They call it a woman’s free choice to cover herself. Let me take the hypocrisy apart, word by word!
It comes back every single time. A Muslim voice steps into the debate and explains to us that the niqab and the headscarf are the woman's own choice. That she decides over her own body. That it is in fact feminism. And that the rest of us should stay well away from the subject, because we do not understand it.
Usually it is a man saying it.
So let us take it from the ground up. Not because the argument is strong, but because it has been repeated so many times that people have started to believe it.
Freedom is not measured by what a person is allowed to do. Freedom is measured by what it costs to do the opposite.
A choice is only free if both doors are open. One door leads to support from family, mosque and the entire community. The other leads to condemnation, loss of honour, loss of network and in some cases loss of safety. Then there are not two doors. There is one door and a warning.
If you want to test it, it takes three seconds.
Same woman. Same right to decide over her own body. She says: tomorrow I take the niqab off. I let my hair blow free. I wear a summer dress with bare arms and bare legs.
Now ask the same men who defended her choice yesterday whether they defend it today.
They do not. You know it. I know it. They know it themselves.
And they do not even hide it. Go into any comment thread where this exact subject is being discussed. Not some other topic. This one. Covering, choice, freedom. And watch what happens the moment Western women are brought up.
We are the contrast they need. We are called whores. Cheap. Without dignity. Women who have used their so-called freedom to make themselves available to anyone. That is written by the same men who, three comments earlier, explained that a woman decides over her own body.
Read what is actually happening there. Her right to cover is being defended by degrading the women who do not. Both statements come from the same man, in the same thread, about the same question.
If both choices were genuinely equal, one of them would not have to be dragged through the mud to defend the other.
And while they write it, they stare. Every woman reading this has noticed.
That is where the whole argument collapses. The right to choose is defended in one direction only. A right that runs one way is not a right. It is an order with a friendly explanation on the outside.
Then comes the next move. She says herself that she chooses it. Who are you to contradict her?
Think about what is actually being asked. If there is a price for taking the covering off, there is also a price for saying you were pressured into putting it on. The punishment lands on both statements. Her answer is therefore least reliable in exactly the situation where it is being used as final proof.
You cannot elevate one answer to the status of truth while pretending it is a coincidence that only that answer is free to give.
And there is something that runs deeper than what she dares say out loud.
She was born into an ideology that places her sex beneath the man's from the very beginning. She was raised to believe that covering is what is best for her. That it protects her. That it is the very source of her dignity. She has heard it since before she could walk.
I am not saying she is stupid. I am not saying she has no will of her own. I am saying that no human being can give free consent to something they have never seen a real alternative to. That applies to all of us. None of us chooses freely inside what we were taught to see as the condition of our own worth.
And there is the truly uncomfortable part. When covering is tied to her dignity, the opposite choice is not merely forbidden. It is shameful. Nobody chooses freely between two options when one of them is defined as the loss of herself.
If you want to know whether the choice is free, do not only listen to those who stay. Listen to those who left. They have paid for what they are saying. That is why it weighs more.
And now to the part that closes the case. You do not have to guess what they believe. They have written it down themselves.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Islamist movement working for a global caliphate, and it is banned in a number of countries. It has a Danish website. Read what they say to us, and read what they say to their own.
To us: a ban on face covering is an infringement of Muslim women's right to manifest their identity. The argument about coercion and social control they call an obvious lie. The women chose it themselves, they write, often against their families' wishes.
To their own: the party has made it a requirement that sharia-compliant dress consists of jilbab and khimar. The party's disciplined members comply fully with the party's positions.
Requirement. Not choice. Their words, not mine.
And there is more in their own draft constitution. The woman is a mother and the keeper of the home. The commentary makes clear that she must have permission from her guardian or her husband to leave her house. Offices of government may be held only by a man.
Read that last part again.
A woman who has to ask permission to walk out of her own front door. A woman who can never hold office. She is the one presented to us as the free and sovereign individual whose choice of covering none of us has the right to question.
The right to choose is invoked outward by the same movement that has abolished it inward. This is not a disagreement about what freedom means. It is our own language of freedom picked up and used by people who do not believe a single word of it. They use it because it works on us.
And then the men who speak on her behalf.
What matters is not that they are men. What matters is what they are actually doing. They speak about a freedom they will never have to pay for. If they are wrong, they lose nothing. If she is wrong, she loses everything. They borrow her risk to win an argument in a country where taking part costs them nothing at all.
Underneath all of it lies the thing nobody dares say out loud. You cannot hold a conversation about women's free choice inside a system where the woman is not the equal of the man from the outset. Not in testimony, not in inheritance, not in divorce, not in the right to leave the faith. When the frame is unequal, the choice inside the frame is unequal too. You cannot quote freedom on one point and skip everything else.
So to the legislation, and there is nothing to wrap it in.
Ban it. The covering of women that grows out of an oppressive ideology has no place under Western values.
I know the counterargument by heart. If she is under pressure, doesn't a ban hit her instead of the man applying the pressure?
No. It does the exact opposite.
As long as the covering is permitted, it is a demand he can make, and one she has to find the strength to refuse entirely on her own. She pays the full price of saying no. Ban it, and the demand disappears, because it can no longer be made. She does not have to defy her father, her brother or her husband. She only has to point at the law. That is the difference between a woman standing alone and a woman with a society behind her.
This is not about clothing. It is about the fact that a face is the precondition for being present among other people. You cannot be a citizen of an open society and be anonymous inside it at the same time. France, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland settled this long ago, and the European Court of Human Rights upheld it in 2014. The argument has been had. It was lost by the people who called it freedom.
And to those who call this an attack on their way of life: it is not. It is information about where the line runs, and about what you are saying yes to when you settle here.
There are 55 countries where that way of life is the rule. Choose them, if that is what matters most. But choosing the West means choosing what the West rests on. The woman is the equal of the man. The face is uncovered. You do not take the foundation with one hand and tear it down with the other.
Call it faith. Call it obedience. That is honest.
But do not call it freedom. Freedom is when it costs the same to leave as it does to stay.
It does not here. So let the law carry the price. Not the woman.