Veiled Threat

The flip side of radical Islamic totalitarianism.

By Bret Stephens
Tuesday, July 3, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Last October, Jack Straw, then the leader of the House of Commons and a former foreign secretary, touched off a furor in Britain when he suggested there was something amiss with the growing trend among Muslim women to wear the face-covering, head-to-toe garments commonly known as the niqab. "Insensitive and surprising," sniffed Simon Hughes, party chairman of the Liberal Democrats, about Mr. Straw's remarks. "A dangerous doctrine," added Oliver Letwin of the Tories. "Jack Straw has unleashed a storm of prejudice and intensified division," opined columnist Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian.

And what dangerous, insensitive, prejudiced and divisive thing did the Right Honorable Member say? He said that wearing the veil was "bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult." He said he "would rather" Muslim women do away with the niqab entirely. He said that "seeing people's faces is fundamental to the relationships between people," and he asked his niqabi constituents to remove their veil when meeting with him in his office--a request with which they had, apparently, been happy to comply. He said he hadn't meant to be "prescriptive," that wearing the veil was "a matter of choice," but that it was nevertheless "important to put out on the table something which is there in any event."


Now six men and one woman are in police custody in connection with last week's attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow. The speed with which the arrests were made isn't surprising: Scotland Yard and MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, are known to keep tabs on literally thousands of Muslim radicals. What is surprising is the failure of much of the British establishment to connect the dots between the jihadis in the Jeep Cherokee and the women behind the veil. The first are treated as a security issue; the second as a civil rights one. But they are opposite faces of the same totalitarian coin.

Seen from a narrow angle, it's easy to tie oneself in knots debating the correct attitude of Western societies toward the veil. The liberal says: People generally ought to be entitled to dress as they choose. The liberal also says: Veiling the female face isn't merely an expression of sexual modesty but an obliteration of a woman's public identity and hence a violation (even if self-imposed) of her political rights. The conservative says: If religious freedom is a bedrock Western value, then the rights accorded to the Amish or Hasidic Jews to dress as they do must also extend to ultraconservative Muslims. The conservative also says: Liberal societies cannot allow illiberal and separatist practices to flourish under the banner of multiculturalism, particularly if those practices are often enforced by violence.

Yet all this misses the fundamentally tactical element of niqab. "It's about enforcing separation," notes a former senior French Interior Ministry official who helped draft his country's 2004 ban on religious headgear in public schools and government buildings. "It is best understood as an intra-Muslim show of strength, a way to intimidate their own women, a way to intimidate the infidels, a way to make themselves more visible, a way to make sure no one strays from their world vision."

In radical Islam, the vision is advanced along two tracks: as a war for supremacy within the community, and as a war for supremacy without. It may be futile to speculate about what precisely drove the jihadis to strike at this particular moment: It could have been in reaction to the knighthood awarded to novelist Salman Rushdie; it could have been a send-off to the detested Bush poodle Tony Blair; it could have been an invitation to the cabinet of Prime Minister Gordon Brown--stuffed with opponents of the war in Iraq and Israel's war against Hezbollah--to draw the same lesson Spaniards did from the Madrid train bombing and withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever the case, it stemmed from a generalized hatred of a civilization that can't quite decide what to say or think about the niqab.


In this battle, radical Islamists will almost certainly lose: Britain has nearly four decades of experience combating, and defeating, vastly more competent terrorists. The country is much less sure-footed when it comes to fighting the battle against radical Islam on the first track.

Consider the case of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Banned in Germany for anti-Semitism and in much of the Middle East and Central Asia for advocating the replacement of existing governments with an Islamic caliphate, Hizb ut-Tahrir nonetheless has no proven links to terrorism and is not listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In Britain it disseminates "its thoughts through discussion with the masses, study circles, lectures, seminars [and] leaflet distribution," as it explains on its regularly updated Web site, hizb.org.uk. It sees no distinction between "political" and "traditional" Islam. Not surprisingly, it is at the forefront in opposing efforts to curb the use of the veil.

Not surprisingly, too, the reaction of the British government to Hizb ut-Tahrir has been near total paralysis. Mr. Blair attempted to have it banned after the July 2005 bombings; he was rebuffed by his own government, which could find no legal basis for the ban and which feared the move might further radicalize its members. The party has also helped itself by joining ranks with the Stop the War Coalition, which has its own leverage on the British Labour Party.

And so the ideology of radical Islam--advocating the destruction of Israel and dozens of Muslim governments, justifying the killing of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, concurring with al Qaeda's ends even if it does not endorse its means and employing the vocabulary of liberty to promote a vision of theocracy--has gained its foothold in British political life. It does all this openly and freely, because the only actionable threat the government seems to understand is the one accompanied by the sound of a blast. But there are graver threats hiding in plain view. To see them, all Mr. Brown and his government need do is remove the veil before their own eyes.