What it really feels like to wear the 'burqa'

I recommend reading the article linked to in the title of this post. It's interesting. I'm not sure how to sum it up, but here's an excerpt:

"We have a school uniform and that means wearing the hijab and the jilbab." These young girls, growing up in our society where women have fought to win the equality and rights we have today, are, it seems to me, being denied full access to that world.

Most jobs in Britain would be quite impossible for women wearing burqas, leaving them with no option but to live off their fathers or husbands.

And yet, it is hard to see how legislation itself could ever change this. The best way has to be encouragement through example.

But the example we currently hold up is hugely flawed: fashionistas struggling to achieve a size zero body, a generation of women plunging into debt to buy the latest must-have clothes, scantily dressed teenage girls getting legless on a Friday night because somehow this is thought of as "cool". Looking out between the slits of my long black veil, I have little confidence that the example we currently hold out is one that everyone would willingly leap to embrace.

I'm coming at this as a feminist who has always fought for freedom and for choice and everything the burqa stands for runs contrary to this. The freedom that women in the West enjoy has been long fought for and rightfully prized.

But I wonder if our noisy condemnation of this mode of dress doesn't actually entrench it further into Muslim culture as it stokes up such heated prejudice. In that febrile atmosphere it is nigh on impossible to separate what is an issue of human rights from accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

Feminism spread in this country because women were given the confidence to make choices about how they wanted to live and I can only hope that living in the West will give Arab women the courage to confront the veil and make choices based on what they want — and not on the whims of the clerics and their men.

(The woman in this article wore the full burqa for a day: "I'm wearing a burqa, the full-length Islamic veil that covers not only a woman's body, but her head and face as well. What I can see of the world, I'm seeing through a crocheted panel set into the black material.")

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Word of the Day: Junta