic men with their offensive placards and slogans.

YouTube - Channel 4's alternative Christmas message

This is the Alternative Christmas Message that Channel 4 broadcast after the earlier candidate, Khadija Ravat, pulled out after discovering that the community was opposed and that she would be broadcast at the same time as the Queen's own message. The sister is Khadijah Atkinson, an activist with the Minhaj al-Qur'an sisters' group in east London. (Hat tip to Hamza @ DeenPort.)

Sunday Telegraph: Ban veils in public, says Asian bishop

The Anglican Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali (son of a convert to Catholicism from Islam) jumps in on the latest bogus veil controversy by calling on the Government "to introduce legislation that would force Muslims to remove the veil when they are at work or travelling":

Bishop Nazir-Ali, whose father converted from Islam to Catholicism, said that the legislation should not just cover airports, but should extend to all areas of travel where an identity needs to be established, such as tube and train stations and ports. He said that the possible failure of airline staff to challenge Jama was symptomatic of people being "too worried about offending Muslims".

The only problem is that it has not been proven that Jama did indeed escape this way. It is only a possibility, but it does not deter this vile man from claiming that it's a security risk. The likely reason even if it is true is that passport checks are no longer done routinely on exit, having been abandoned several years ago on cost grounds. Clearly this man is the first port of call for the tabloids when they want an opinion hostile to Muslims, however ill-informed.

Comment is free: Lifting the veil

Rajnaara Akhtar (chair of Protect Hijab) on the recent fake scandal involving the Somali who was involved in murdering the policewomen Sharon Beshenivsky and supposedly might have escaped disguised as a Muslim woman in a veil. What she doesn't mention is that the "veiled escape" is only one of a number of possible reasons for why Mustaf Jama fled and thus escaped justice. Of course, nobody in our community has ever demanded that veiled women not be identified if need be, but you don't need to flip a veil to find out if the wearer is actually a woman - you need to just induce them to speak (and devise ways of surprising them into dropping their attempt to disguise their voices, if that's what they're doing).

More at Islamophobia Watch: [1], [2], [3], [4].

Technorati Tags: niqab, yasmin alibhai brown, khadija ravat, channel 4

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". Ravat, she says, is "a nice lady" whom she met on a TV programme and found to be "warm and non-judgmental", and "gives the niqab a good name". The article appeared in the Evening Standard, which does not generally publish its opinion pieces online (but Islamophobia Watch reproduced it).

Via Deenport and Pickled Politics, we hear that Channel 4 is planning to have a woman in niqab to read their "alternative Christmas message" this year:

A veiled Muslim woman will deliver this year's alternative Christmas speech on Channel 4, the broadcaster has said. Khadija, a Zimbabwean-born British citizen who has been wearing the full veil - or niqab - for 10 years, has been given the slot. The message will reflect a year in which the wearing of religious clothing and symbols have "dominated the news agenda", said a Channel 4 spokesman.

More: Daily Mail (which broke the story), Media Guardian, BBC News.

Leon at PP suggests that the channel "has decided to take its pseudo subversive ‘controversy’ reputation one step further", but what is of concern to Muslims is that this will give the Express and similar stupid rags an excuse to manufacture yet another of their pseudo-scandals to make a huge profit at our expense. Perhaps we should flood Channel 4 with letters and faxes, or perhaps we might defend the idea, given that Christmas is right at the end of the year and that the Christmas message is often about things which have affected the country over the past year, and is a logical time to give such a speech since it's exactly a week before the start of the next year.

By the way, who on earth is this Khadija? We are told she is in her early 30s, was born in Zimbabwe and has British nationality, lives in the Midlands and is "a freelance teacher and lecturer in Islamic studies and the Qur'an", but we are not given any other details about her, supposedly to avoid her being inundated with interview requests. Perhaps someone out there knows who this Khadija is; I'm not suggesting you post her address, but maybe we could be enlightened as to why she went along with this idea.

Naima Bouteldja, in today's Guardian, discusses the impending Dutch niqab ban and the pattern of governments stoking anti-Muslim hostility for political ends:

Naima Azough, a Dutch Green MP, points out that the ban would apply to fewer than 100 women. "This didn't come from public pressure," she says, "but was initiated by the immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, whose Liberal-Conservative party is scrambling for far-right votes." The result will simply reinforce the perception of Muslims that they will never be accepted in Dutch society.

And the French anti-hijab laws similarly didn't come from the public, but from on high:

France provided the political laboratory. In April 2003, the headscarf row came out of nowhere; within a year it had been outlawed in state schools. No serious demands to ban the headscarf had ever come from teaching bodies, students or the public. It simply wasn't seen as a problem before April 2003: of the 10 million students in French state schools, only 1,250 wore the headscarf.

So who or what sparked "l'affaire du foulard"? Françoise Lorcerie, the editor of The Politicisation of the Veil in France, Europe and the Arab World, points the finger at France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who, in a generally well-received speech to the Union of French Muslim Organisations in April 2003, sparked uproar in the hall when he reminded the audience that wearing the headscarf on national ID card photos was "unlawful".

Within days, commentators and celebrities were demanding the banning of the headscarf in schools. In 2003, three French papers (Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro) published 1,284 articles on the subject. By contrast, the hotly contested plan to reform social security - a genuine national debate that brought tens of thousands on to the streets - registered only 478 times.

Significantly, the Stasi commission, which recommended the ban, also recommended such things as including things like slavery and colonialism in the teaching of French history; the government ignored nearly all of them.

Mere Islam: The Face Veil...Let's Be Honest

Abu Iman Squires (of Mere Islam and Muslim Answers) delivers a refutation of the recent article published by the so-called Muslim Canadian Congress (the "Islamic organisation" which tells powerful non-Muslims what they want to hear) telling women to stop wearing the niqab. The usual nonsense accusations that it's a Wahhabi thing and the irrelevant (and dubious) historical "facts" are also discussed. (The article was originally published in this Deenport thread.)

BBC NEWS: How veil remarks reinforced its support

How Jack Straw's comments on his dislike of the niqab (and the idiotic tabloid press campaign which followed it) increased the popularity of the veil among young British Muslim women, with the local Hijab Centre, the biggest local supplier of them, seeing its trade in niqabs more than double and Jack Straw's popularity plummet among local Muslims.

The latest edition of the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight on last month's incident where chemical precursors to explosives were found at a house belonging to a member of the British National Party, which was under-reported in the media because the police sat on the story and claimed that there were reporting restrictions, which there were not. The widespread suspicion is that the lack of any media coverage was because they were white extremists and not Muslims (and let's face it, it's not as if we've ever had such people leaving nail bombs around, is it?). The edition also has an article, not on the website, about the response to Jack Straw's comments about the niqab and attacking the right-wing tabloid response in particular.

First up: there is a programme on tomorrow (Monday) evening on Channel 4 entitled Women Only JIhad, about the struggle for Muslim women to gain admittance to a number of mosques in northern England. It's part of the Dispatches slot and is on at 8pm. See here for the MPACUK discussion of the issue (a lot of the women involved are members of MPACUK).

Also, I found this article linked off the Guardian's Comment site. It's in the Toronto Globe and Mail and notes "the spectacle of very powerful male politicians publicly criticizing a small number of women -- who are hardly members of their countries' elites -- for what they choose to wear", and also the history of immigrants being treated with suspicion due to their foreign dress habits. (He might have realised, however, that a lot of the women who wear niqab in the UK are not immigrants, but their granddaughters.)

Also, those who found my insider's view from sister Ardo in Ottawa interesting might like to read the experience of a sister in the UK, named Umm Maymoonah. She posted this in response to brother Abu Eesa's article on niqab, and this when I requested that she read my article sourced from what Ardo wrote to me.

Nzingha has an excellent article, ma sha Allah, regarding some of the popular perceptions about what women can and can't do in a veil, in response to a particularly stupid article in the Arab News which claims that the veil "physically impedes a woman from fully interacting with others, chopping vegetables, operating machinery or doing any number of every day- day tasks which require the full use of the five senses". The sister lives in Saudi and has seen veiled women doing all these things except chopping vegetables (which she has however seen blind people do). Long, and pretty comprehensive.

The Guardian today printed an article by the journalist Zaiba Malik about her experiences wearing the niqab for a day around London. This follows last night's Tonight with Trevor McDonald slot in which Saira Khan - yep, her again ([1], [2]) - did the same, donning a niqab and going walkabouts in two districts in Manchester, one with a heavy Muslim presence, one without, for the cameras. Needless to say, both of them, neither of whom even wear the headscarf in public normally, came away disliking it.

Technorati Tags: hijab, islam, jilbab, niqab, jack+straw

What follows is an account of the experiences of a young sister in Canada who has been wearing the niqab since she was 17 and at school. Her name is Ardo; she is of Somali origin and lives in Ottawa, and is presently in her fourth year at university. I wanted to present a real sister's experience and perhaps defence of the niqab, because although I strongly defend the right of Muslim women to wear it (and, insha Allah, I may post a more comprehensive defence either here or at the Sharpener either today or tomorrow), I am not best-placed to do so as a man, so I sought Ardo's experiences. What she told me was both enlightening and sometimes depressing.

Three articles today's papers on the ongoing niqab controversy. First off, here's the actor Steven Berkoff in today's Independent letters:

For Jack Straw it concerns his ability to read the mind on the human face. Can the voice alone not carry infinite shades of meaning? Was poor blind Mr Blunkett that much less capable of reading the inner thoughts of others? For the articulate Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (9 October) it carries an unending proliferation of horrors from sexual repression and slavery to the inability to go swimming. If that is what they wish then let them be, since I have to admit that they are still far more elegant and dignified than some Western women whose sense of self-respect and dignity has long been eroded by their slavish following of the most absurd iniquities of fashion. When I see young women in the street with their buttocks hanging out and their thongs almost obscenely exposed, it hardly inspires admiration, more, I'm afraid, a feeling of revulsion.

In today's Guardian, Timothy Garton-Ash offers this:

In any case, I don't think Straw was right to suggest to niqab-wearing women at his MP's constituency surgery that they might like to remove the face-covering, however courteously it was done. After all, he was in a position of power in relation to them. Presumably they had come to him with a problem they hoped he could solve. In that context, the distinction between a request and a command is somewhat blurred. Indeed "you might like to do X" is a familiar English syntax of polite command. Given that these women were availing themselves of a classic democratic channel of redress - and thereby demonstrating, in a far more important way than what they wore, a degree of integration into British society - I think he might just have worked a little harder to get their meaning.

And just how difficult is that anyway? I recently took part in a degree ceremony at Sheffield Hallam University. It was a heart-warming event. Many of the graduands were Asian British women - often, I was told, the first in the history of their family to go to university - and some of them came on stage to collect their degrees wearing a hijab. There was polite applause for each student and louder cheering for a few who were especially popular. One of the loudest cheers went up for a female student in a full niqab. Clearly her fellow students knew the woman behind the veil.

First up, here's Abu Eesa: "this is an excellent opportunity for qualified Muslims to debunk the mysteries behind such a visually obvious, mysterious and perhaps even shocking statement of a Muslim woman’s identity". As you might expect from him, particularly strong on Islamic legal positions.

Today's Independent letters page contains a bizarre letter from one Fawzi Ibrahim, claiming that a woman's choice to wear the niqab is somehow not valid if she has been "conditioned" to wear it from her upbringing:

Grown-up women conditioned into wearing the veil throughout their childhood cannot exercise true choice. My mother could not walk out without the veil even after the revolution of 1958 in Iraq, and with the full support of her enlightened family. She said she felt naked.

"Enlightened", huh? I'm sure most Muslim women would if wearing the hijab or covering their face was natural to them. Since when did "conditioning" mean that someone is not their own man or woman and fully responsible for their actions?

Marcel Berlins, in today's Guardian, raises the issue of veils in court. In this particular case, even scholars who regard veiling is compulsory allow for their removal for the purposes of testifying, because justice requires that it be ascertained that witnesses are who they say they are.

Another ignorant secular Muslim is given a voice in the Times, namely that of Saira Khan, who numbers the veil among "issues" like "domestic violence, forced marriages, sexual abuse and child abuse that are rife in the Muslim community". Just in case anyone wanted to write them a letter.

A junior minister, David Woolas, has offered his two-pennyworth on the niqab controversy in today's Sunday Mirror, not online, by suggesting that it could play into the hands of the far right:

"It can be hard to tell whether women wear the veil as an expression of their faith or because they are compelled to do so," Mr Woolas said.

"Most British-born Muslims who wear it, do so as an assertion of their identity and religion. This can create fear and resentment among non-Muslims and lead to discrimination.

"Muslims then become even more determined to assert their identity, and so it becomes a vicious circle where the only beneficiaries are racists like the BNP," he said.

(By the way: the Guardian had fairly positive coverage of the issue yesterday, allowing a niqab-wearer named Rahmanara Chowdhury to give her account of "life behind the niqab"; she was also interviewed in the Observer last September. The Independent also had a vox-pop with two niqabi converts allowed to give their point of view; see end of this article which goes PPV after a week.)

Technorati Tags: evening+standard, guide+dogs, niqab, patrick+sookhdeo, pc+bashar

It seems to have been open season on Muslims in the media the last few days, with three inflammatory anti-Muslim stories becoming front page news in either the morning or the evening papers in as many days. First it was the Pc Bashar story, which turns out to have been exaggerated anyway, but nonetheless made the front pages of the tabloids and was the lead story on Vanessa Feltz's phone-in, with the host branding it "pick-and-mix policing". Then there was the "Jack Straw on veiling" controversy, and then the petty incident of the Muslim cab driver who refused to carry a blind woman with a guide dog. I'm not suggesting that these stories were co-ordinated to appear in quick succession, but the fact that any petty story involving Muslims makes the front pages, and do so three days running, is starting to distress me somewhat.