Let’s take this one element at a time.

If anyone ever tries to sell you on the idea that wearing a burqa or niqab is comfortable, feel free to laugh in their face. Anyone who has ever witnessed what it’s like to walk around cities, often in sweltering temperatures, draped head to toe in black, knows just how punishing the garment is. Go ahead and argue that it pleases Allah to see women and little girls with no peripheral vision try to navigate busy streets. I mean, that argument at least is in line with twisted hyper-modesty edicts. But don’t try telling us that these deathly weeds are comfortable.

As for safety: Walking around severely perceptually and physically hampered is not safe at all; and if you mean safe from the raping ways of all evil men… Men who find your eight year old daughter as evilly seductive as they find you… Look at the normally dressed women around you, moving freely among normal men. Try to work on your attitude toward men rather than cling to an outsized sense of the degree of danger to you they represent.

Do you really think the people gazing at your invisibility behind full body black cloth feel respect? As your husband in jeans and a t-shirt, and similarly free boy children, gambol about in front of you?

There’s nothing patronizing about pointing out that there’s something disturbing about someone whose lived experience tells her that walking around with a symbolically rich black fabric over her mouth generates personal comfort and respect from others.

… Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Bosnia, encompassing ethnic, political, sectarian, and geographical diversity in Muslim populations, … have restricted the [burqa] in public spaces. Some of these Muslim states also have bans in place for the hijab, the Islamic head covering, in legal and public institutions that limit the display of all religious symbols. The number of Muslim-majority states outlawing the face veil is increasing.

…  [I]t is ironic that counter-terror laws applied to all citizens are criticised [in Europe] in a way that Muslim-majority states are not when they pass policies aimed specifically at these garbs.

What is also evident is that more Muslim states can deem these sexist coverings, designed to erase female identities, as not belonging to their society than European states. 

… Instead of simply dismissing a burqa ban, the UK government should listen to progressive voices within the Muslim community who condemn such clothing as a tool to suppress women. 

Questioned in Parliament about banning burqas, the PM got all How Dare You? flustered, as did a bunch of other politicians. In a country where comfortable majorities support a ban, this was not a brilliant move, because now UD‘s Google News alerts are exploding with BURQA stories out of Britain. Everybody’s talking about it.

The minute a country initiates a serious debate about the burqa, it is on its way to a ban. Talking and reading about it all the time unburies a latency: Latently, millions of modern people really dislike burqas and what they blatantly say about women; and all it takes is manifesting the subject for their dark inchoate messes of feelings about them (pity, guilt, repulsion, studied indifference, helplessness at their small daughters seeing invisible women) to firm up into opposition. I’ve followed this narrative many times; it’s a step by step process into referenda, partial restrictions, etc etc.

So the latest thing is an important Conservative party member announcing that “employers should be able to ban their staff from wearing face coverings.” Also, she will not talk to constituents in “surgeries” if they are fully covered. These announcements will activate religious and political indignation, which will in turn inflame the other side, and so it goes.

The problem is that there’s absolutely no reason for a modern democracy to tolerate gender-based repression and a total refusal to join civil society, and even good people who pride themselves on their tolerance know this. This is why so much of the world already bans/restricts this garment.

It’s banned in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Tunisia,  China, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. There are also tons of partial bans, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Burqa bans have regularly been upheld by the courts.

In short, however you personally feel about the burqa, its restriction has become a routine and largely uncontested part of the life of many countries and territories, and discussions about banning, or further banning, are ongoing in lots of locations.

It’s a thing, babe, in Morocco as much as in Italy.

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Now, UD‘s own US, largely because it’s so large (most people here don’t ever encounter burqas), hasn’t had anything to say about burqas; but, well, England. Now England…

England’s the big holdout; no burqa bans here!

Many of its neighbors, as we see, have gone the total or partial ban route.

And at the very least, these neighbors don’t consider mere debate about the burqa to be an abomination. How can it be, considering what’s going on in the world with the garment? Do you really want to hold yourself snobbily aloof from this widely shared/discussed concern?

Embarrassingly, yes. An MP brought the matter up in PM’s Questions the other day – the sort of thing one would expect to happen, and one would want to be prepared for – and got a fierce appalled Lady Bracknell put-down from the PM and others.

I mean how dare you. How dare you.

It is amusing – embarrassingly so – that England continues to feign indignation that anyone, anywhere, would have the nerve…

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Here’s the deal. The story is now all over the British press, which means the latent unhappiness in much of the population with full facial veiling is now being made manifest.

Dig. You’re supposed to shut up about the burqa and keep it out of the press precisely because the moment you break the uncomfortable national silence about it, millions of Brits will realize that now that you mention it they are quite unhappy with the thing.

I mean, uh, strong majorities, when asked, support a ban.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the government’s attempt to strangle vox populi through incredulous contempt will work.

Here at UD, we cover both anti-hijab and pro-hijab protests in Iran, where they put you in prison, or at least bankrupt you, for failing to wear the mandatory hijab.

[Photo Vahid Salemi/AP]

Here, enraged women eviscerate the government for failing to destroy the anti-hijabis, and, while we’re at it, we demand MORE VEILING YOU FOOLS YOU INFIDELS.

Why let women get away with a dinky little head doily? Make it black, make it thick, make it full body, baby!

However!

Tehran Governor Hossein Khosh-Eghbal said … that the [pro-hijab] demonstrations were “illegal” and warned that police would disperse any further protests held without permits.

lolololol

An Iranian filmmaker offers his all-hijab all the time movie at Cannes, where, interestingly, all of the film’s actresses showed up hijabless.

And big thick black robeless! MOST immodest. I hope someone has reported them to the Chastity Law’s Morality Police.

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Ah. That’s more like it.

Nothing like informed consent to this serious constriction can be said to exist; nor is there any reason for a modern society to play along with the grotesque belief that five year old girls must cover themselves because they are sexually arousing to men.

Macron’s party proposes forbidding “minors under 15 from wearing the veil in public spaces,” and would make it a “criminal offence for coercion against parents who force their underage daughters to wear the veil.”

For most of these children, the veil is only part one. There’s the unvarying uniform of the long baggy black dress, and the comprehensive gender segregation that keeps them out of many normal childhood activities. The French government rightly sees this mode of female upbringing as emblematic of a repressive fanaticism seriously at odds with the free, egalitarian values of the state.

[A school-age hijabi is typically] banned from riding a bike, swimming or participating in other activities that characterize a healthy childhood. She is taught, directly or indirectly, from an early age that she is a sexual object, and it is her responsibility to hide her features from the opposite sex, lest she attract them. A heavy burden for modesty is placed squarely on her shoulders. So many women have been traumatized by such an upbringing, which, I believe, frankly borders on child abuse. 

Various European schools have already banned the child-hijab, and more are doing it all the time.

Und so weiter. You really do wonder, as well-meaning idiots in secular countries crash into problems over and over, what it will take for them to cut it out.

Now that the city of Montreal has removed the image of the hijabi from its welcome poster, perhaps that municipality has finally realized that (say it with me, one more time), Quebec is secular.

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Maybe this will help: Iran is not secular. It is a theocracy. It mandates that all girls and women cover themselves with hijabs and chadors and if they don’t do it they go to horrible disgusting jails for decades. Women in Quebec on the other hand are free to wear or not wear hijabs, except in certain public sector settings.

Quebec is considering expanding Bill 21, which already keeps public sector employees from wearing religious clothing/objects while on the job. Not only teachers, for instance, but also students, would, in this proposed expansion, not be permitted to wear hijabs.

Of course the Muslim community spokesman in my headline reveals the problem: Secular legislation is wildly popular in secular Quebec. Banning religious garb is indeed a surefire way to bolster your poll numbers. So the question at issue is whose “fundamental rights”? UD, for instance, considers it a fundamental right of secular countries, states, and provinces to protect their secularity in certain restricted realms (government schools being one of them). Further, she fully admits that her support for restricted secular laws has to do not only with respect for the strongly expressed will of people in some localities that the secular nature of their sense of themselves as a culture be enshrined in law, but also with her belief that schoolgirls too young to have any say in the matter should not be draped head to toe. This obviously repressive form of fundamentalist religious expression offends her liberal sensibilities; it degrades the promise of equality at the heart of democratic regimes. I don’t think parents have a fundamental right to wrap their eight year old daughters in head and body sheeting before they can go outside.

Postmodern surveillance technology maintains a medieval state.

Strange brew.

… that.‘ Ayatollah Khomeini 

Without them veils I'd be a goner.
I must have taken too much bourbon ...
Quick!  Lend me PDQ your turban!
Ah.  Now I feel at peace, and calmer."

Shot secretly in Iran, ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ has received international acclaim. It has won awards at Cannes and other major film festivals…

Here’s part of what you can’t see in India.

Navratilova nails it on the Sadeian sick boys of Iran, who elaborate upon their torture fantasies with each iteration of the beautifully named Chastity Bill.

And keep your eye on the Islamists who just took Syria. UD’s optimism about them is high; but they too may want to scrape clits off, force black robes on, forbid going outside, etc. etc.

Sure hope not! But wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in the cards.