Source: New Statesman

A critical book review by Myriam Francois-Cerrah, who is a freelance journalist and broadcaster (France, Middle East and North Africa, Islam) and a DPhil candidate in Middle Eastern studies at Oxford University.

In Refusing the Veil, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has written a socially conservative book that is dressed up as a liberal feminist manifesto. Rather than challenging the prejudice Muslim women face, Alibhai-Brown provides the ultimate insider’s reassurance that such emotions are warranted and legitimate.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a woman who prides herself on bridging worlds, denouncing racism at west London dinner parties while opposing religious bigotry down at the mosque. A committed anti-racism campaigner, she has been an almost-lone Muslim voice in the mainstream British media arguing against immigration scaremongering and retaliating against sweeping stereotypes of Muslims as anti-British terrorists. Her latest book, Refusing the Veil, part of a series entitled “provocations” for Biteback Publishing, is a passionate treatise against what she – as a Muslim, feminist and liberal – considers to be submission to a misogynistic symbol of women’s inferiority.

“The veil,” she argues, “in all its permutations, is indefensible and unacceptable”.

But this is no theological treatise aimed at challenging the textual validity of “veils”, though Alibhai-Brown does also question that. It is a fundamentally political treatise on the place of Islam and Muslims in Europe, in which Alibhai-Brown contends that Muslim women are exploiting “the weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the core of free societies”.

The book opens with her bemoaning the “bullying” of schools over the right of female students to wear face veils, arguing that “veils are now ubiquitous”, something she refers to as a “depressing and scary development”. The bullying, we are told, is happening from radical Muslims allied with well-intentioned liberals, who misunderstand the meanings behind the face veil. While the face veil has become a source of tension in certain contexts, namely schools and court buildings, establishments have typically found a compromise between upholding security requirements or other societal obligations and the freedom of religion of individuals. Sadly, discussions of mutual accommodation, itself a manifestation of the very integration allegedly at stake here, are entirely absent in favour of a confrontational binary between entitled radical Muslims on one hand and beleaguered liberal institutions on the other.

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