'I don’t wear the niqab to separate myself from society… It’s not about separation.'
So said the veil-wearing British-born Muslim woman who finally appeared on Channel Four’s Alternative Christmas Day Message to talk about the practice.
Apparently, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri doesn’t agree. Last Sunday, an audio-recording was posted on websites used by Al-Qaeda in the past of someone who purported to be and sounded like Zawahri who called every Muslim women in the west who wore a veil ‘a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader.’
It is not just what the niqab symbolises that is at issue here. Also involved is a genuine security issue.
Not only did tolerance of the practice apparently enable one of the killers of PC Sharon Bershenivsky' to escape capture the previous Christmas by enabling him to leave Britain for Somalia from Heathrow airport disgusied as his niqab-wearing sister, and despite a warrant being out for his arrest on suspicion of the murder.
Last Saturday, also by posing from behind one as a Muslim woman, an Islamic militant from the Pakistani part of Kashmir was able to get sufficiently close to a police-chief from the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir to be able to shoot and mortally wound the policeman, before being able to get away from the crime-scene without his appearance and hence identity being revealed.
There are enough genuine concerns as to who and what may really lie behind the veil to justify its proscription in public places.