Banning the burqa: a bad idea ...

This article was published in The Economist 13 May 2010

...whose time may soon come in parts of Europe.

When Jack Straw, a British Labour politician, said a few years ago that he would prefer Muslim women to uncover their faces during appointments with him, because he “felt uncomfortable about talking to someone ‘face-to-face’ who [he] could not see”, liberal opinion was scandalised. He had no more right to request this than he did to ask a teenager to take out a tongue-stud or anything else that might offend middle-aged men: indeed, arguably less because the covering was for reasons of faith, not fashion. Today, however, some European governments are going further than Mr Straw ever wanted to. Starting with Belgium and France, they plan to ban the face-covering niqab or burqa altogether (see article).

Europeans’ hostility to the burqa is understandable. It doesn’t just deprive them of the beauty of women’s faces; it offends the secularism that goes deep in European—and especially French—culture.