One of the joys of online journalism is that you can include links to your sources, and this pleasure is never keener than when the source is a 75 page PDF of an academic report in Danish. This one contains some very useful perspective on the debate about banning burkas, to be precise, Niqabs. The Danish government thought to ask how many people such a ban would affect: the answer was something between 100 and 200.
An article on the interesting Swedish site islamologi.se picks the story up:In France, where there is an inflamed debate on the matter right now, the first investigation carried out by the police last year found that there were 367 women in France who wore burka or Niqab – 0.015% of the population. This was so low that the secret service was told to count again, and came up with a figure of 2,000; in Holland there seem to be about 400, and in Sweden a respectable guess suggests 100.
The most fascinating figure of all, though, came from the Danish researchers, who actually interviewed some of the covered women. Most were young, or at least under forty, and half of them were white converts. I think this makes it entirely clear that in modern Europe the burka is not an atavistic hangover, but a very modern gesture of disaffection from and rejection of society, which appeals to a certain kind of extreme temperament. This isn't to say that nutters can't cause society real problems. The arrest of seven people in Ireland yesterday, charged with a conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist for drawing a cartoon of Muhammed, should be proof enough of that. But the burka debate is not so much about religious obligation, as about the public rejection of the surrounding society, and society's tolerance for that.
