Word: burqa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...school laws and the calls by Britain's Prime Minister to refrain from wearing the niqab in public, the Dutch center-right government has pledged that if it is returned to power in Wednesday's election, it will pass a law prohibiting the wearing of niqab and full-body burqa in public. Holland's 1 million Muslims have lived under an air of suspicion from the wider society since the 2004 murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh by a Islamist radical. That killing and the subsequent arrests of extremists plotting terror attacks have understandably raised Dutch concerns over...
...hijab, or the custom of veiling, altogether. Both zeroed in on the niqab, a minority practice considered extreme by even mainstream Muslim standards. (The niqab tradition is confined to certain regions of the Muslim world, parts of the Gulf, and Pakistan; a similar covering is known as the burqa in Afghanistan.) I come from a Muslim family and have spent years living in various Muslim communities around the Middle East. Every single Muslim female friend I've had, from pious to secular, veiled to vixen, has been unable to befriend, or even hold a proper conversation with a niqab-wearer...
...Belgium, Denmark and Singapore have taken similar steps. Britain has been both more relaxed about cultural differences and over-anxious about challenging unacceptable practices. Few Britons have realized that the hijab - now more widespread than ever - is, for Islamicist puritans, the first step on a path leading to the burqa, where even the eyes are gauzed over. I have interviewed young women who say they feel so wanton wearing only a headscarf that they will adopt the niqab. Now even 6-year-olds are put into hijabs. Western culture - it is true - is wildly sexualized and lacking in restraint...
...modern Muslim woman, I fast and pray; but I refuse to submit to the hijab or to an opaque, black shroud. On Sept. 10, 2001, I wrote a column in the Independent newspaper condemning the Taliban for using violence to force Afghan women into the burqa. It is happening again. In Iran, educated women who fail some sort of veil test are being imprisoned by their oppressors. Saudi women under their body sheets long to show themselves and share the world equally with men. Exiles who fled such practices to seek refuge in Europe now find the evil is following...
...There have been other warning signs, of course. But until that day at the beauty salon, I had ignored any hint of a return to 7th-century mores, preferring to savor a few extra weeks of denial before the government-issued burqa arrived at my doorstep. A month ago I met a few girlfriends for coffee at a caf? popular with young people. Upon lighting a cigarette, one of them was informed by the embarrassed owner that smoking is now illegal for women in caf?s. Now half the women I know don't go out for coffee anymore. An ingenious...