The Danish government and the majority of the Danish population do not approve of seeing women in the streets wearing the Muslim burka or niqab. Nor, according to Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Lib), is the dress code welcome in Danish schools.
Prime Minister Løkke Rasmussen told his weekly news conference that he is awaiting a report on how to avoid students, teachers and other public servants wearing the niqab or burka.
“Then there can be a discussion about how to rip the burka or niqab off women. Do we do it through legislation or by signaling our attitudes. Or do we do it by backing the leaders out in our institutions so that they take up the battle,” Løkke Rasmussen says.
“The important issue is that the view of women that this clothing represents is something that is anathema to us. Danish society rests on being a positive society in which we meet each other at eye level, in which we can see each other and in which we gesticulate with each other,” the prime minister adds.
“So neither the burka nor the niqab have their place in Danish society,” he says.
A report from Copenhagen University shows that only three women in Denmark wear the burka and a couple of hundred – many of whom are Danish converts – wear the niqab. Various politicians have questioned the figures presented in the report.
The prime minister, however, says the government’s view has nothing to do with numbers.
“To spell it out: If there was a situation in which my son was being taught in the public schooling system by a teacher in niqab, I couldn’t care less whether this was a fate he shared with three, or three hundred classes in Denmark. It would be one niqab too many,” Løkke Rasmussen says.