The Muslim women featured in Emine Saner’s article .... miss the point as to why most of us find the niqab so objectionable. This has little to do with religion or racism. It is because the niqab covers the face and effectively renders a woman unidentifiable. It is incomprehensible to many of us that the human face, the means by which we communicate and relate to each other, should be deemed unfit to be seen in public.
.... comparing a tiny minority of Muslim women in the UK to letterboxes is not racist. Surely it is not necessary to state again that Islam is not a race. It is a shifting set of dogmas, prescriptions, beliefs and practices to which anyone from any ethnic origin is invited to subscribe. There are “white” Muslim converts who choose to wear the niqab. To confuse religion and race is to make the humanist’s task more difficult when confronting religions head on, or, as Albert Camus famously put it: “To name things incorrectly is to add to the misfortunes of the world.” [The Guardian] Read more
