Across the pond

The reason the arguments around Jack Straw’s statement that he wants Muslim women who wear the niqab to lift their veil when they come to chat to him in his surgery are still being raked over is that they touch something deep in the national psyche. Despite the acres of newsprint that have already been used up on this subject there is still more to be said. There are two points which have not been made in anything I have read on the subject.

Point number one is that although the number of women adopting the niqab, which covers the whole of the face leaving only a slit for the eyes to see, and be seen, is only a small minority, there has been a much bigger increase in the number of women adopting the hijab and the chador and other Muslim dress forms. Though some male writers have suggested that this as an example of how women are dominated by the demands made by their menfolk, the evidence from the large numbers of Muslim women interviewed demonstrates overwhelmingly the choice to wear traditional dress is made by the women themselves.

They find it liberating rather than the reverse. And their attitude is a mirror image of our own cultural norms in relation to the how much female flesh is exposed in newspapers, on television and in films and to how often television time is devoted to explicit sexual acts. These changes have taken place gradually over the last forty years so that we have not noticed them, and younger people, who have not known anything different, do not think to question them.

Thus there has been serious concern in newspapers over the last few days about the increase in hard porn on the internet, which implies that an increasing number of women and children are being exploited and probably harmed by being involved in making the videos. But no-one has discussed how this growth has been facilitated by the shift in what is acceptable in our dominant norms. This is not just to do with the tabloid press and the more sensational television programmes.

Saturday’s Guardian, for instance, had two full pages on the row over the niqab. But the prime advertising spot, the back page, was devoted to a full page ad for Observer Woman. This showed two naked and handsome young people engaged in a fond embrace with the headline, ‘Why we all stopped having sex’.

This is just one example of the serious media using blatant sexual titillation in the hope of selling newspapers. (The headline was in fact quite misleading. The actual article was angled around of an American, whose views on what was happening, was based on her experience in New York. It did contain several interviews with English people, which revealed that more sex was taking place rather than less!)

This trend has been going on since the late 1960s when I interviewed Rupert Murdoch at the time he was just starting the Page Three girl and was facing a lot of flak from the serious papers for doing so. Murdoch pointed out that the first nudes in British newspapers had been published in the British qualities. He was quite right. The first was in The Times, which was an extremely titillating full page colour ad for Fison’s agricultural chemicals. The second was in The Observer arts section. (For the record you will not find the paragraph quoting this in my article for The Times, because it was cut out by a sub-editor after I had gone home. And not because I had exceeded my word length.)

The feminists of the late 1960s were making their own statement by deliberately adopting non-titillating dress and even avoiding the use of make-up. Today’s feminists have not entered the niqad debate and they seem to have given up their campaign to stem the trend towards serious television female journalists exposing more and more flesh.

The second point I wish to make is about the reasons many people feel threatened by the niqab and its effect on communications between human beings. First, it is threatening because it is unfamiliar. I do find myself that I am a bit intimidated by the niqad, when I encounter it on the 24 bus. Other forms of Muslim dress don’t bother me, because they are not very different from the habits of Roman Catholic nuns, who were regular travellers on the Wolverhampton number 3 bus of my boyhood.

But it is simply not true that the niqab makes it significantly more difficult to tell whether a person is lying or telling the truth. We do rely on facial expression for cues as to how people really feel. But, because of that, skilled liars become practised in controlling their facial expressions to conceal their feelings. So the student of non-verbal communications observes other non-verbal cues that are still available and which may be less under their conscious control. Posture, gesture and tone of voice, for instance.

And, of course, even with the niqab you can still see the eyes, which the poets used to call the windows of the soul. And because of the absence of other facial expression clues you pay more attention to the eyes. Fear and laughter come through very clearly. But as with all non-verbal clues it is easy to mis-interpret. Some people look shifty, not because they are lying, but because they are shy or uncomfortable.

One final point that has occurred to me in writing. The wearing of the niqab does not in any sense reduce the ability of the female to stir the loins of the rampant male. The greater the degree of coverage of the female form the more that is left to the male imagination. And, of course, the favoured sexual message of my youth was when a girl was making eyes at you. So if the mullahs are expecting the wearing of the niqab to reduce sexual activity between young Muslims I doubt they are having much success.