Yesterday, the British Parliament debated the ban of a garment, something that the British Parliament had not discussed since Victorian times. This time it was not the length of skirts or sleeves that the honorable parliamentarians addressed, but rather the well known (but rarely seen in western cities) burqa; banned in France, threatened in the rest of Europe, and now also under threat in the UK.
As other attempts, however, yesterday’s debate failed in imposing a burqa ban in the UK, and as the minister confirmed, Great Britain will not follow France.
The burqa is not an Islamic fashion per-se, but rather a tradition not opposed by Islamic teaching, which is probably the best way to present it. Covering the face, and in particular the mouth, has a geographical and environmental genealogy (such as the protection of skin and eyes from the dust and sand of, for instance, the Afghan desert). If such a garment is anything in Islam, it is a scholarly theological diatribe, with some sheikhs ready to wrap a baby in it, and others stating that it is not Islamic dress per-se. Continue reading
During my 3 years of research in Singapore, as part of a wider research on Malay youth in Singapore, I studied the social identity formation of Malay teen Muslim girls from socially and economically disadvantaged families. Methodologically, not only have I conducted in-depth interviews but also, thanks to organizations such as 
That body is of 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl, Hena Akhter. Her story has distracted the western mass media from the still very confused situation in Libya. Hena Akhter was sentenced to receive 101 lashes to be delivered with extreme force after a village court implemented the fatwa of the local imam, whom decided that she had committed fornication with her much older married cousin. She died a week later from the injuries. The 
The year 2010 appears to be marked by the ‘war on burqas’ (the Switzerland minarets being an exception). While 
While in London in 2000, I met an Afghan man, in full Pasthun Afghan attire, who proudly told me that he was a Taliban. During the cold war, the Taliban were, for the UK and US, the heroic mujahidin who fought the Red Devil, the atheist communist USSR. Some, during the 1980s, were welcomed to the west to escape persecution or recruit volunteers for their training camps, which were US and UK supported.The man in London claimed to be among those who reached the UK in the 1980s. When we met, the Taliban had established their Islamic republic and, following their own version of Shariah, implemented one of the most (albeit contradictory and corrupt) brutal regimes that Muslim countries had ever known. 
