too-familiar pang that I read the story, “Woman wearing veil asked to leave Italian museum”, about a niqab-wearing Muslim woman who was asked to leave Venice's Ca' Rezzonico museum, which houses 18th-century Venetian art, because she refused to take off her niqab while in the building. I also wear the niqab. And there have been many times when I was deliberately excluded and denied entry into places and positions because of the niqab. It strikes me as hugely ironic that this niqabo-phobia (for want of a better word) thrives in the West, the self-styled champion of personal choice and human liberty. Does anyone else see the dichotomy and the glaring hypocrisy? Tony Blair called the niqab “a mark of separation” and the judicial system of his country promptly came down hard over a British woman, Ayesha Azmi, who wanted to work in a public school while wearing a veil, dismissing her with a paltry compensation for “damages.” French Minister Fadela Amara called the niqab “a prison”, “a straitjacket” while justifying the denial of a French citizenship to Faiza Silmi, a Moroccan woman married to a French citizen, on the grounds that her veil is not conducive to integration in French society and her “radical” practice of Islam was incompatible with French values like equality of the sexes. Does anyone else see who's doing the straitjacketing, who is preventing these women from integrating in society? Each time these women move out of their comfort zone to participate in society, who is turning them away? It is not the niqab which is preventing these women, it is people. In the case of the Muslim woman, who was turned away at the Italian museum, it was an “overzealous” security guard who felt threatened by her veiled presence, although she was with her husband and children and had previously cleared security when she entered the building. People often invoke the bogey of “security concerns” to justify their opposition of niqab-wearing women and their presence in public places. I can only direct these people to the words of historian and political commentator Timothy Garton, who wrote at the height of the Jack Straw-niqab controversy (when the British MP said he would ask veiled women constituency members coming to his office to take off their veils to foster “better communication”): “The most tiresome argument in this whole debate is that the niqab makes white, middle-class English people feel “uncomfortable” or “threatened”. Well, I want to say, what a load of whingeing wusses. Threatened by drunken football hooligans or muggers - that I can understand. But threatened by a woman quietly going about her business in a veil? As for uncomfortable: myself, I feel uncomfortable with a certain kind of pink-faced Englishman wearing crimson braces, a white-cuffed pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. Their clothing is a fair predictor of the views that will come out of their mouths. But I don't ask them to take off their braces. [...]Why shouldn't they (wear veils in public places)? What skin is it off your nose? As our society becomes more diverse, we will have to become more tolerant of diversity. We need to make a triage between the fundamentals of a free society on which we cannot compromise, matters that are properly the subject of intercommunal negotiation, and third-order issues best left to time and the quiet tides of social adaptation. Free speech belongs in the first category; the veil in the last.” Having been at the receiving end of senseless partisanship and prejudice so often, I don't believe the situation for veiled women is going to get better in the West. All I can hope for, is for more people to see who is being unreasonable and stubborn in such a scenario. It's not who they think. __
