Marnia Lazreg is an Algerian Muslim feminist academic and her mother once wore the veil.
Her book Questioning the Veil. Open Letters to Muslim Women. is carefully reasoned and beautifully written.

She is respectful of Muslim women's own feelings and of their religious desires but argues that the veil (face, head, and full body covering) is not commanded in the Qu'ran;
that it is harmful to women's physical and mental health;
and that it is mainly a political statement about fundamentalism and misogyny.

She has little patience for feminist academics who themselves are not forced to veil and who "play" at imagining or de-constructing the veil as "liberatory" or as a statement of "resistance."

In her last letter, Lazreg implores Muslim women to stop wearing the veil.

"It is a symbol of inequality…it undermines faith… it objectifies women for (reasons of) political propaganda just like advertising in Western society does: one by covering, and the other by exposing womens's bodies."


It has long been said that America and the UK are two countries separated by a common language

After reading some posts in this forum I think that we are often separated by humour too

However, it has also occurred to me that there remains a very real difference between the concept of 'freedom to' and freedom from' especially with regard to some expressions of 'freedom of speech' versus freedom from 'hate speech'

Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi, the leading religious figure of Al-Azhar and regarded by many as Egypt's Imam and Sunni Islam's foremost spiritual authority, was "reportedly angered" when he toured a school in Cairo and saw a teenage girl wearing "niqab" which means that her face was masked or possibly that she was wearing a full head, face, and body covering.

He asked her to remove her veil saying:
"The niqab is a tradition, it has no connection with religion."
The imam instructed the girl, a pupil at a secondary school in Cairo's Madinet Nasr suburb, never to wear the niqab again and promised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against its use in schools. The ruling will not affect use of the hijab, the Islamic headscarf worn by most Muslim women in Egypt.
Following the imam's lead, Egypt's minister of higher education is to ban female undergraduates from wearing the niqab from the country's public universities, Cairo's Al-Masri Al-Yom newspaper reported. "

Nevertheless President Obama spoke in Cairo saying it is "important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practising religion as they see fit, for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear".

More often than not it is the mullahs, the fathers, husbands, brothers, and sometimes mothers and grandmothers as Paul pointed out, who impose the dehumanising full-face and body burka on younger women.
An increasing number of young girls, aged four and five are being made to wear the hijab to school in the UK.

History shows that forcing women to cover their beauty began long before Islam and existed even in ancient Persia; the majority of Muslim scholars agree that there is no religious proof that face veils are a required part of Islamic dress for women.

Are all cultural customs protected by 'human rights'?
"Cultural diversity" surely should not trump the dictate for sensory deprivation, social isolation, and various Vitamin D deficiency diseases for its wearer that is the burka

As a leading Islamic Indian scholar said

"Purdah should be in men's eyes, not on women's bodies!"