LAURA DODSWORTH
On the beach in Turkey this summer, I was struck by how much burqinis resemble condoms. This is not surprising. In a sense they serve a prophylactic purpose.
I felt sorry for the women and girls who were entirely covered in cloying fabric unlike their unfettered menfolk, whose shoulders were exposed to the sun and breeze. Swimming must be a very different and less freeing experience when you are shrouded from head to toe. What for me is joy and salt and sunlight must be for them a clammy and cumbersome ordeal.
There were more hijabs and burqas off the beach than on my last visit to Turkey a few years ago.
It’s fine over there. After all I chose to visit the country and I can leave. And at least women can choose in Turkey, unlike their poor Muslim sisters in Iran and Afghanistan. (Although I gather in some parts of Turkey there is now more pressure than there used to be.) But here is what troubles me: increasing numbers of women in the UK are veiling their faces.
It is jarring. It is new in my lifetime and I cannot get used to it. I remember when seeing a burqa, or even a hijab, was a surprising oddity. Now they are everywhere. In my area there are women wearing the full burqa, even with mesh across the eyes.
I really do not like it. And why should I?
Seeing each other’s faces is so fundamentally important it hardly needs justification. Faces are how we connect, how we build trust, how we recognise humanity in one another. To cover the face is to withdraw from society. These women appear dehumanised and — probably completely contrary to how they feel on the inside — they look threatening.
Plenty of other European countries have recognised this and acted. France was the first in 2010, banning face coverings in public on the grounds of secularism, equality and the simple principle of living together. Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, the Netherlands and more have joined them. In Denmark, lawmakers argued that face coverings prevent integration and undermine social trust, which is core to Danish culture. Switzerland held a referendum and the majority of Swiss voters chose to ban face coverings in public.
They are right. If people move here they should integrate. And is there any greater symbol of separation than the face veil? It is not just cloth across the mouth and eyes, it is a veil across language, culture and religion. It separates the wearer from the wider society.
Public opinion polls do show that a majority of Britons support banning the burqa, but no mainstream party has adopted a ban as policy. Reform UK briefly appeared to broach the issue when newly elected MP Sarah Pochin asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer whether he would follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others, and ban the burqa. Reform’s then-chair, Zia Yusuf, responded on social media that it was “dumb” to propose a measure that the party didn’t support.
I would not go so far as to suggest banning the hijab. People can cover their hair if they like, and for many reasons. To protect a hairstyle from the wind or rain, to keep warm, for fashion or for faith. Hair is one thing, but the face is quite another. If it is so vital to cover your face perhaps you should stay in your country of origin.
Perhaps Covid made it harder to ban veiling? After all, the government flat out lied and said masking was good for us. Covered faces were the norm. And while few people wear face rags for protection from airborne viruses anymore, it is the case that, regrettably, surgical masks have become a lingering uniform of sorts for protesters and criminals — a convenient way to conceal identity. But the pandemic is over.
There is another important factor. The burqa draws a boundary around women — a physically oppressive and powerfully symbolic barrier that replaces the boundaries men should set for themselves. Manners and chivalry are the civilising checks on male behaviour, because unconstrained masculinity can be dangerous. In cultures where women are always veiled, the responsibility for restraint falls on women, not men. And the consequences show in the statistics. An Afghan-born man in Britain is twenty-two times more likely to be convicted of rape than someone born here. While it’s increasingly mainstream to question why we should welcome these men to our shores, shouldn’t we also question why we welcome the symbol of female oppression from a culture that produces such levels of sexual violence?
Why should we accommodate customs that oppress women, fracture social cohesion and threaten public safety?
We should not protect people’s right to wear whatever they want more than we protect our cultural values. We should not prize the veil above the face, ‘choice’ above oppression, or division above trust.
We should follow the lead of our European neighbours and ban the burqa.
This article (Ban the Burqa) was created and published by Laura Dodsworth and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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