.... M&S’s decision to market the burkini is not “the ultimate proof that Britain is truly multicultural”. It is yet more dismaying evidence that our own culture has failed to stick up for itself and is allowing misogynist attitudes to sneak in under the radar.
It takes me back to a summer thirty years ago. I was doing teacher training at a primary school in London where I was shocked to observe the social exclusion of little Muslim girls. Certain aspects of school life didn’t apply to them.
.... Not long ago, a German court ruled that a young Muslim girl must attend mixed school swimming lessons because the “social reality of life in Germany came above her religious beliefs”.
Yet in the UK we go on making the same mistakes; failing recently to clamp down on Sharia courts which regard a woman’s evidence as worth half that of a man.
And now, unbelievably, we have one of the nation’s favourite retailers marketing the burkini as if it were just another jolly beach outfit, not a restrictive, quasi-religious garment that treats the female form as lascivious and shameful. [The Telegraph] Read more
