Joss needs to face the facts behind the veil

SINGER Joss Stone has posted this picture of herself in Saudi Arabia, wearing what she seems to think is a niqab, the face-covering veil favoured by sterner versions of Islam.

She may not have got the whole idea. Her garment is a light-hearted pink, rather than the usual midnight black, and reveals her eyebrows, her forehead and even some of her hair, which also deviates from the standard issue. She explained chirpily: ‘Women here are strong and exercising their choice to be free, wear what they want and do what they want, their want may be different to what we experience at home but there ain’t nothing wrong in that.’

I know from past experience that it is risky to say anything at all about Islamic head-coverings for women even if, like me, you think people should be able to wear what they like, but also not forced to wear what they don’t like.

In October 2015 I wrote about how the H&M chain had chosen the model Mariah Idrissi, who wears the Muslim headscarf or hijab, for a new advertisement. I said I thought this was part of a normalisation of such things which would end with non-Muslim women coming under pressure to conform to it. I was called in for a sharp interrogation on Channel Four News, headquarters of political correctness.

A cross Left-wing woman called Nesrine Malik (not wearing a headscarf herself) told me sternly that I had been wrong even to mention it. She declared: ‘It shouldn’t even be something to comment on in any way other than “This is really cool, this is representing a significant swathe of British Muslim people and it’s something we should celebrate.” ’

I later found Ms Malik had strong views of her own on Muslim headcoverings, and had condemned the face-veil that Joss Stone praises, saying: ‘I would rather no one wore a niqab. I would rather that no woman had effectively to disappear, from a young age, because that is the norm in her family. I would rather that no one had to go through the discomfort and social awkwardness of dealing with a woman whose face you cannot see. I would rather that Islam be purged of the niqab and all its permutations.’

She called it ‘uncomfortable, hot, stuffy, limiting and impractical’. She added that she was forced to wear the face-veil in her teens and ‘found it an unpleasant and initially traumatic experience’.

I think she should have a word with Joss Stone.