IF MEMORY serves it would have been the General Election campaign of 2005. I was sitting in the living room of Dewsbury businessman Iftikhar Azam, discussing serious allegations about the activities of Labour’s MP-in-waiting, Shahid Malik. I recall this not out of fondness for multi-cultural nostalgia, but in the context of Reform UK’s determination to ban the Muslim face covering – the niqab.
Malik – currently on trial for a £6.3million covid fraud which he denies – would go on to be a junior Labour minister before he was disgraced in the MPs’ expenses scandal. Defeated Tory candidate Sayeeda Hussain-Warsi would instead be fast-tracked to Westminster by Michael Howard as Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury and later elevated to the first Cabinet of David Cameron.
I remember pulling my car over to take her phone call. ‘Danny, I’ve just been made a baroness! You’re the first person I’ve called after my dad!’ I swallowed that one hook, line and sinker, not for the first or last time.
Back to Ifty’s lounge. His wife was hidden from view in the kitchen (this pertains even in most supposedly ‘liberal’ Muslim households) but one of his four children entered the room before heading out. A girl, I couldn’t guess her age – 12 or 13? – because she was clad head to toe in black burqa and the eye-slit niqab.
Ifty laughed. ‘Kids, eh? She insists on wearing that stuff!’ He shrugged, in the puzzled manner of any secular 21st century dad. Fashion or religious indoctrination, then? Which of these – or both – is Reform UK determined to tackle?
It was different in the living room of Sayeeda a short while later when we discussed a looming libel trial in which she was a witness. Neither her husband Naeem nor her young daughter was present, neither was there the required chaperone. She didn’t seem troubled, sitting there in a low-cut, tight-fitting tee shirt and jeans.
Islam’s strict constraints on female modesty? Go figure. I can’t say if a chaperone accompanied Baroness Warsi and since-imprisoned Labour peer Nazir Ahmed (sex assaults on minors) when they flew to Sudan in 2007 to rescue British ‘teddy bear’ teacher Gillian Gibbons. But then Ahmed had campaigned for his Tory lady friend in Dewsbury’s 2005 election against his own party. Again, go figure.
Back then, owning the local newspaper, I was still very useful to Sayeeda’s ambitions. So much so that she’d invited me to a private lunch with recent Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (soon to be assassinated). Much later I’d recall seeing Iftikhar Azam at that Dewsbury Town Hall event, celebrating Sayeeda’s very worthy Savayra Foundation charity, but at the time it meant little.
I raise all this because of the declaration by Zia Yusuf that Reform UK would ban the niqab once they have control of No 10. He didn’t say ‘niqab’ explicitly, instead addressing ‘all face coverings in public’, which I suppose could equally refer to far left/Antifa knuckle-draggers and their enduring covid-era face masks and ubiquitous hoodies. But I think we all ‘get’ Zia’s nod-and-a-wink.
It’s a policy (if not yet on a manifesto) which I suspect will appeal to the vast majority of non-Muslim voters/citizens who can too often feel alien on their own streets, literally surrounded by this insistent reminder of our kuffar status. I’d expect Muslim men to assert that their women should not be seen by any man, whatever his faith. Experience suggests they’re not inclined towards agreeing to disagree.
As a brief aside, it’s not as if this is a universal aspect of Islam. I’ve travelled many times to Morocco and Egypt and seen few local women with their faces covered. It seems to me that this is a deliberate, separatist diktat exercised in many – but not all – British Muslim districts.
Time and election results will reveal the grit behind Zia Yusuf’s grandstanding. Assumed to be Muslim, he remains guardedly private about his beliefs and apparently won’t be observing Ramadan. Should Reform come to power, however, I suspect that this pledge could draw an uncomfortable line in the religious/cultural sand that one steadfast minority faction may insist on crossing. That could make community relations interesting and test Reform’s resolve, to say the least.
Still, Islam’s practitioners are nothing if not adaptable. Iftikhar Azam moved his imported cousin/wife out of the family home and in with her in-laws across the road. Meanwhile his old schoolfriend Sayeeda Warsi ousted her imported cousin/hubby Naeem, the pair hastening off to have themselves a Sharia marriage. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Well, after a fashion they did. Attention-seeking ex-Tory Baroness Warsi (she resigned the Whip and left the Conservative Party in 2024) continues to change her mind on Britain’s failings more often than she did her public/private garb, while the first Mrs Azam had to be informed by Daily Mail reporters that she’d actually been divorced. Her limited English hadn’t enabled her to understand the paperwork . . .
