Why am I against the veil? Because I know Islamism when I see it

As an observant Muslim woman, I support Boris Johnson’s right to criticise this misogynistic garment

As Britain tangles with the issue of the veil, I remember wrestling with my own. It was the sound of polyester muffling my ears that I most detested. Traipsing around the Al-Faisaliah Mall in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the turn of the millennium, keeping my standardissue hijab (or headscarf) secured while managing my floor-length abaya (an all-covering black gown) was my prime anxiety in public. Too often, my nemesis – the hijab – would not stay. It would slip off silently, only for the ever vigilant religious police to ambush me with the admonition: “Cover your hair!”. There were even “Cover Your Hair!” fridge magnets back then.

Yet, 20 years later, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is calling for the kingdom to adopt a more moderate form of Islam, going so far as to announce that women no longer need to wear traditional black abayas or headscarves.

His country is not alone. Within days of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, newly elected President Sisi of Egypt addressed the clerics of Al Azhar University, the oldest seat of learning of Sunni Islam, demanding a need for “religious revolution” and the rescue of Islam from “ideology”. Sisi was referring to Islamism. Morocco is sealing shut the factories which weave the fabric to make burkas. Turkey strictly forbids the niqab (the veil that leaves all the face covered apart from the eyes) and even the hijab among its judicial and military personnel.

Yet in 2018 Britain finds itself mummified within the niqab – literally unable to see and hear the reality of donning this garment. Fixated instead on the hysteria around Boris Johnson’s letter-box-cum-bank-robber analogy, the nation fails to recognise that Mr Johnson generously – but, in my view as an observant Muslim woman, mistakenly – welcomed British Muslim women as free to choose to wear the veil. In mocking the niqab, Boris is deemed to have mocked Islam. He did not. Like many Muslim women, I am thankful that Boris said what he did. To criticise the niqab and to criticise Muslim women are two very different things.

So why are many Muslims against the niqab? Because we know Islamism, a profound and totalitarian distortion of Muslim belief, when we see it.

I first stared Islamism in the eye in 2012. I was in the Swat Valley of Pakistan meeting with former child Taliban operatives as they told me their routes towards radicalisation. I have met with Islamism in America, as I testified to Capitol Hill on the real problem of domestic radicalisation revealed by migrant parents who had lost their American-born children to Somalia’s Al-Shabaab.

This spring I met with Islamism in Kurdistan, newly liberated from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant by the fearless Peshmerga, where I spoke with Kurdish commanders – Muslim men and women – who had heroically led the offensive to defeat the most heinous manifestation of violent Islamism to date. The Peshmerga freed Yazidi women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by Isil and required to wear the veil. When such women were liberated from Isil, the first thing they did was to burn their niqabs.

The adoption of the face veil represents a uniquely Islamist obsession, not an Islamic rite. Those that reject the burka or niqab – whether British American Muslims like me, or Peshmerga Muslim commanders in Kurdistan – are deemed impure or inauthentic by the Islamist.

Islamism is obsessed with the concepts of purity and authenticity. Battling for the sole claim to authenticity is central to its rejection of all other Muslims and all who are not Muslim. This is in stark contrast with the Koran, which announces “to each is sent a law and a way”, and is a complete departure from the foundational contract of Islam with the believer: there can be no compulsion in belief.

I fully back Boris’s right to objectify the veil because the veil itself is an instrument of objectification. Unlike him, however, I would ban the niqab from British streets altogether. Its true purpose is to demarcate the wearer and the secular world, to overshadow the public space. It derives from misogyny. Islamism views women as a threat to society, so it is best that they are seen and not heard. Some women even remain veiled inside their family homes. My religion does mandate modesty, but there is no basis in Islam for the niqab.

The reaction to Boris’s comments, particularly the false accusation of Islamophobia, plays into the Islamists’ hands. It masks the diversity of Muslim opinion, treating voices like mine as if they do not exist, and aided by pseudointellectual liberals in the West, allows Islamists to falsely present their dress code as the only true face of Islam.

One of my brothers has expressed deep concern at my anti-niqab stance, fearing I am inviting adversity to the lives of Muslim women in Europe. Certainly, with the rise of anti-Muslim xenophobia, this is a valid worry. My other brother sees both sides of the problem, the distortion of an Islamic directive – to be modestly dressed – and the bind any regulation of clothing places on a secular liberal democratic society. My mother, a deeply observant pluralist Muslim, and my father are firmly in my camp.

Among my Arab Muslim friends, a former female colleague sympathises with Muslim women who adopt the niqab, but she believes its basis in Islam is controversial, to say the least. When weighed against the freedom of religion, economic stability, and safety from wars and persecution that life in the secular liberal West provides, however, she sees abandoning the niqab as not unreasonable.

Crucially, these differing opinions are tolerated as part of each of our personal expressions, and experiences, of Islam. They are not tolerated by the Islamists, as I have found myself, having received threatening and vulgar abuse for speaking out. If we do not defend our public spaces as secular shrines to pluralism, not only will public discourse on these issues be extinguished, but it will become that much harder for anti-Islamist Muslims like me to speak out. That’s why I back Boris.

The adoption of the face veil represents a uniquely Islamist obsession, not an Islamic rite. Those who reject it, like me, are deemed impure or inauthentic by the Islamist

Dr Qanta Ahmed is author of ‘In the Land of Invisible Women’