‘It's a part of me, I feel naked without it': choice, agency and identity for Muslim women who wear the niqab

ABSTRACT

In the context of heightened suspicion and anti-Muslim stereotypes in a post-9/11 and 7/7 era, Muslim women who wear the niqab (face veil) are stigmatized, criminalized and marked as ‘dangerous’ to British/Western values. While the wearing of the niqab has elicited a good deal of media, political and public debates, little attention has been paid to the opinions of Muslim women who wear it. Drawing on individual and focus group interviews with Muslim women who wear the niqab in the UK, this article places at the centre of the debate the voices of those women who do wear it, and explores their reasons for adopting it. The findings show that the wearing of the niqab emerges as a personal choice, an expression of religious piety, public modesty and belonging to the ‘ummah’. It is also perceived as a form of agency, and non-conformity to Western consumerist culture and lifestyle.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim women
• Islam
• niqab
• agency
• identity
• ummah

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The findings presented in this article are parts of the author's PhD thesis (Zempi 2014).

2. A ‘mahram’ is a man whom a woman cannot marry in her life such as her father, brother, father-in-law or son. As such, a Muslim woman must wear the niqab in the presence of men who do not have with her a degree of consanguinity (blood relationship) that precludes marriage.

3. Prayer is called ‘Salat’ in Arabic. However, Muslim women from the India subcontinent used the term ‘Namaz’ instead of Salat.

4. Shafia was a French national of Algerian heritage. At the time of conducting the interviews, Shafia and her family had recently moved to Leicester from Paris because of the veil ban in France which prevented her from wearing the niqab in public.