British women dont belong behind veils

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Saira Khan

The Muslim veil, House of Commons leader Jack Straw remarked last week, is “anti-social.” Straw was promptly accused of Islamophobia, said Saira Khan in the London Times, but he was right. “The growing number of women veiling their faces in Britain is a sign of radicalization.” Increasingly, veiling is a political, not a religious, act and it has nothing to do with how these women were raised. Like me, most Muslim women of my generation in Britain have mothers who came from Pakistan. Our mums wore head scarves at home— though not at work—but they never wore veils, not even back in the old country. That’s because it is “an extreme practice” that is explicitly intended to prevent women from participating in society. “Some Muslim women say that it is their choice to wear it; I don’t agree.” Who would honestly choose to have less freedom than everyone else? In most cases, the conservative Muslim men in the family insist, through threats of violence, that their wives and daughters cover up. For those few British Muslim women who really do believe they should cloak themselves away from the rest of us, I have one question: If you don’t want to integrate, “then what the hell are you doing here?”