Face to face with a trend that unsettles

Mumtaz Patel wears a cloak of invisibility when she walks out of her apartment every morning.

After donning her long black robe and wrapping a scarf around her hair, Patel drops a black veil across her face, leaving her huge brown eyes visible only through a narrow slit.

The 24-year-old doctoral student at Queen Mary, University of London, wears it as a message: “The way I’m dressed tells even non-Muslim men that I’m off-limits,” she said. “You don’t touch me, you don’t harass me. You just talk to me, and that’s as far as it goes.”

For many Britons, however, Patel’s withdrawal behind her veil makes her anything but invisible.

The Muslim veil, or niqab, has come under question in the last few weeks from Cabinet ministers, judges and even Prime Minister Tony Blair, who described it as “a mark of separation.” Increasingly, Patel and others find themselves under physical and verbal threat for a style of dress they regard as an essential expression of piety and modesty.

Not long after former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw publicly called for examining the wearing of veils, Patel walked into a shop to buy a chocolate bar.

“The guy said, ‘I’m not going to sell it to you unless I can see you.’ I said, ‘Stuff your chocolate!’ And I know -- he wouldn’t have said that if Jack Straw hadn’t said it first.”

France and Turkey have banned head scarves, or hijab, in public schools, and the Dutch government this month sought to ban the niqab and burka in public. Britain has always tolerated a variety of styles of Muslim dress and has made no attempt to regulate head scarves. The veil, however, has already been restricted at a few schools and hospitals.

Many Muslims fear that Straw’s remarks -- and the flood of support they generated, mainly among non-Muslims -- could be an indication that regulation of even head scarves might be on the way.

“A lot of practicing Muslims feel very much that a lot of people in power are not happy with us being part of this country, and this culture, on our terms. Constantly, the media is saying Muslims need to compromise, and basically secularize,” said Eman Penny, 29, of Kingston Upon Thames, a clinical psychologist who is a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Protect-Hijab.

Penny, who wears the full niqab only occasionally, said the debate has made confronting veiled women politically correct.

“It seems like it’s kind of OK for people to say, ‘I’m not comfortable with this; would you mind taking that off?’ ” she said. “People say it’s not in tune with ‘British values,’ but they can’t say what they are.”

The veil issue is one of many that have accompanied Britain’s transformation from a mainly white, Christian nation to a true multicultural stew. Large waves of immigrants from South Asia over the last half a century have created a growing generation of native-born Muslims, many of whom are even more rigorous than their parents in religious practice.

In the newspaper column that started the current controversy, Straw wrote in the Lancashire Telegraph, his hometown paper, that he had begun asking veiled women to remove their face coverings during visits to his office.

Straw, who is now leader of the House of Commons, said he had begun to think after his encounters with veiled women about “the apparent incongruity between the signals which indicate common bonds -- the entirely English accent, the ... education -- and the fact of the veil.”

“Above all, it was because I felt uncomfortable about talking to someone ‘face to face’ who I could not see,” he said.

Since then, Muslim organizations have reported an increase in physical attacks against women wearing veils.

Patel has already faced frightening confrontations.

In the first, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, she was surrounded by a group of white youths as she was leaving the university. They began kicking and punching her, shouting, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” and other hostile remarks. She was hospitalized with heavily bruised ribs and a concussion.

Then shortly after the London transit bombings in July 2005, Patel said, she was again surrounded by a group of boys, who pushed her back and forth across the circle they had formed and finally shoved her to the ground, breaking her knee.

A month later, she was driving with her sister in East London. Her sister was wearing a head scarf, Patel a full veil. An oncoming car blocked their progress down a narrow street, and five boys leaped out and surrounded the car. The young women quickly locked the doors, she said, but the boys began pouring gasoline on the vehicle.

A bystander ran indoors to where a Muslim family was having a party, and a large group of men ran into the street and fell on the five boys, she said. The police arrived about 20 minutes later, Patel said, “but by then the guys had been dealt with.”

Patel, whose parents were born in India, said it was wrong to argue that the veil stood in the way of integration or a genuinely multicultural society.

“I can tell you, I am severely integrated into this society,” she said. “I work in a university. All the men and women at the university know me on a personal level. I’ve lectured at that university to people from all over the world. How is that not integration?” she said.

Patel lives in Walthamstow, -- a district often jokingly referred to as Walthamstan -- where several suspects were arrested this summer in the investigation of an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners. She called the neighborhood an example of the multiculturalism that many Britons complain has been replaced by isolated ethnic enclaves in much of the country.

When she was growing up, she said, children on her street roamed blocks at a time, playing with children of many races and religions. Since then, she said, the high crime rate has made youngsters stick closer to home.

“Still, it’s white people, black people, Asians. On our street, if it’s Eid [a Muslim feast], we’ll send out food to everybody on the street. If it’s Christmas, people will send out food to everybody else. I have friends who are not Muslim. The only place multiculturalism doesn’t exist is in the minds of these politicians.”

Straw is a member of the liberal Labor Party, the political force that probably is the most accommodating to immigration and multiculturalism in Britain. It seemed advisable that if someone was going to raise the veil issue, said Phil Riley, the party’s secretary in Straw’s hometown, it ought to be Labor.

“One of the problems is if mainstream politicians don’t talk about things, then the extremists do,” he said. “It ought to be that people can have a conversation about things like this without becoming neo-Nazis.”

In Blackburn, the town in northern England that Straw is from, a wave of immigration from India and Pakistan in the 1950s has resulted in a population that is about 25% Muslim. Yet interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims “has been fairly limited,” Riley said.

“The major Muslim social events are these huge wedding parties most weekends. A very small minority of whites are ever invited to them,” he said. “Normally, you’ll go to an event and there’ll be 2,000 Muslims there, and maybe 10 white people.”

He said the number of women wearing the niqab has increased to “spookily really significant numbers” since Sept. 11, most of them young, Blackburn-born and British-educated.

“All my views about integration would have said to me that the development of a process of self-segregation is an odd thing for Blackburn-educated women to do ... and that’s what it is. There’s nothing about [the veil] that makes any indication that those women want to converse with anybody,” Riley said.

Many Muslim women say the veil allows the wearer to set the parameters of social interaction.

“It’s a spiritual thing for me. It provides me a space where I don’t have to talk to anyone,” Penny said.

“I think it’s a very powerful thing. Because you’re deciding how much of you you show to other people.”