Is ‘security’ the real reason for Birmingham College’s niqab ban? And if not, why can’t they say so?
Birmingham Metropolitan College has announced that it’s banning students from wearing the Muslim veil, or ‘niqab’, on its premises, due to concerns over security. Understandably, this has led to some pretty mixed reactions.
The thing is, I do kind of understand banning the veil for security reasons, at least to a certain extent. It’s difficult to tell who someone is if you can’t see their face, after all. But, if security was all this was about, wouldn’t it make sense to have some sort of mandatory entrance checkpoint where the person could briefly show their face to prove it was them on their I.D.? Apparently not. “They haven’t provided us with another alternative. We said we would happily show the men at security our faces so they could check them against our IDs, but they won’t let us,” said Imaani Ali, a student who just enrolled. So it seems there’s something bigger than just identity-checking going on here.
Perhaps security is just a convenient excuse for a deeper reason for banning the niqab. There are other, arguably , legitimate reasons to ban it too. Firstly, people tend to get uncomfortable when they can’t see other peoples’ faces. It makes reading expressions and emotions difficult.
But it’s difficult to justify denying people their religion on the grounds it makes others uncomfortable, when you can’t prove that it negatively impacts their studies (unless, maybe, they’re studying drama). Like it or not, religion is the issue here, which brings up yet another argument
Of course, there’s always the often-argued point that the niqab is oppressive. When France banned the burkha they came straight out and said this was why they did it. Covering up entirely isn’t actually required by the Qur’an, which only really demands modest dress, and there are some pretty good arguments that it’s unfair to expect women to cover so much of their bodies when the same rules don’t apply to men. Things get understandably uncomfortable once religious politics start to be discussed. People who wear the niqab have very strong religious reasons to do so, and telling them they are being oppressed by their own beliefs, which are important to them and define a great deal of their personal identity, is obviously going to come off as patronising. The women who go to Birmingham Metropolitan College are adults who can decide for themselves how to dress.
We kind of pride ourselves on being a ‘mixing pot’, and that includes letting people follow their own religious customs, within the law. Strictly speaking, wearing a veil doesn’t hurt anybody else. Of course, you can argue that if we have laws against showing too much skin (you’re not allowed to rock up to class in lingerie either), it’s stands to reason that we can have rules about covering too much.
In the end, this is always going to be a touchy subject. There are reasons to ban the veil just as much as there are reasons not to. But nervously insisting that you’re doing it for ‘security’, and not giving justification for that, isn’t going to help your cause.
No one at Birmingham Metropolitan College was available for comment.
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Image: Jacques Delarue via flickr
The post Why has Birmingham Metropolitan College really banned the niqab? appeared first on Planet Ivy.
