NEWS
The Full-Face Veil and the State: Imposition, Ban, Non-Intervention
«The burqa is the best type of hijab, a symbol of the culture of the Afghan people.» — Decree of Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, 7 May 2022
In the same year an activist wearing the full-face veil received a public honour at Westminster for her work with girls, elsewhere the same garment — the full-face veil, niqab or burqa — remains legally imposed in one country and legally banned in others. This is not a conflict between Islam and the West: it is a conflict, cutting across both worlds, over who has standing to regulate the appearance of the female body — and over what the law can actually establish when the same practice is described, depending on who is speaking, as choice or as coercion.
Dated facts, with sources
In Afghanistan, the 7 May 2022 decree of Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada makes the burqa mandatory in public, with penal responsibility falling on the woman's male “guardian” (father, brother, husband): a warning at the first violation, a summons before the authority at the second, three days’ detention at the third, referral to a court at the fourth. The decree encourages women to stay home when there is no essential need to go out. By 2026, enforcement appears to have intensified in Herat, where — according to the exiled Afghan newspaper Hasht-e Subh (June 2026) — a new local directive, invoking Akhundzada’s Decree No. 1930, orders the immediate arrest of women who fail to observe the prescribed dress code, with wearing perfume in the presence of men counted among the violations; non-compliant female civil servants are suspended from duty.
In Tunisia, a 5 July 2019 order by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed banned the niqab in government buildings, after a double suicide bombing in Tunis on 27 June that same year (BBC, 5 July 2019) — an older case than initially assessed here, but still the most frequently cited precedent for the “public order” argument in the Arab world. In Egypt, the Ministry of Education banned the niqab in public and private schools on 11 September 2023, effective from the academic year starting 30 September, leaving the hijab optional (Middle East Eye, 12 September 2023).
In Kuwait, as of March 2025 the sources diverge, and the divergence should be reported, not resolved: some outlets (Jordan News, Arab Times, 17–18 March 2025) reported the Ministry of Interior denying the existence of an active ban, calling it an old 1984 ministerial decision “no longer in force”; other outlets (Gulf News, Gulf Insider, same dates) reported the same Ministry announcing fines of 30–50 dinars for driving while wearing the niqab or burqa, as part of an updated traffic code, citing the same 1984 origin. No source consulted reconciles the two versions.
The United Kingdom has never introduced a national ban on the niqab. On 24 July 2026, Khadija Patel — 39, from Bolton, founder in 2009 of the Krimmz Girls Youth Club — received the British Citizen Award 2026 at the Palace of Westminster, one of 28 recipients, for her work getting girls from under-represented backgrounds into sport. Patel wears the niqab and, after a wave of hostile comments triggered by the award photo, said her work “should be judged by my actions, not by what I am wearing,” calling the niqab a personal choice that “does not limit” her (statements reported by Metro/MSN and The Islamic Information, 26–27 July 2026).
Symmetry test
The control question is: does the assessment of each case hold if the identity of the acting state is swapped? The Taliban decree, which imposes the veil with indirect penal sanction, and the Tunisian and Egyptian bans, which prohibit it in specific public spaces, are — structurally — the same assertion of state sovereignty over the female body: the direction changes (obligation versus prohibition), the principle does not, since the state decides and the woman complies. The fact that Tunisia and Egypt are themselves Muslim-majority countries dismantles the binary civilisational reading: the same public-order argument invoked by France since 2010 (and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in S.A.S. v. France, 2014, via the “living together” criterion) is used by Islamic states without being read, in that setting, as Islamophobia.
The Kuwaiti case, with its conflicting sources, shows a third variant: a state that does not clearly decide whether the ban is active or merely historical — an ambiguity none of the other models share. British non-intervention, in turn, should not be read as weakness relative to a single Western standard — none exists: the continent is divided, France and Belgium ban it, the UK does not — but as a specific, time-consistent political choice. This does not settle, in Patel’s individual case, the question of whether wearing the niqab is autonomous choice or induced conformity: Patel herself describes it, in her own words, as a choice — a statement to be reported as such, not rewritten in either direction.
Declared judgment
None of the four models discussed here addresses the underlying doctrinal issue: the niqab/burqa is not a religious obligation for the majority of Sunni legal schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i), but it is for the Hanbali/Salafi current alone — a distinction treated at length in the linked in-depth piece. A state that bans the niqab for public order and a state that imposes it as Islamic law commit, in this writer’s judgment, the same category error: both treat a minority doctrinal practice as if it were an indisputable religious given — one to suppress it, the other to impose it. The only position fully consistent with individual religious freedom is the one that leaves the choice to the person.
But even this principle must, in fairness, be limited: the law can only recognise a declared choice, not the pressure that may precede it. A statement like Khadija Patel’s — “it is a personal choice” — may be the exact truth, or it may be the only form that family or community pressure, if it existed, could take publicly: no instrument available today, legal or journalistic, reliably distinguishes the two possibilities when they produce the same statement and the same garment. This is not a normative gap that a better law could fill: it is the point at which the very category of “choice” ceases to be observable from the outside.
Related in-depth piece: The Veil That Covers the Face: A Shared Root, Three Different Paths — the pre-Islamic origin of head covering and the doctrinal distinction between hijab and niqab/burqa. On international criminal accountability for Taliban conduct toward women, see Afghanistan: The International Criminal Court Charges Top Taliban Leaders With Gender Persecution. On the overall picture of institutional subjugation in Afghanistan, see Three Ways to Erase a Woman: Law, Body, Death.
Sources: VOA · France 24 · Hasht-e Subh · BBC · Middle East Eye · Jordan News · Gulf Insider · Metro/MSN · The Islamic Information