Recent years have witnessed an escalation in the passing of legislation and the carrying out of campaigns in opposition to the wearing of the face-veil in its different forms, be it the niqab or the burqa or the khimar. Security organizations, local entities, civil society groups, and parliamentarians in a number of Middle East countries have spearheaded this escalation. The rationale behind it encompasses security concerns as well as political, social, and cultural objections to face-veiling. Verifying a person’s identity is considered vital in public spaces, the workplace, and educational institutions, especially considering the fluid transformations occurring throughout the region. Yet there are hurdles facing the attempts to partially ban the face-veil, notably opposition within significant segments of the society, increasingly hostile social conflicts, attacks by the Salafi movement, the position of official religious institutions, and crackdowns on human rights. 

There is a continuing debate between Middle Eastern imams over the proper Islamic position with regards to the face-veil, and whether women are religiously obligated to cover their faces or not. There are no indications that this debate will die out anytime soon in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. 

A Variety of Examples:

The Moroccan Ministry of the Interior issued a decree banning the production and sale of Afghani burqas, which was implemented on January 9th 2017 across shops and malls. Social media disseminated documents signed by local authorities in many cities requesting that shop owners dispose of all burqas in their possession within 48 hours, or risk detention. 

It is unclear if this decision applies to the ‘regular’ niqab, which is similar in appearance to the burqa. Several Moroccan news outlets reported that members of the Interior Ministry ordered the ceasing of production of certain forms of niqab in the cities of Tangier, Martil, Salé, Meknes and Taroudant.  

The Tunisian parliament proposed legislation in March of 2016 which would ban face-covering in public places, with penalties reaching up to 15 years of imprisonment and a fine of USD 1200. The legislation was put forth by the al-Horra block, a splinter group of the Tunisian party Nidaa Tounes. The proposed legislation further stipulates that a person who forces another to wear the face-veil may be incarcerated for up to a year. 

Egypt witnessed similar events in March 2016, as a campaign was launched calling for the banning of the niqab in state institutions, including schools, government buildings, universities and public hospitals. The campaign was named “Ban the Niqab”, and was focused only on attaining this goal in the workplace and not on the streets, according to the founder of the campaign Mohamed Attia. One of the campaign’s organizers carried out field tours in some of Egypt’s governorates and towns and villages, to organize conferences and symposiums as part of an outreach effort to disseminate the campaign’s message.

The campaign met with student unions in Egyptian universities in an attempt to convince them of its goals, and to support the decision of Cairo University’s president Dr. Gaber Nassar to ban the niqab among the university’s teaching staff, as well as the staff of its affiliated hospitals. The campaign also attempted to contact Egyptian parliamentarians to convey the necessity of implementing anti-niqab legislation in the workplace. 

Pertinent Motivators:

There are a number of factors, which motivate states or armed non-state actors to ban the wearing of the face-veil, which can be summarized as follows:

1-Identification: Some of the relevant literature concludes that banning the face-veil is primarily motivated by the goal of revealing one’s identity. This rationale was evident in the decision of the Syrian Minister for Higher Eductation, Ghiat Barakat, in 2010 to ban women donning the face-veil from enrolling in both public and private universities as well as institutes. His argument was that this jeopardizes the integrity of examinations, as it had been noted that some Syrian students were wearing it to assist them with cheating. This decision was later rescinded.

2-Terrorist Attacks: The “Ban the Niqab” campaign in Egypt sought to reduce the capacity of terrorist groups to utilize face-coverings as a tool in their attacks against the police and military, as well as civilian targets and foreign embassies. A similar rationale is used by the anti-niqab faction in Tunisia, given that terrorist groups are capable of using the face-veil as a mask to conceal their identities while carrying out attacks. Police investigations in Tunisia concluded that terrorists used face-veils to sneak into cities, especially the capital, from other areas, notably Jebel ech Chambi in the West of the country. 

3-Felonies: Banning the face-veil in public places is predicated upon preventing it from being utilized in committing crimes, according to many viewpoints. For example, the proposed legislation in the Tunisian parliament did not focus on the niqab specifically, but any form of face-covering, due to fears that such covering could be weaponized as a criminal disguise. Such incidents are featured prominently in stories pertaining to crime and accidents in Arab newspapers

4-Directing Public Opinion towards Secondary Issues: Some Middle Eastern nations at this time are facing serious crises which require immediate focus, such as employment and the promotion of investment and developing impoverished areas. Such priorities seem to conflict with government attempts to regulate face-veiling. The ban on niqabs in Morocco coincided with the bumbling attempts to form a Moroccan government under the leadership of Abdelilah Benkirane. The struggle went on for over three months after the Justice and Development Party attained the most votes in the Moroccan parliamentary elections of October 2016. Public opinion in cyberspace vented its frustration at this state of affairs through the hashtag “no to banning the niqab”. 

5-Imposing the Model of the Islamic Caliphate: ISIS has attempted to impose its interpretation of an “Islamic micro-state” since overtaking portions of Iraq and Syria in mid-2014. ISIS has in fact attempted to impose a dress code in the cities in which it controlled. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated on February 22nd 2015 that the terrorist group subjected a man to 100 lashes in the northeastern Syrian village of al-Sarb in the countryside of the city of al-Hasakah, as punishment for allowing wives to take off their face-veils. 

Ironically, ISIS prevented women from wearing the face-veil within its secured zones in northern Iraqi cities in September 2016, citing safety concerns. This was in complete contrast to the rules imposed on women previously, which had forced them to don attire which completely hid their face, and punishing them with beatings should they fail to comply. In some cases the punishment for violating this dress code was death. 

Difficult Hurdles:

There are a number of complications facing the imposition of a ban on the face-veil throughout the region, which can be listed as follows:

1-Social Opposition: Segments of public opinion in some Middle Eastern nations consider the face-veil to be part and parcel of Islamic law, and thus see banning it as a flagrant violation of Islam’s teachings, though this is not actually true. The face-veil is part of social custom among the majority of certain populations, but it is not an aspect of religious piety. The Egyptian government faced such a debate in 1992 when it banned the niqab on school campuses, only to have President Mubarak rescind that decision.

2-Increasingly Heated Social Confrontations: Campaigns in favor of banning the face-veil are faced with equally passionate counter-campaigns. A number of female professors in Cairo University in October of 2015 petitioned their lawyer Dr. Ahmed Mahran, the head of the Cairo Center for Political and Legal Studies and Human Rights, to support their case, which they presented to Egypt’s Administrative Judiciary Court. The women’s lawsuit sought to nullify Dr. Gaber Nassar’s decision to ban them from teaching, lecturing and lab work. 

3-Attacks by the Salafi Movements: Salafi activists led a campaign in opposition to the Moroccan Interior Minister’s decision to ban the production and sale of the burqa. The Salafis believed that this decision will create social rifts, as women cannot be forced to ‘uncover’ their faces and bodies. In that context, Moroccan Salafi websites adopting viewpoints similar to those of the Islamic State responded to the Interior Minister’s decision in many ways. One of them was to issue incendiary speeches attacking the government, written anonymously by Moroccans and Levantines. Some online comments even went so far as to claim that “even the Jews” had not committed such a horrible action in an Islamic country as the Moroccan government’s decision.

Some Salafi students in Tunisia attacked the dean of the College of Literature Art and the Humanities in the Mounba governorate, north of the capital. The attack occurred on December 3rd of 2011, during which the students surrounded the dean’s office and trapped him there for hours to demand that he lift the ban on face-veiling on the campus, a demand which had led to widespread protest. Those opposed to the ban have often held that it is possible to verify identification through electronic thumb-printing, rendering such a ban meaningless. 

4-The Position of Official Religious Institutions:  Official or government-sponsored religious institutions in the region have taken both supportive and silent positions on the face-veil debate. Dr. Amina Nassir, an Egyptian parliamentarian and a professor of religious philosophy at al-Azhar University, stated that the government would face numerous hardships if it undergoes the battle against the niqab without support from the religious institutions.

5-Crackdowns on Human Rights: Those who oppose the banning of the face-veil utilize the issue to highlight government encroachment on personal liberties, and hold that women who cover their faces are having their rights violated. In that context, the Moroccan human rights group ONDH Maroc stated on January 9th 2014 that the Moroccan Interior Ministry’s decision banning the burqa is a violation of international humanitarian law, and that it is a repressive measure and an indirect violation of women’s rights to choose their own attire which expresses their identities and their cultural, political and social beliefs. 

Escalation:

In conclusion, there is a regional trend against the wearing of the face-veil in public places. This trend exists even in nations where extremist groups roam, such as Afghanistan. A protest was held at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul, by a group of Afghan men belonging to the “Afghan Peace Volunteers” organization, who voiced their objections to the violations of women’s rights and the escalation of violence against women throughout the country. Much of the literature points to the decline in Afghan women’s rights since the Taliban came to power in the late 1990s, which imposed wearing the face-veil by force of low.

In accordance with diffusion theory, Afghan dress has spread across borders to other countries in the region, and in some cases has become a political symbol in its own right. Interest groups, whether religious or political or economic, which have defended such a dress code have surpassed what is known as the “modesty dilemma”. The issue with such a dress code is not modesty per se, but rather the ideological and value systems which lurk behind it.