“Boris Johnson and the Burqa” has turned into Britain’s surprise summer blockbuster. Two weeks have passed since the former foreign secretary, returning to his old job as a Daily Telegraph columnist, used some flippant language about Muslim veils, and pundits are still tearing frenziedly at the entrails of the story.
The offending column was actually a condemnation of Denmark’s ban on face coverings in public places. Governments, wrote Boris, had no business telling women what to wear. He personally found it “ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”; but a total ban, quite apart from being illiberal, risked vindicating those jihadi nuts who argue that Western democracy is incompatible with Islam.
The letterbox crack sparked the most absurd political row I can remember. Almost every leftist politician, and a fair few conservatives, piled on to demand that Boris apologize. The fact that he had been arguing against the burqa ban was not enough. It is apparently now unacceptable to express your personal distaste for burqas and niqabs, even in the context of saying that they should be legal.
To see quite how silly all this is, you need to know three things. First, hardly any British women wear niqabs (veils that leave just the eyes showing), let alone burqas (which cover the entire face with a sort of cloth grille). Most British Muslims come, ancestrally, from the Indian subcontinent, where the dominant Muslim tradition is Sufism — a contemplative, spiritual, quietist strain of Islam. Yes, some British girls of South Asian background now wear veils — part of what we might call the Arabization of Islam — but I doubt whether even as many as a thousand British women cover their faces fully.
Second, Britain is not the sort of society that accepts what were known in the Middle Ages as sumptuary laws — that is, restrictions on what private citizens can wear. We leave that to statist regimes like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and France. In 2010, when France legislated to outlaw face-coverings (including balaclavas and motorcycle helmets), the BBC tried to stimulate a debate in the U.K. They managed to find a Conservative backbencher who, almost uniquely, wanted an equivalent British ban, but struggled to find a niqab-wearing woman who wasn’t a foreign tourist. Eventually, though, they tracked one down and brought her face to face, so to speak, with the Tory.
“Is it so unreasonable to ban the niqab here when they’ve banned it in Muslim countries like Egypt?” asked the MP. The woman replied in broad Cockney: “I never thought I’d hear a Conservative politician comparing our country to some tinpot dictatorship like Egypt”. Put like that, it’s hard to argue.
The third thing you need to know is that the row is only tangentially about burqas. The sad truth is that, more than two years on, British politics is still defined by the Brexit referendum. A lot of clever and educated people will never forgive Boris for having led the Leave campaign, and there is a universal human tendency to judge an idea by the person advocating it rather than on its merits.
In fact, Boris Johnson is a moderate who, as mayor of London, campaigned for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. His comments on the burqa were impeccably liberal — we shouldn’t ban things simply because we don’t like them. But, in the eyes of unreconciled Remainers, all Brexit supporters are racist bigots.
The way these Europhiles piranha-shoaled around Boris served to boost his popularity enormously. Like President Trump’s critics, the lefties played only to their own base, each seeking to be more ostentatiously outraged than the next. This made a lot of people remember why they had voted for Brexit in the first place — because they were sick and tired of being talked down to by self-righteous poseurs.
The fundamental problem is that our intellectual elites insist on seeing everything through the prism of race. Because veils are often worn by people who are not white, leftists find themselves taking up positions that, as secularists and feminists, they would ordinarily eschew.
You’d think that it would be uncontroversial to be anti-burqa and also anti-ban. A liberal society should not threaten people with fines simply for choosing to wreathe their faces. But it should reserve the right to frown on practices that are both unfriendly and bad for integration. A burqa signals a refusal to assimilate into our open society. Every liberal should want it to fall into disuse voluntarily. What a miserable tangle the contemporary Left has gotten itself into.
