Dear Editor

A burka ban won’t heal the rifts in our society

The desire by certain British politicians to emulate their French counterparts in banning the burka to achieve ‘community cohesion’
raises a very pertinent debate about community cohesion in Britain today.

The claim by Tory MP for Kettering, Philip Hollobone that women who cover their faces with the niqab are a problem for community cohesion in Britain is frankly ludicrous.

How can a small piece of cloth, worn by a tiny minority of women, create problems between communities? Why is it assumed that women who wear the niqab wish to cut themselves off from British society when we have not heard one face-veiled woman utter anything close to this?

The real perpetrators of community division are the politicians such as Mr Hollobone and a host of others, including Jack Straw, the Labour MP for Blackburn, who started this debate. Their regular sensationalisation of different elements of the Muslim community
promotes the current propaganda war against Islam and Muslims. Instead of tolerance, our wider society is fed with this negative
misinformation about Islam. No wonder why community tensions exist.

In the period when Islam was being implemented as a comprehensive ruling system (for more than 1,400 years), people of different faith
lived side by side without feelings of isolation or being labelled. During the time of Umar ibn Al Khattab, third ruler of the Islamic
State, protection of Christians and Jews was ensured in Jerusalem (now conflict-filled). Community cohesion was achieved as the non-Muslims were able to practice their own religions, freely, in their places of worship with the knowledge that they had the protection of the state on their side as citizens of the state. Such a picture of community cohesion is a far cry from what has been achieved by secular liberal democracy today.
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Letter to the Editor of the Daily Mail today
20 July 2010