Janice Turner in the Times "Frenzy about the burka is no help to women"

[Lefty99]

Does anyone have a share token for this article please? I seem to have used my allowance of Times articles for this week

Which 3 Anna? I live in one of those and it really is a common sight in many areas,not just traditional inner city parts.

Dont agree with a ban.

Do consider that in this country it is not a cultural norm to cover your face and in fact is generally associated with danger / illegality. When I was growing up there were two sorts of people who covered their faces - terrortists and people who were about to commit a serious (armed) robbery. This should not be underestimated in our national knee jerk to face coverings. It is a cultural no-no.

As for the rest of it I feel very torn. I agree with many for and against points. I have read that covering in the UK means no leering no continuous assessment of your body which was so intrustive when I was a teen. Of course we also know that covering does not "protect" you from any forms of abuse (and in the UK women who wear identifiable islamic garb are at high risk of verbal & physical assault).

I agree that it's all about sexual objectiifcation with covering totally at one end and taking it all off at the other. Those French police who made the woman on the beach strip. Yay liberation.

In the end it all comes back to men and how they view / treat women. As private or public property - both are awful - and women navigate this as best they can in the circs they are in.

Solution is of course an end to women being seen as sex objects and then our clothes will carry no more significance than men's clothes do .

I agree with a ban.

Solution is of course an end to women being seen as sex objects and then our clothes will carry no more significance than men's clothes do

Choosing to wear a burqa or a niqab in the UK or Europe fully endorses the view that women are sex objects and is about as far as you could get from the idea that clothes are just clothes.

Ah that thought was complete in my head

"Solution is of course an end to women being seen as sex objects and then our clothes will carry no more significance than men's clothes do"

and then there would be no more extremes of dress seen as in menswear

I wonder how many of the teens/young women wearing hijab when their mothers do not has an element of teenage rebellion. The Islamic equivalent of the very short skirt.

Another thought experiment I posted on another thread: instead of banning the burqua pass a law that says that the male relatives of every woman who wears it must wear it as well. The custom would most likely vanish overnight. I know, I know, unenforceable.....

Very very very few women go out and about in a niquab in my UK city. I probably see one every few weeks. It’s a reasonably large city too, with many many hijab wearing women.

I imagine that every damaging practise throughout history enacted upon females and not males had advocates earnestly saying and believing that the practise was a free choice.
Footbinding, corsets, crinolines, FGM, child marriage. Some have been ended, others still persist.

What is the difference between those which are history and those which are current?

The will to reject them. Sometimes they die out naturally through successful education, and other times the law decides they are intolerable, which involves denying the individual choice of those who want to continue a practise that harms others in society.

I decided that for me, that to be closer to God, the best act of devotion, was, for me to wear the face veil

"In the Quran, it says for women to 'lower down their garments' it means to cover up

These are quotes from a young Muslim woman in Wales. Odd that not one of the billions of Muslim men has taken this route to get closer to their god.

I agree with a ban.

But the only way to enforce the ban is to make women who are wearing them take it off. How is forcing women to take off clothing better than forcing women to put it on??

Odd that not one of the billions of Muslim men has taken this route to get closer to their god.

No men wear a face veil but millions of Arab men wear a thobe which covers everything except for the face, hands and feet. Obviously this law is rooted in misogyny but millions of men do cover up to get closet to their God.

Very very very few women go out and about in a niquab in my UK city. I probably see one every few weeks. It’s a reasonably large city too, with many many hijab wearing women.

Conversely I see niquabis in my city daily, and it's quite small. Less burka, but enough to see at least a couple. You can't use observational anecdata of raw numbers on this one, I think you have to ask more questions. Veiling is a mixture of religious and cultural practice: where you have particular groups clustered together, you'll have different practices. A very rough analogy might be styles of church building - where you have a lot of Catholics (particularly generations of immigrants), you'll tend to have more ornate churches. Where you have more Baptists and Methodists, church buildings are plain and unadorned (I grew up in an evangelical church that was little more than a shed). That's cultural interpretation, not a biblical law.

I honestly don't know where I could stand on this one, I can see all the different avenues of thought. What I'm hearing is a great deal of sound and thunder - and dog-whistling - from a man who wants to keep his name at the top of the list for next PM (or failing that, a lucrative seat on a board or in the Lords), and not a lot of input from women who actually wear the veil.

slientcrow I agree. I don't really know where I stand - but I know I'm only being asked to think about it by a man who doesn't actually give a stuff about women whatsoever.

I do know a dogwhistle when I see one.

Dress codes of state and private employees can insist that their staff have faces uncovered.

I don't agree with a ban, but I do think restrictions are perfectly fine.

No men wear a face veil but millions of Arab men wear a thobe which covers everything except for the face, hands and feet

Nor does it completely hide their hair. Odd that only women need to hide their faces to be close to their god. The thobe , particularly if no head covering isn't worn, isn't covering anything more than what men cover with long sleeve shirts and trousers.

Excellent articles. There are two things that are really annoying me about the way this debate is playing out:

The way it is being used for virtue-signalling by the non-Muslim liberal left. To be honest, as I'm usually a member of that group, I find the lack of critical thought evidenced embarrassing.

The constant repetition of "but where do you draw the line" as if that is the ultimate trump card, when it is blindingly bloody obvious and has been stated many, many times that the line is face coverings. I don't like the hijab, I don't like what it stands for and I hate in particular seeing little girls wearing it, but I accept that until someone tells me to wear it, or someone asks me to support their right not to wear it, it's none of my damned business. But the niqab is a barrier to communication in a way that European culture has long considered unacceptable and I do not believe it is racist to insist on maintaining that cultural norm.

I know the niqab has been given religious significance by some relatively new Islamic sects, but I remember hearing many years ago a Muslim professor saying that the burkha because a practice in Afghanistan some three hundred years ago to protect women from Colonialist men.

I can believe this, having read so many nineteenth-century novels where men who had raped a native woman were perfectly acceptable in English society.

The thobe , particularly if no head covering isn't worn, isn't covering anything more than what men cover with long sleeve shirts and trousers.

This is a fair point although I do notice how you (seemingly deliberately) failed to respond to me quoting you directly above my second post.

How would this covering have protected women from rape by colonialist men?

There's a very interesting article in today's Telegraph by Qanta Ahmed I back Boris on the burka, and so do millions of Muslim women like me. I read it in my DF's paper but unfortunately it's a premium article so you need a subscription to read it.

She writes: "I fully back Boris's right to objectify the veil because the veil itself is an instrument of objectification. Unlike him, however, I would ban the niqab from British streets altogether. Its true purpose is to demarcate the wearer and the secular world, to overshadow the public space. It derives from misogyny. Islamism views women as a threat to society, so it is best that they are seen and not heard. Some women even remain veiled inside their family homes. My religion does mandate modesty, but there is no basis in Islam for the niqab."

"The reaction to Boris's comments, particularly the false accusation of Islamophobia, plays into the Islamicists' hands. It masks the diversity of Muslim opinion, treating voices like mine as if they do not exist, and aided by pseudo-intellectual liberals in the West, allows Islamists to falsely present their dress code as the only true face of Islam."

• Have you been to Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham,Blackburn,Bolton,Walsall or Coventry (for eg) lately?

And Preston. Rarely go to Sainsbury's or the town centre without seeing at least a couple of ladies in niqabs.

Taco the egotism of some posters never ceases to amaze me "you didn't respond to me"

I assume France et al are enforcing the law through fines. I support a ban.

And presumably they will be asked to remove it as any other person in the countries which have banned it will be asked to remove a full face mask.

The article in The Telegraph is very persuasive.

*Taco the egotism of some posters never ceases to amaze me "you didn't respond to me"

I assume France et al are enforcing the law through fines. I support a ban.*

It's not intended to be egotism but it does seem as if you can't answer a question when you ignore one and answer another.

How can you assume that they are using fines only when we have cases of police forcing a woman to take off her clothes kn a beach in France and another man ripping the burka off another in Denmark?

Errol - yup, I'm in the north, not a big city, and there are always young women in niqabs whenever I go out to the town centre. Many more wear the hijab, and all black these days.

There is no requirement in the religion to wear this clothing. Even if there was, that's no reason why we should allow it here. Religion should not give men a free pass to abuse women for being women in this country.

A few random thoughts - Boris is past master at running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Virtue signalling that there shouldn't be a ban, while keeping burka-haters onside by making letterbox jokes.

It's irritating when people rant on about colonialism. Ordinary British people had it just as tough, because the people who were running colonies abroad came from the same class that was oppressing the working classes at home. And now those working classes have to take on the guilt of the colonial masters. A win-win for the masters!

I agree with a ban.