Introduction

Abstract

These comments exemplify the vulnerability of Muslim women who wear the niqab (face covering) as actual and potential victims of Islamophobia and highlight the cumulative impact of this type of victimisation upon them. As we shall see, the visibility of the niqab (hereafter ‘the veil’) marks Muslim women as particularly vulnerable to anti-Muslim attacks in the public sphere. Indeed, the wearing of the veil has come under much media, political and public scrutiny in the UK and elsewhere in the West in a post-9/11 climate. Within this framework, the veil is seen as a marker of gender inequality. As such, veiled Muslim women are routinely perceived as oppressed and subjugated, whilst Islam is understood as a misogynist and patriarchal religion. The wearing of the veil is not only synonymous with gender oppression but also with Islamist terrorism and a lack of integration. In this regard, it is perceived as a danger to public safety on the basis that the covering of the face hinders identification. The wearing of the veil is also understood as a marker of segregation on the basis that veiled Muslim women refuse to integrate into Western society. Taken together, these stereotypes provide the justification for Islamophobic attacks against veiled Muslim women as a means of responding to the multiple ‘threats’ of the veil as a symbol of gender inequality, religious fundamentalism and self-segregation.

‘I’m walking down the road and people look at me like they’ve seen an alien’.

Alima, 20 years old

‘People avoid us because if they are near us they might be contaminated. This is making us feel as if we are dirty’.

Focus group participant

‘Ripping my veil off was a very personal attack. It felt like a sexual attack’.

Haleemah, 32 years old

‘Everything is a prison now. That’s what it is, my life has become like a prison; everywhere is a prison. I’m forced to stay in my home so they have made me a prisoner. They are oppressing me’.

Maha, 40 years old