Who wears the burqa?
In an earlier entry I discussed the unhelpful ‘defence’ of niqaab that only a few thousand women wear the garment. However, a side argument is that only a few hundred wear the burqa, the...
Category: Niqab (face-covering)
Another lesson in diplomacy
As Muslims face the consequences of Britain’s one-time “top diplomat” insulting an ethnic minority (and, by extension, the women of a number of the countries where Britain could do with having friendly relations) and...
Niqaab row brings out the ‘Muslimanders’
Two days after the controversy over Boris Johnson comparing Muslim women who wear the niqaab to letterboxes and bank-robbers became big news, the party is facing calls to demand an apology from him (which...
Boris Johnson’s latest insult (and the Muslims who unwittingly side with him)
Yesterday, in one of Boris Johnson’s new columns for the Telegraph (which you may recall the paper made a big announcement of after he resigned as foreign secretary), he registered his half-hearted opposition to...
Niqaab is not relevant to sexual harassment
What will women gain from squawking about sex pests? Niqab | Daily Mail Online This piece appeared in today’s Daily Mail and has been widely derided by both Muslims and feminists on Twitter, and...
Hijabi versus liberal Muslima
The other day Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, a popular Muslimah poet and blogger, drew my attention to an advertisement she’d seen in a mosque in Birmingham. It was from a BBC radio producer looking for “an...
Niqab in Camden: where are the Muslim voices?
The niqab is not just a fashion statement | @guardianletters | World news | The Guardian These two letters appeared in today’s Guardian in response to an article in yesterday’s edition by Gaby Hinsliff,...
Maajid Nawaz plays to groundless fears over niqaab
Why I, as a Muslim, believe the veil must be barred in our schools: A provocative view from Islamic thinker fighting for Glenda Jackson’s seat Maajid Nawaz, the former member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir who was...
Letter to the Guardian on Niqaab
I wrote this letter last Thursday after seeing a series of very hostile letters in the Guardian following Kira Cochrane’s article in which she interviewed women who wear the niqaab (who had been conspicuously...
Outbreak of media splaining over niqaab
The recent wave of media interest in niqaab that resulted from the Birmingham College and niqaab-in-court affairs has, as previously noted, featured a lot of opinionising from almost everyone except for wearers — plenty...
No basis for attack on niqaab
My veil epiphany | Victoria Coren Mitchell | Comment is free | The Observer Last Thursday a major further education college in Birmingham, the Birmingham Metropolitan College, backed down on a decision to ban...
On ‘child brides’ and irrelevant imams
I saw two stories in the mainstream press today that were about the state of the British Muslim religious establishment. One was in the Daily Mail by Baroness Cox which was based on a...
Niqab ban reflects Islamophobia and a security-obsessed culture
Lessons in Islamophobia (from CounterFire) This is an article about a Muslim mother who was barred from parents’ evening at her son’s school because the staff insisted on her removing her face-covering for “security”...
Hargey attacks Islam along with the “burqa”
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...
Niqab experiments: don’t do it!
Someone asked on DeenPort earlier today for advice to give to a female Christian friend who wants to do an experiment by wearing niqaab, the face-covering worn by some Muslim women, for a day....
France niqaab ban “not meant to help women”
France’s ban on the Islamic veil has little to do with female emancipation | Law | guardian.co.uk Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the...
Muslim country bans niqaab shock!
This didn’t quite come too late for yesterday’s entry on niqaab, but that was dragging on too long and I had an appointment this morning that I should have been preparing for while I...
Nessie allows bigoted ‘debate’ about niqaab
This morning Vanessa Feltz, the host of the BBC London morning phone-in show, had among her topics the question of whether the so-called burqa should be banned (you can listen to it, if you’re...
Norman Geras demolishes Hitchens on niqab ban (partly)
I was directed by Islamophobia Watch to an article on Normblog taking apart Christopher Hitchen’s arguments on the Slate website in favour of banning the niqaab in France and elsewhere. The Belgian parliament has...
JPost editorial tells Europe how to deal with Muslim women
Jerusalem Post: Rejecting the burka 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...