Why the British Should Not Stop Getting Their Niqabs in a Twist

Civitas, 7 December 2006

A few weeks ago, our airwaves and newspapers were filled with criticisms of the growing practice among Muslim women in this country of wearing the full face veil or niqab — at work or elsewhere in public. What had triggered this wave of criticism was license for it having been given by several prominent Labour ministers who had set it in train.
For a time, these criticisms seemed destined, if not to stamp out the practice, then at least to make serious inroads into its public acceptability.
Well, if a week in Westminster politics is a long time, a month in identity politics is almost an eternity. Yesterday, as if to register how unserious an issue it considered it to be, Channel Four announced this year its annual alternative Christmas message, broadcast to coincide with the Queen’s, will be given by a niqab-wearing free-lance lecturer on Islamic issues from Leicester named Khadija Ravat.
Come the appointed hour, so today’s Times reports, Ms Ravat will not be tuning into Channel Four to see herself. Instead, it reports, she will be watching the Queen. ‘I’m going to be watching the Queen’s speech. I like being British – being British has so much that can be shared by many people’, she is reported as saying.
All nice clean, good-humoured, knock-about but essentially harmless stuff, you might think, that fully accords with the spirit of peace and good-will to all men that lies at the heart of the festive season. Might I beg to differ?

Channel Four had, perhaps, chosen Ms Ravat to give its alternative message because, when the rumpus about the niqab first broke out in October, the BBC had broadcast her defending the wearing of it. A report on the BBC News website quotes Ms Ravat as denying wearing it demeaning to those who do or intimidating to those who don’t. It reports her as describing it as empowering its wearers, liberating them from being ‘dominated and controlled by fashion, society and its pressures’. It also reports her as inviting those wary of it to try one on for size and experience for themselves how enjoyable wearing one is.
It would be uncharitable to suppose any part of Ms Ravat’s enjoyment in wearing one derives from the fear the sight of her instils in those not of a similar persuasion to her. However, that she and some other of its wearers find wearing it enjoyable and do so of their will free-will does not show either that the niqab does not serve to intimidate others, nor that many Muslim women who wear one do not so under duress and would welcome being given the freedom not to.
There are several reasons for doubting what Ms Ravat says on this score.
First off, she has a track-record of being overly zealous in endeavouring to white-wash other forms of Islamic practice here that have given genuine cause for public concern. For example, she is on public record as defending the Markfield Institute, a Muslim Institute of Higher Education near Leicester, despite the links that surfaced in the summer of 2004 between it and the hard-line Pakistani Islamic party Jamaati-I Islami, as well as with the Qatar based Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi whose extremist views are notorious, such as his condoning suicide bombings as martydom, as well as wife beating and the death penalty for practising homosexuals.
Second, notwithstanding her assertion to the contrary, it is a well attested fact that, throughout the Muslim world, many Muslim women are forced to wear face covering against their will. As is reported by the Weekly Standard in a recent posting on the subject, ‘a survey conducted in France in May 2003 found that 77% of girls wearing the hijab said they did so because of physical threats from Islamist groups’.
In support of its claim that forcing Muslim women to wear the veil is a means of their social control, the same report also quotes a prominent Tunisian Muslim theologian as saying: ‘The veil is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the veil, there is the regressive interpretation of the sharia … [defined by] three essential inequalities: inequality between man and woman, between Muslim and non-Muslim, [and] between free man and slave’.
There is further reason to object to the niqab. Wearing it sends out an offensive message about men – one to the effect that they are all sex maniacs who cannot help but view all women as sex-objects. Some extreme latter-day Western feminists have claimed as much in print. But it is one thing to do so in that way, another to go about broadcasting this opinion as publicly as those who wear the niqab do. Why should not their doing so be considered no less offensive and insulting to men as it would be were men to go to work or walk down the street brandishing notice-boards conspicuously proclaiming all women to be potential whores begging to be raped, or that all homosexuals and Jews were vermin. If there is such a thing as Islamo-phobia, then there are surely such things as misanthropy and ‘Kufr-phobia’. Wearing the niqab arguably exemplifies one or the other or both, notwithstanding whatever apologists might say on its behalf.
Big-wig producers at Channel Four might find Ms Ravat’s giving their alternative Christmas message a hoot. Without wishing to suggest she intends to insult men, especially non-Muslim ones, by wearing the niqab, I wonder whether all her co-religionists here will be quite as welcoming of its decision as she. Doing so has sent out a message that there is no cause for public concern about the practice of wearing it, when there most certainly is. Moreover, by doing so, it has pushed the country just one inch further down the road towards its Islamicization, a goal common to all Islamists, but one most certainly not shared by non-Muslims or at all in the spirit of Christmas.