The burqa: is it OK to mock it?
The first veiled woman I came across was a teacher at a mosque in my home town of Oldham, Greater Manchester, said Iram Ramzan in The Sunday Times. “Most of us Muslim girls, then aged nine or ten, found it very odd.” Like many of my faith, I still do. So I was surprised by the fuss over Boris Johnson’s remarks about fully veiled women looking like “letter boxes” or “bank robbers”. His language was “crass”, but I’ve heard worse from my own relatives. Face veiling (whether with the niqab, which leaves the eye area open, or with the much rarer, full-body burqa, which often hides the eyes behind a mesh) is rightly controversial because it’s an outdated “symbol of subjugation”. Several EU countries, including France, Germany and Austria, have introduced complete or partial bans on face coverings in public. So have Muslim-majority Chad and Niger; Morocco has banned the manufacture, marketing and sale of the burqa.
Politicians denounce face veils to court popularity, but they give little thought to the suffering this causes, said Anna Piela in the New Statesman. British niqab/burqa-wearing women (of whom there are estimated to be about 1,000) say they regularly face hostile stares, abuse or physical attacks in the street, with people trying to tear their veils off. The face veil may not be an explicit religious requirement under the Koran, but if some Muslim women choose to adopt it as a form of modesty, what business is it of anyone else? Muslim women “don’t need to be saved”, agreed Anjum Peerbacos on Open Democracy. We’re quite capable of dressing ourselves as we see fit, whether that be in a headscarf, niqab, burqa or no head covering at all.
“I wonder what the women of Raqqa, who sang for joy as they pulled off black shrouds when liberated from Islamic State, would make of free Western women willingly wearing this garb of the erased,” said Janice Turner in The Times. Still, there’s certainly no point banning face veils. It would just lead to niqab-wearers staying indoors, as they do in France. The evidence shows that such action has the entirely counterproductive effect of driving more Muslims “to the sanctuary of identity”. New laws may be unnecessary, said Matthew Parris in the same paper, but we must never give up the right to ridicule things that “society at large” disapproves of. “Invective and insult” have always been part of “the weaponry of challenge and reform”. It’s the basis of satire. “Authority dislikes being farted at in its face, for it knows the power of respect to chill independent thought. So does fundamentalist Islam.”