The Woman Behind the Veil by Sara Al Nuaimi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21829/the-woman-behind-the-veil

When I ask my mother why she decided to wear the niqab, she looks at me, puzzled. “Decide?” she repeats, as if I’d asked why she “decided” to speak Arabic.

She manages her own stock portfolio entirely in Arabic… she notes that “wars slow things down, yet when there are wars, gold goes up.”

When asked what she thinks of interest, she explains that interest has multiple meanings. When someone is desperate or helpless and needs a loan with interest, that is unacceptable — it exploits the needy. But interest on her own deposits? That is her money “working” to bring more money.

She does not trust foreign stocks. Even locally, she is selective about private ventures, such as new hotels. “It’s never clear what they’re doing exactly,” she says. “They could be financing prostitution.”

Watching so many politicians talk about my mother’s niqab, I do not see bad intentions. I see concern. People want to protect their culture. They worry that foreign customs might slowly replace their own. It is true of people in the West, as well, who might worry that people could be in their midst who wish to replace miniskirts with burqas.

This response is not prejudice. What people are picking up on — sometimes without knowing how to name it — is that people wish to protect what matters to them…. Like church bells in Salzburg or kimonos in Kyoto, they belong to a place, and they deserve to be protected.

In the end, my mother’s story is not really about the niqab. It is about how to stay rooted in a world that keeps shifting.

This means being yourself within the world as you find it, not demanding the world to change for you. That is the kind of wisdom we do not talk about enough.

When most of the world sees a woman in a niqab, a face veil that covers everything except the eyes, the assumptions are predictable — and harsh.

Recently, in Dubai, a tourist filmed a woman in a niqab eating at a restaurant. The tourist and her friend were treating the woman as if she were entertainment for them, rather than as a person trying to enjoy her dinner. Eventually, when the video clip went viral on social media, the Dubai Police issued a statement that they were investigating the matter.

Even in a Muslim-majority country, the woman could not simply be out in public without becoming a spectacle.

In 2017, Australian Senator Pauline Hanson wrote about the burqa, which covers the whole body and face:

“I have long believed that full face coverings, such as the burqa, were oppressive, presented barriers to assimilation, disadvantaged women from finding employment, were causing issues inside our justice system, presented a clear security threat and has no place in modern Western society.”