Should it be a crime to mock the burqa?

For a brief moment on Saturday afternoon, a befuddled silence fell over the 60,000-strong crowd that had gathered in central London for the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally. Three women dressed in niqabs – the full Islamic dress that allows only a thin horizontal slit for seeing – emerged on stage. For a moment, confusion reigned in Parliament Square.

Needless to say, this was a stunt. One of those on stage encouraged the crowd to chant, ‘Take it off!’. Eventually, they did, revealing themselves to be three smiling young women.

The response to this public mockery of the burqa – a symbol of women’s subjugation by Islamist hardliners, let’s not forget – has been depressingly predictable. ‘No condemnation from our politicians, no action by the police’, fulminated Guardian journalist Owen Jones. ‘British Muslims are sent a clear message: you are fair game for hatred.’ TV personality Narinder Kaur complained that the stunt represented the ‘sexualisation and humiliation of brown women’, slamming ‘the public humiliation of one group of women by another group of women’. Another commentator called it ‘Islamophobia’. ‘As Muslims, we shouldn’t have to tolerate this in our home… England’, she wrote on X.

In their different ways, all of the above are essentially saying the same thing: we shouldn’t be allowed to poke fun at any aspect of Islam, not even its most extreme and misogynistic practices, such as covering up women from head to toe (which, as it happens, most Muslims around the world actually reject). We are never told why we aren’t allowed to mock or criticise such things – only that it is ‘hatred’, ‘humiliation’, something that should not be ‘tolerated’.

Fortunately, the police have not (at the time of writing) taken any action against the three young women involved in the stunt. This is a genuine relief, given that the authorities are usually eager to punish critics of Islam. After all, last year, a man was (unsuccessfully) prosecuted for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish embassy in London. Meanwhile, Labour’s official ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition, introduced earlier this year, is an Islamic blasphemy code in all but name. So it is hardly a surprise that so many so-called progressives expected the police to take action.

Is this really what the left has been reduced to? Calling for critics of religious misogyny to be silenced, even arrested? The Islamo-left is a truly sinister force.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.