Veil of Darkness

There's an interesting article in today's New York Times about the peculiar upsurge in popularity of the niqab (aka burqa) amongst British Muslims.

LONDON, June 16 — Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. On a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, groups of black-clad Muslim women relaxed on the green baize lawn among the in-line skaters and badminton players.

Their appearance, like little else, has unnerved other Britons, testing the limits of tolerance here and fueling the debate over the role of Muslims in British life.

[...]

A leading Labor Party politician, Jack Straw, scolded women last year for coming to see him in his district office in the niqab. Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the niqab a “mark of separation.”

David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been “too deferential.”

“It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,” Mr. Sexton wrote. “It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.”

That the niqab is very much a symbol of all that is unbearable about a certain Religion of Peace™ goes without question, but my problem with it has nothing at all to do with symbolism. To put it simply, when a person goes about sheathed from head to toe in loose-fitting black robes, nobody knows what she (or he) could be packing underneath, and for all the rest of us know we could be walking next to a would-be suicide bomber; just as no one would reasonably expect to be allowed into a bank wearing a ski-mask, it's the height of unreason to allow BMOs* associated with a religion known for suicide terrorism to frequent buses, subways, malls and other places where victims can be reaped en-masse: if certain Muslim women wish to veil themselves out of masochism or in pursuit of some dubious notion of "liberation" or other, let them do as they please, but not at the expense of compromising the safety of the general public.

*Black Moving Objects.

Comments

[Andrew]

I don't really buy this argument: The 7/7 bombers weren't wearing loose-fitting robes, after all - if I recall correctly they carried their bombs in rucksacks. It's not as though we're about to start banning people from carring rucksacks on the tube...

[Abiola]

Just because loose-fitting robes weren't required to carry out one set of attacks doesn't mean that they're somehow an acceptable hazard - just look at Israel's experience with bombers dressed in such a manner, or the recent successful flight from Britain of a male terrorist suspect dressed in a niqab to hide his face.

The question isn't whether prohibiting niqabs in crowded public spaces will prevent *all* suicide terrorism - nothing will - but whether the rewards of doing so outweigh the negatives, and for me the answer is simple: I would never accept that men could go about on the streets with balaclavas on, so I certainly wouldn't even worse from practitioners of a religion so conducive to terrorism. If they just want to dress like that at home, in the suburbs or while driving about, that's not my problem (as long as they're willing to reveal their faces when stopped by traffic police).

The matter is really simple, as far as I see it: decent people who have nothing to hide have no problems showing their faces, and when one allows individuals to go about in public with their faces fully covered, the end result is an even worse form of the mischief spurred online by the feeling of anonymity: balaclavas, klan hoods and niqabs have no place in most of the public sphere.

[Abiola]

Oh, and by the way, if you think the analogy between the balaclava and niqab a poor one, you might want to read the following story:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1360645.ece

["Two robbers stole traditional Muslim women’s clothing that covered their faces from a Mosque and then used the disguise to steal from a bank.

The men, Anthony Roberts, 22, and Nicholas Bidar, 19, waited in a NatWest bank in West London for guards to deliver some money and used the element of surprise to grab the cash bags and run.

They were dressed in a long black cloak and a Niqab, a full face veil, during the audacious raid in June last year."]

Criminals clearly recognize something many well-meaning liberal folk refuse to: you cannot have one law for the ski-mask and klan hood wearers, and yet another for those wishing to wear the even more concealing Niqab for "religious" reasons.

[cuthhyra]

If banks and such like weren't shackled by anti-discrimination laws, then perhaps they would take the sensible precaution of simply banning those unwilling to clearly show their face.