Do burqa bans make us safer? Veil prohibitions and terrorism in Europe

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, several European states have moved to ban or restrict the wearing of Islamic face veils. Supporters of these bans maintain that they are necessary to ensure national security and cultural assimilation. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that prohibitions on the veil unjustly restrict the religious liberty of Muslim women. Interestingly, though, despite the controversy surrounding restrictions and bans on the veil and conflicting expectations on the effects of these limitations, little research has attempted to rigorously analyze their effect on radicalization. We seek to address this gap through a statistical analysis of the effects of these laws on Islamist terrorism in the states of Europe. We find that states that enforce veil bans are indeed statistically much more likely to experience more and more lethal Islamist terrorist attacks than countries where such laws do not exist.

KEYWORDS:

• Burqa bans
• Europe
• Islam
• terrorism
• women’s rights
• veils
• religious freedom
• ISIS
• France

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jia Hui Lim for valuable research assistance and the journal referees for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nilay Saiya is assistant professor of public policy and global affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Stuti Manchanda is a Ph.D. candidate in public policy and global affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Notes

1 Qu’ran 7:46; 19:16–17; 24:30–31; 32:32–33; 33:53; 33:58–59; 41:5; 42:51.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nanyang Technological University [grant number Start-Up Grant].