I went to a school that was majority Muslim. I also went to a school that banned the burka.
Unlike in Birmingham, where the Birmingham Metropolitan College was recently forced to undo its explicit ban, my school banned the veil through inference; the uniform code was held up as strictly non-negotiable, and included a shalwar khameez and a headscarf in school colours, but no niqab.
Was that oppression? Certainly, the inescapable backdrop of my school years was of vanishing women. Form classes that had been gender-balanced at Year 7 had become male-dominated by Year 11. Girls disappeared, to single-sex schools and to the private sector. Would a veil in school colours have kept more girls at my school? I don’t know.
Certainly I know that it proves that enforcing any kind of ban on the ‘full veil’ or burka would be impossible, even if it were desirable. I am definitely dubious about members of parliament who think that food banks are the business of private citizens but what women wear is a matter of state, and I know a thin pretext for sectarianism when I see one.
But I’ve also – three years at university aside – lived and worked in east London my entire life, and I can’t, in all honesty, claim that the burka isn’t a bad thing for women. I have seen it in libraries or parents’ evenings, worn by a silent woman, with either a child or a husband or a translator. I’ve worked in shops and served women – again mute – behind cloth, often watched by a male escort. In that time, I’ve counted women in headscarves among my friends, colleagues and managers, but I’ve never worked with a woman in niqab.
I’ve never seen a woman in the full veil at the cinema, or a restaurant, or a gig, or the theatre. The only leisure activities I’ve seen veiled women involved in is visiting the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green and I’m not convinced that child-rearing can ever plausibly be described as ‘leisure’. And neither you nor I will see a woman in the full veil address the conference floor next week.
Whether the niqab is a cause of women’s non-appearance, or whether both it and their absence are each consequences of the a world view that discourages appearing in public, when I read the words of women who have chosen the burka, I can’t help but feel the same level of scepticism I do when a self-made man shills for small-state Conservatism. That may be his reality; but it feels so irreconcilable with mine that I can’t quite accept it. The lived truth of the girls I grew up with who ended up wearing it and the women I see wearing it now is that the burka closes down opportunity.
But just because I dislike something or it makes me feel uncomfortable isn’t a reason to ban it. Just because I suspect that many of the ‘free choices’ to wear the burka are anything but free doesn’t mean that I have to right to reduce choice still further. I suspect that many of the supporters of a burka ban know all this, and know, too, that a ban would, rather than freeing anyone, simply drive veiled women indoors, where we wouldn’t see them, and they couldn’t make us feel uncomfortable any more.
This is Britain, yes. We wear what we want, yes. But we shouldn’t pretend that guaranteeing a society where most wear what they want also means protecting a society where some women wear what they’re told. We might not be able to do anything about it. But it should make us uncomfortable, nevertheless.
———————————————————
Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
———————————————————