Banning and criminalising the Muslim face veil tests the very foundations of modern liberal society, warn researchers from Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Sussex.
The paper ‘Reasons to Ban? The Anti-Burqa Movement in Western Europe‘ examines the move to legislate against, and to criminalise face-veiling which has swept across the EU recently.
The European movement against face-veiling is now widespread, with calls to implement a ban, or a ban being in place, in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany.
This move from country to country makes it seem like a form of “political Swine Flu”, suggests the paper’s authors, Prakash Shah, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, QM and Ralph Grillo, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Sussex.