DORRIES, NEW BRITISH CULTURE SECRETARY ACCUSED OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

Mon 20 September 2021:

The new culture secretary of the United Kingdom has been accused of Islamophobia after describing Muslim women wearing a burqa – a full-body covering with a face veil – as a “medieval” dress code. She was appointed to the post during a Cabinet reshuffle last week.

Within the bounds of U.K. Following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet reshuffle, Nadine Dorries, 64, was named head of the government’s digital, culture, media, and sports department. However, just like Johnson, her earlier remarks that brought controversy had been recorded online.

A populist right-winger, Dorries has been the vocal supporter of then-conservative lawmaker Johnson when he published an infamous article in a newspaper calling the burqa “oppressive” and comparing Muslim women who wear it to “bank robbers” and “letterboxes.” The new culture secretary echoed his rhetoric and called for a ban on the full-face veil.

“I’m very disappointed in Boris that he did not go further and actually use that newspaper article to call for a complete outright ban on a dress code – a medieval dress code – which was designed to cover up women’s beauty and their bruises,” she told Sky News, suggesting that the clothing was used to hide scars from domestic violence.

“Women should be allowed to choose what they wear, and many of these women are not allowed to choose. As I have said, they are not even allowed to choose who they marry,” Dorries said. “Many of them aren’t even allowed to keep their genitals,” she added, referring to female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice prohibited in the U.K. FGM predates Islam and Christianity but is carried out by a minority of adherents to several faiths.

In the same year, Dorries wrote on Twitter, “you cannot expect a society that celebrates gay pride and embraces gay marriage to live harmoniously when condoning the suppression of women forced to cover up, segregate and become invisible.”

Replying to a tweet by journalist Aleesha Khaliq, Dorries said that Muslim women in burqa are “segregated and suppressed.”

“It’s a medieval costume with no place in today’s liberal society. No progressive country should tolerate it,” she added.

It is well known that only a small percentage of the UK’s three million Muslims wear veils.

But the garment, which is banned elsewhere in Europe, occasionally captures national attention when politicians or public figures comment on it.

“We have Boris Johnson who has made Islamophobic comments and now Dorries (as culture secretary),” Khaliq told Qatar-based media outlet Al-Jazeera. “We’ve been legitimizing Islamophobia from the top down for so long that it’s now normal.”

“It’s dangerous because she was actively advocating to ban the burqa. It’s worrying that a senior government figure can dictate what a minority of women choose to wear. Is she going to bring it up again?”

Dorries was suspended from the Conservative Party in 2012 after she took time off from her job as a lawmaker to travel to Australia and appear on the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.”

(With DS)

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