The Independent gets a woman who wears the niqab to explain to the benighted rest of us why she’s so right and right-on and good for doing so.
The common impression that many people have about those that wear the niqab is that we are oppressed, uneducated, passive, kept behind closed doors and not integrated within British society.
So you know what’s coming next. She’s none of those things; she’s the opposite of all of them. Therefore the niqab is great.
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a proud Welsh and British citizen, a molecular geneticist by profession and an activist in my spare time.
An activist? An activist for what? Not feminism, I assume. “An activist” isn’t some automatic badge of virtue. Activists can be activists for fascism, for lower taxes for the rich, for forced pregnancy, for theocracy – for anything. Maybe she’s an activist for the niqab, or Islamism, or sharia. Maybe she’s an activist against secularism, or human rights, or abortion rights.
I have formerly been elected as the Wales Chairperson of a national Muslim student organisation and held other leadership roles including working with bodies such as the National Union of Students.
Ah that kind of activist. Well quite. She’s an Islamist and she wears the niqab. Yes we knew that – we knew there are Islamist women.
I wear the niqab as a personal act of worship, and I deeply believe that it brings me closer to God, the Creator.
Ok that’s the part that all this was leading up to. Wut? She believes wearing a mask over her face brings her closer to “the Creator”? Why? If “the Creator” didn’t want women’s faces to be visible, why didn’t it just design women accordingly? Without faces, for instance? Why would concealing a part of one’s body bring one closer to the entity that is supposed to have created that very body?
It’s a dopy idea. She tries to make it less dopy in the usual way, by saying she “deeply believes” it – but that just backfires with people who have learned to be even more suspicious when people start babbling about what they “deeply believe.”