Portugal Bans The Niqab And Burqa

The Portuguese parliament recently voted to ban the niqab and burqa in most public spaces. Critics cry xenophobia. But in an age when most of Europe mumbles apologies for its own existence, Portugal has chosen to defend the simple, civil idea that in a free society, the face must be seen.

To grasp the importance of Portugal’s move, we must first grasp what exactly is being banned. The hijab covers the hair but leaves the face visible. It is a symbol of faith, and crucially of presence. The niqab and burqa, by contrast, erase that presence altogether. The niqab conceals all but the eyes; the burqa shrouds the entire body behind a mesh screen. The first says, “I am here; I am human.” The others say, “I am human, but you may not look.” Some call that a matter of style. I call it the fault line between civilizations.

Western societies — and Britain most of all — were built on the idea that freedom requires visibility. The nation’s entire civic order depends on recognition: faces seen, voices heard, and truth spoken openly. A courtroom demands witnesses who can look one another in the eye; a democracy demands citizens who do the same. The niqab and burqa dismantle that compact. They turn presence into absence and replace participation with concealment. These ghastly garments don’t express liberty. If anything, they deny it.

When Portugal’s Chega party introduced the bill, it did so not to persecute belief, but to protect order. “A man who forces a woman to wear a burqa, or a woman who sees it as her greatest virtue — let me tell you — you don’t belong in this country”, said party leader André Ventura. It was a sentence that made bureaucrats in Brussels faint, but it captured what many Europeans know. The West cannot endure if it confuses submission for piety and silence for respect.

Yet Britain still hides behind its favourite cliché, “tolerance”. Keyboard warriors, many of whom can barely tell a burqa from a bedsheet, insist that a ban would alienate Muslim citizens. What they fail to acknowledge is that even the Muslim world has drawn its own red lines. Chad banned the niqab a decade ago; Algeria banned it in 2018; Tunisia followed suit in 2019; even Turkey — once the seat of the Ottoman Caliphate — flirted with the idea. Ask yourself why. Because they know what the West has forgotten: that covering the face does not honour faith.

The common defences are familiar: what about nuns, or Sikhs, or Jews? Yes, what about them? None of those garments erase identity. Unlike the niqab, which anonymises, the habit identifies and the turban honours, but the burqa hides. To compare them is to confuse devotion with deletion. The West can accommodate difference but cannot endure surrender of the individual in service to an alien creed.

Supporters of full-face veiling often appeal to “choice”, but a choice made under centuries of conditioning is not freedom. In countries where women are flogged for removing the veil, “choice” is simply submission sugar-coated. Moreover, when those same symbols appear in London or Birmingham, they do not magically shed their meaning but carry it with them. A garment born in coercion does not become emancipatory because it crosses a border.

Britain is not North Africa or the Middle East. To come to Britain is to enter a culture shaped by openness — of speech, of conscience, of face. It is a society built on dialogue, equality before the law, and the right to look power squarely in the eye. Here, individuality is sacred because it is seen. The country that gave the world the suffragettes should not hesitate to defend women’s right to be recognised as full participants in public life.

Portugal, a small country with a long memory of faith and freedom, has reminded the West of something essential. Freedom, in its purest form, cannot exist behind closed cloth. The burqa and niqab are less religious symbols than social partitions. They separate citizens from one another, and women from their own reflection.

Britain should follow Portugal’s lead: not to condemn Islam, though it could do a far better job of confronting its extremist fringes, but to defend the civilisation its forebears built. The Britain of Churchill and Gladstone was forged on the belief that truth must stand tall. The pioneers who fought for those values did not do so to create a nation afraid to see or be seen. The human face — in all its strength, imperfection, and individuality — is the clearest expression of that heritage. To hide it is to turn away from everything Britain once stood for.