When a judge ruled that a 22-year-old Muslim defendant must remove her full-face veil during testimony — albeit behind a screen so that only the judge, jury and lawyers might track her facial responses — there was much heady talk about the implications for Europe’s restless and unresolved struggle with issues of faith and identity, tolerance and freedom.
But a pithier riposte came from Salma Yaqoob, a Muslim and former city councilwoman in Birmingham who rhetorically asked a reporter from The Guardian whether the full-face veil, the niqab, should really absorb so much debate in a land seized with far broader social and economic challenges.
“Is this the biggest issue we face in the U.K. right now?” she asked.
But it was not an issue that was likely to go away: four days after the court ruling, there were reports that 17 hospitals had also ordered staff to remove full-face veils when in contact with patients. And the question arose whether the furor was not so much about the niqab, a supposed symbol of piety, as the telltale marker of a deeper sense of difference between faiths, sharpened by years of war in Muslim lands abroad that wrenched Britain’s social fabric at home.
The debate is not new. In 2006, questions about the niqab arose in the case of Aishah Azmi, a 24-year-old teaching assistant who was dismissed from her job for refusing to remove the full-face veil in class.
At that time, a year after the London bombings of July 2005, Britons were in a state of shock after their brutal encounter with Islamic militancy when four suicide bombers killed 52 travelers on the London transit system.
Tony Blair, then the prime minister, called the full-face veil “a mark of separation,” contradicting the vaunted strivings of a society that, for decades, sought to place ethnic and religious diversity ahead of enforced integration.
The temperature of debate this time seems lower, but there are other portents.
Britain‘s Muslim population is significantly bigger — rising from 1.6 million, or 3 percent of the population in 2001, to 2.8 million, according to the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, an increase that makes Britain’s Muslim minority Europe’s third most populous after those in France and Germany.
While congregations dwindle in traditional Christian churches, Islam is growing. Society is changing, offering new challenges and perhaps a new assertiveness among Muslims that unsettles those who expect a degree of pliancy from their minorities.
“Britain has a proud tradition of attracting and welcoming religious minorities, of offering them refuge from persecution and a place where they can practice their faith freely,” the conservative Daily Telegraph said in an editorial. “But one reason why our society is both diverse and relatively peaceful is because we ask that people respect our values and do not resist integration.”
In this week’s court case, Judge Peter Murphy ruled on a core principle, established over centuries, of open justice, saying that if “a fair trial is to take place, the jury and for some limited purposes the judge must be able to assess the credibility of the witnesses.”
“In my judgment, the adversarial trial demands full openness and communication,” Judge Murphy said. “I am fairly convinced that the wearing of the niqab necessarily hinders that openness and communication.”
By inference, too, the case raised questions about the state’s right to curtail individual freedoms, particularly in the name of security concerns.
“I think it’s for women to make a choice about what clothes they wish to wear,” said Theresa May, the home secretary. “If they wish to wear a veil, that is for a woman to make a choice.”
But, she continued, “There will be some circumstances in which it’s right for public bodies, for example at the border, at airport security, to say there is a practical necessity for asking somebody to remove a veil.”
The debate is not limited to Britain or Europe, suggesting a broader social questioning as the tectonic plates of religion seem to shift.
France, for instance, outlawed the wearing of the full-face veil in public places two years ago. Under rules reflecting the country’s distinctive and cherished secularism, religious symbols like crucifixes, Jewish yarmulkes and Islamic head scarves are banned from schools in France. According to the daily newspaper Le Monde last month, the authorities now want to extend the prohibition to universities.
In Quebec, the separatist government released a plan last week to prevent government workers from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols, including an array of turbans, skull caps and large crosses.
Part of the debate is about a sense that clear lines of demarcation between faith and society — the essence of French secularism — ultimately build greater cohesion than Britain’s permissive multiculturalism.
“In England, they get into fights and throw bombs at one another because of multiculturalism, and people get lost in that type of society,” said Premier Pauline Marois of Quebec.
Yet, despite their divergent policies, France and Britain have both been convulsed by attacks in their own cities in the past 18 months by young descendants of immigrants from former colonies drawn to radical Islam as they turn against societies from which they feel alienated.
The attack last May in southeast London on Lee Rigby, an off-duty British military drummer, provoked a sharp increase in anti-Muslim episodes by small far-right groups, arguably presenting far more of a challenge than the debate over the niqab. “It cannot be right,” said Farooq Murad, the secretary general of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, “that a minority community is allowed to be targeted in this manner.”