Islam does not require women to wear a veil
Earlier this week, a Toronto judge ordered a Muslim woman to remove her niqab (face veil) before she testified in a sex assault case, despite the woman’s claim that she wore it because Islam requires it.
[T]he witness stood on her Muslim “honour,” arguing that as a general rule she should not have to show her face to men eligible for marriage. Judge Weisman rightly dealt with this as a motive with no proper claim to recognition in a Canadian court of law.
Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress argues that, in fact, Islam imposes no such obligation on women.
There is no requirement in Islam for Muslim women to cover their face. Rather, the practice reflects a mode of male control over women. Its association with Islam originates in Saudi Arabia, which seeks to export the practice of veiling — along with other elements of its austere Wahhabist brand of Islam — to Muslim communities around the world.
If readers have any doubt about this issue, they should take a look at the holiest place for Muslims — the grand mosque in Mecca. For over 1,400 years, Muslim men and women have prayed in what we believe is the House of God, and for all these centuries, female visitors have been explicitly forbidden from covering their faces.
Obligation to wear a veil is a “terrible tribal custom” that originated with Wahhabi Islam and did not became widely popular in Canada until 2004. That was when Farhat Hashimi, a radical Islamist from Pakistan, opened a Muslim school in Mississauga and encouraged her female students to embrace Wahhabism’s oppressive teachings.
Mr Fatah has written before on the false belief that Muslim women must cover their faces, but the message apparently needs to be repeated.
Muslim clerics in Central Asia have recently denounced the hijab (head scarf) as a “foreign influence”. How much more so the niqab.