Mick Hartley

Joan Smith at UnHerd – No feminist should defend the niqab:

Over the weekend, pro-migration campaigner Zoe Gardner called out the broadcaster Colin Brazier, who had complained about seeing women wearing niqabs on Oxford Street in the centre of London.

Gardner denounced his post as “racist as fuck”, and asked the aforementioned question about the niqab. “Go on spell it out you nasty Muslim hater,” she added. What actually needs spelling out once again, it seems, is the fact that some cultural practices are hugely damaging to women. Culture is no more benign than nature, which gives us plagues and avalanches as well as sunsets and beaches.

There is a disturbing history here. In the Eighties, I used to argue with women, some of them feminists, who believed in equal rights but refused to condemn “female circumcision”. Their defence of mutilating women’s genitals always started and ended with the same statement: “It’s their culture.” Even Germaine Greer fell for it, describing moves to ban female genital mutilation as “an attack on cultural identity” in her 1999 book The Whole Woman. Now FGM is a criminal offence in Britain, and rightly so.…

Feminists who criticise the niqab or the burqa are not attacking the women who wear it, but the ideology which promotes it. In Afghanistan, the burqa makes individual women invisible, a daily reminder of the horrors imposed on them by a pathologically misogynistic sect, including a ban on girls’ education. In Iran, where thousands of protesters have been killed by another vile regime, women who remove the headscarf have been at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It started in 2022 when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested for violating the regime’s rules mandating the wearing of the hijab.

It’s always seemed ironic that some women in the West are keen to defend a practice which is resisted at the risk of death in other countries. When women are dying for the right to uncover their hair and faces, the real question about the niqab is why any feminist would defend it.

There’s a grim history of feminists supporting Islamic dress codes for women. Naomi Wolf – of The Beauty Myth fame – was all in favour:

Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception. When France banned headscarves in schools, it used the hijab as a proxy for Western values in general, including the appropriate status of women. When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women; when the Taliban were overthrown, Western writers often noted that women had taken off their scarves.

…many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze. 

Hmm. The Islamic rationale for women covering themselves in public has little to do with protection from the “intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze”, and a lot more to do with the assumption that men cannot be expected to control their sexual urges, and women are therefore responsible for any sexual harassment that they may experience.

Good Muslim girls cover themselves, while young white girls don’t. As the grooming gang perpetrators have it, “this is what white girls are for”.