Why Tony Blair is Right About the Veil

AZADEH MOAVENI

Muslim women can't integrate with British society from behind a mask.

I dislike the veil. But last year, when I spent a month working all over Afghanistan, I wore one the entire time — because Afghan society cannot yet tolerate unveiled women, and I wanted to connect with people and do my job effectively. I could have gone bare-headed, but it would have sent the hostile message that I didn't care about integrating with the society around me. Did I enjoy having to reconsider my anti-veil stance? Of course not. I detested how wobbly it made my beliefs feel, and I trashed it on my flight out of Kabul. But I was the one who had gone to Afghanistan; Afghanistan had not come to me. That made it my responsibility to deal with how my presence affected those around me.

I've thought about this constantly since the debate erupted in Britain over whether Muslim women should wear full-face veils. Prime Minister Tony Blair has backed calls by his party's parliamentary leader, Jack Straw, that Muslim women in Britain should refrain from covering their full faces, particularly when dealing with the wider society. The indignation of British Muslims — their refusal, really, to even have a conversation about the issue — strikes me as particularly delusional, given the realities of post-9/11 Europe. It would be like me traipsing as an American into hostile, post-Taliban Afghanistan, imagining I could bare my hair without alienating those around me. To expect this would involve an unhealthy relationship with reality.

The fact that the issue in Britain does not seem to be the veil per se, but the more extreme full-face covering known as the niqab, the comments of Blair and Straw seem perfectly reasonable to me. Neither of them asked Muslim women to abandon their belief in hijab, or the custom of veiling, altogether. Both zeroed in on the niqab, a minority practice considered extreme by even mainstream Muslim standards. I come from a Muslim family and have spent years living in various Muslim communities around the Middle East. Ever single Muslim girlfriend I've had, from pious to secular, veiled to vixen, has been unable to befriend, or even hold a proper conversation with a niqab-wearer. The young son of a close friend, raised in a large Muslim family in a large Muslim country, calls them "ninja ladies." Covering the face, whether in Yorkshire or Beirut, seems to send a universal message of separateness. If the full-face veil is considered creepy by many Muslim women in the Middle East, why wouldn't it cause a twinge of unease among ordinary British people with no tradition of veiling at all?

The idea that women in niqab can assimilate properly into a community or be effective as teachers distresses me, because it is at heart disingenuous. Clearly, meaningful social exchange requires a face. And arguments about non-verbal communication being inessential only address half the problem. The obscured woman, who can see her interlocutor clearly through her slits, is enjoying contact with a face; it's the other party, conversing with a tiny black tent, that bears the burden of the discomfort. It would be more sincere for niqab-wearers to say they accept the cost of holding inflexibly to their tradition: the unease of their non-Muslim fellow citizens, and slower assimilation.

It's no coincidence the British debate surrounds a teaching assistant who refused to take off her full-face veil around male colleagues. Niqabs in school are an even more delicate issue than niqabs at the supermarket or the park, for teachers serve as role models to children, and the niqab sends a controversial message that may or may not be appropriate in the classroom. Even more so than the headscarf, the niqab is premised on the traditional Muslim belief that uncovered women are sexually stimulating to men, who are presumed to be incapable of controlling themselves. In a Muslim society where many men hold such an ugly view of their own gender, perhaps a heavily-veiled woman connotes no insult. But to a Western man living in a culture with very different norms of gender relations, the idea that a woman is covering her face and body because she considers him a potential sexual predator can seem deeply disrespectful.

Non-Muslim adult men may find this unpleasant, but in a diverse society, they are probably expected to just deal with it. Schoolchildren are a different matter altogether. They may not be briefed on the roots of such Islamic mores, but they'll still wonder why they can't see their teacher's face. I wouldn't want a niqab-wearer as a role model for my child, and I wouldn't want to explain that his teacher considers her bare face somehow immoral. It is ironic that living in an Islamic theocracy, this is something I would never have to do (the niqab is not worn in Iran), while non-Muslim British parents are being asked to do so on grounds of cultural tolerance.

None of this is to say that I consider the wearing of the more commonplace form of hijab, a headscarf, objectionable. If people, British or otherwise, feel uncomfortable because a woman has a scarf on her head, that's not a concern to be taken seriously. Men who wear unattractive baseball caps make me uncomfortable, but I've gotten used to the world not being aesthetically designed to my taste. No, the issue is very specifically the niqab, and the obstacle it poses to human interaction and smooth integration. What does seem obvious is that the assimilation of British Muslims is a troubled process, and that intrusive squares of cloth should remain an open, but peripheral debate.

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