It’s not ‘Islamophobic’ to hate the burqa

Two weeks is a long time to be out of the headlines for Conservative MP Robert Jenrick. So when given the chance to set journalists’ tongues wagging, the shadow justice secretary was always going to grab it with both hands. This opportunity duly arrived this week at the end of Jenrick’s new ‘Ring Rob’ segment on TalkTV, when an inquisitive member of the public asked him whether he thought the burqa should be banned. Jenrick, to audible gasps across SW1, came out emphatically in favour of a ban.

‘There’s definitely a strong argument for it’, he said. ‘There are basic values in the country, and we should stand up and defend them.’ These values (Jenrick didn’t say which) have been ‘completely destroyed’, he warned, by ‘Sharia courts or the wearing of the burqa’. ‘These are issues we’re going to have to confront.’

Every few years, the question of a burqa ban seems to raise its head in the West. Now appears to be one of those moments. Earlier this month, Italy’s right-wing ruling party, the Brothers of Italy, said it would introduce legislation banning the burqa (which fully covers the face), and the niqab (a veil with a slot exposing the eyes) from ‘all public spaces’. It described both as symbols of ‘Islamic separatism’. Portugal’s government has followed suit, backing the hard-right Chega party’s proposed law banning face veils for ‘gender or religious reasons’. Both those laws could be in force before the end of the year. Other European countries, most notably France, have had ‘burqa bans’ for more than a decade.

For anyone with a conscience, making the liberal case against a burqa ban isn’t easy. Every criticism levelled at this garment – that it denotes servility to men, undermines civic participation, robs women of independence – is justified. It is born of a bigoted view of women.

But banning the burqa is nonetheless a bad idea. Firstly, it is an attack on the freedom of religion, which posits that people should be able to follow whatever faith they chose, free of interference, so long as it harms no one else. Others’ sense of outrage or moral objections shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what other people are allowed to think or do, or how they dress.

Criminalising the burqa would also harm precisely the people a ban would seek to protect. There are roughly two million Muslim women in the UK, some of whom wear a burqa. It is highly unlikely that they would simply tear off their veils and tell their husbands to shove it, should a burqa ban come into effect. It is far more likely that they will instead avoid the public gaze, spending more time confined in their homes. A law trying to enforce integration could easily end up leading to more segregation.

Most bans of this nature risk initiating an authoritarian arms race that hurts a free society in the long run. The public mood might well be in favour of banning burqas by the time of the next General Election, which Reform has a strong chance to win. But the same law that is used to ban the burqa today might well be used to ban flying the St George’s Cross or wearing a crucifix in a decade’s time. Like hate-speech laws, bans tend to open a pandora’s box of unintended consequences, most of which are negative. In general, our freedoms are much better served by resisting the urge to ban things we disapprove of.

Jenrick’s comments should be appreciated for at least keeping the spotlight on the problem of integration. In recent decades, the British state’s embrace of multiculturalism, and its betrayal of long-standing secular traditions, has encouraged division and even segregation. In some cases, the authorities have even pandered to the most extreme fringes of Islam out of fear of causing offence.

All of this has to stop – but we can stop it without banning the burqa.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.