Maureen Messent discusses Burka controversy

Jul 23 2010 By Maureen Messent

It's the world's most controversial square of cloth just six inches by eight inches with ribbons at each corner. Yet Canada has banned this face-covering in public, Spain and Holland are considering a similar veto and, in Paris this month, the French Assembly voted to outlaw Muslim women covering their faces. Here in Britain, a clutch of MPs call for like action. Maureen Messent reports on women behind the veil.

AS A white woman living in a predominantly Muslim district, I see no problem with women who cover their faces.

The Catholic nuns who educated me were pretty well shrouded, too. I could see their faces and their hands, but nothing else. I loved them then and still love my memories of them.

Faced with a drunken young woman collapsing in the gutter and wetting herself at nightclub closing time – as I’ve seen many times in Birmingham city centre – I shudder.

Had I a young daughter, I’d far prefer her to be veiled for her religious beliefs. Faith, any faith, I can understand. Youthful debauchery scares me.

We must realise Muslim men do not enforce veil-wearing. This is a female choice.

As it is today, we have uneducated white Britons shouting down a religious custom of which they have absolutely no knowledge – and frequently little knowledge of Christianity. That’s racism disguised as concern for female Muslim wellbeing.

It still smells, though.

Sheikh Arif Abdul Hussain raises his shoulders and eyebrows.

“Strange, isn’t it,” he says, “that niqabs, hijabs and burkas are back in the news after so many centuries. What you must understand before we get to Islam is that Jewish and Christian women were covering their heads and faces long before our Prophet was born.

“That was the sensible reaction to life in a hot, dusty climate – nothing to do with Judaism, Christianity or the birth of Islam.”

Sheikh Arif, 46, born to a prosperous Ugandan Indian family, has studied Islam in Britain and the Middle East.

He travels up and down the UK to lecture on Islam, preaching and teaching at Clifton Road Mosque, Balsall Heath.

“I am going to teach you a lesson so that Birmingham Mail readers get the full picture: it’s quite complicated,” he says.

We start with the burka, the top-to-toe garment that leaves just the wearer’s eyes visible through net meshing. That’s the dress we’ve all seen on film footage from Afghanistan over the last few years and occasionally see in Birmingham.