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A POLICE force in Yorkshire was yesterday accused of wasting time and public money after sending three officers out to spend a day dressed as Muslim women. Sgt Deb Leonard, Sgt Deb Pickering and Pc Helen Turner dressed in traditional Islamic costumes including burka, jilbab, hijab and niqab. They were accompanied by four Muslim women in Sheffield as part of a scheme called In Your Shoes Day, designed to help South Yorkshire Police learn about the Muslim faith. In return, the Muslim women had a tour of the police custody suite and closed circuit TV offices and were shown the...

Here is a video report on the efforts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ban the wearing of the Muslim "Burka" by women. He says it is not a religious symbol, but a sign of enslavement, and not welcome in France. The controversy is a result of growing tensions in France due to the huge Muslim population there - over 5 million. Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa have migrated to France in recent years. . . . . . (Watch Video)

FRENCH officials were on alert last night after a group linked to al-Qaeda threatened to retaliate over criticism of the burka. The Algeria-based group issued a statement on Islamic websites vowing to “seek vengeance”. It followed comments by French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week in which he said the veils would not be welcome in France. Muslim robes may even be banned in public there. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said last night: “French authorities reaffirm their determination to fight terrorism.”

PARIS (AP) — A top Muslim group in Britain lashed out at Nicolas Sarkozy as "patronizing and offensive" on Tuesday, after the French president said body- and face-covering Islamic garments such as the burqa turn women into prisoners. In Paris, parliament formally created a commission Tuesday to study the wearing of body-cloaking Muslim robes in France, a day after Sarkozy told lawmakers that the burqa would not be welcome in the country. A top official with the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella organization for British Muslim groups, accused Sarkozy of "divisive politics," and said his comments could fan an...

Stop Islamist oppression of women.

Shopping in Harrods last week, I came across a group of women wearing black burkhas, browsing the latest designs in the fashion department. The irony of the situation was almost laughable. Here was a group of affluent women window shopping for designs that they would never once be able to wear in public. Yet it's a sight that's becoming more and more commonplace. In hardline Muslim communities right across Britain, the burkha and hijab - the Muslim headscarf - are becoming the norm. In the predominantly Muslim enclaves of Derby near my childhood home, you now see women hidden behind...

President Sarkozy's proposed ban may be pure politicking, but it does expose a fundamental cross-Channel difference"The burka is not a religious problem, it's a question of liberty and women's dignity. It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can't accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That is not our idea of freedom.” So spoke Nicolas Sarkozy in Versailles during his first state of the nation address to France's two chambers,...

President Nicolas Sarkozy lashed out Monday at the practice of wearing the Muslim burqa, insisting the full-body religious gown is a sign of the "debasement" of women and that it won't be welcome in France. The French leader expressed support for a recent call by dozens of legislators to create a parliamentary commission to study a small but growing trend of wearing the full-body garment in France In the first presidential address in 136 years to a joint session of France's two houses of parliament, Sarkozy laid out his support for a ban even before the panel has been approved—braving...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken out strongly against the wearing of the burka by Muslim women in France. In a major policy speech, he said the burka - a garment covering women from head to toe - reduced them to servitude and undermined their dignity.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's government is to consider banning the burka and other Islamic clothing which French MPs claim is degrading to women. In a move that sparked fierce debate, a group of parliamentarians called for an inquiry into the wearing of the head-to-toe Islamic veil in France and whether Muslim women who cover themselves completely in public constitute an assault on French secularism and women's rights. In a call that won support from senior figures in Mr Sarkozy's government, they demanded that a parliamentary commission consider the fate in France of the burka, where the eyes are covered by a...

Bazooka or Burka & fear of criticizing Islamofascism... thesun.co.uk — Many people are scared to criticise the worst excesses of Islamofascism while being hysterically sensitive to the perceived wrongs of our own culture, especially when it comes to the oppression of females. http://digg.com/arts_culture/Bazooka_or_Burka_fear_of_criticizing_Islamofascism

Saudi cleric Sheikh Mohammed al-Habadan has declared that a Muslim veil, or hijab, that covers all but the eyes encourages women to use eye make-up to look seductive, the BBC reported Friday. Al-Habadan has called on Saudi women to wear a full veil, or niqab, which covers the entire face, including one eye. The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies. The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their...

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye. Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

A Muslim member of the French Government has attacked the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a prison, applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore it. “The burka is a prison, a strait-jacket,” Fadela Amara, the Minister for Urban Affairs and a longstanding women's rights campaigner, said yesterday. “It is not religious. It is the insignia of a totalitarian political project for sexual inequality.” The court decision denying Faiza Mabchour, 32, French citizenship has drawn approval from both Left and Right, highlighting a rejection of Muslim customs that conflict with the values of the secular French...

The fiancée of one of the leaders of the failed July 21 suicide attacks has been sentenced to three years in jail for helping him escape by dressing in a burka as a Muslim woman. Fardosa Abdullahi, who was 17 at the time, gave Yassin Omar her mobile phone handset, provided a scarf and handbag for his disguise and accompanied him to Golders Green coach station where he fled to Birmingham in his feminine disguise. Omar's family persuaded her to contact police but she claimed she did not know where he was and it was not until six days after...

When I came to this country, I took off my hijab. It wasn't an easy decision. I worried at night that God would punish me for it. That's what I had been taught would happen, and it filled me with fear. I was 27, coming from my home country of Iraq to study in California. I hoped that by taking off the hijab I had been wearing for eight years, I would be able to maintain a low profile. In Baghdad, you keep a low profile to stay alive. But in the United States, I merely wanted not to be...

Cambridge University has been given £8 million by a Saudi Arabian prince to establish an Islamic studies centre. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, ranked in the top 20 richest men in the world, with a fortune of about £10 billion, has donated the cash to the university to fund a centre in his name for the study of the role of Islam in the Middle East and globally. The gift has been recommended by the university's general board and is expected to be announced in June. advertisement The grandson of King Ibn Saud and nephew of King Abudllah, the prince counts...

A fringe sect of Jewish women with a Taliban-like dress code will be overcome by a major spiritual crisis after the arrest of the group's leader on charges of child abuse, haredi sources in Beit Shemesh predicted Wednesday. According to haredi media and a well-informed source in Beit Shemesh, the 54-year-old mother of 12 who is suspected of serious child abuse and failing to report multiple cases of incest among her children, is none other than the head of a sect of women who adhere to a dress code more stringent than that of the most extreme Muslim sects and...

A burqa may not be the flirtiest garment ever invented for women. The highly modest head-to-toe robe even shrouds the eyes, so for centuries it's been difficult for women wearing them to send suggestive signals to men. But now a German designer has debuted a digitally-enabled burqa that can broadcast a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones. Markus Kison calls it the "CharmingBurka," and says it isn't forbidden by Islamic law. A model demonstrated a prototype of Kison's garment at the Seamless 2008 design and fashion show in Boston, a high-tech fashion event run with support from the...

The bright blue veil of the burqa is one of the most iconic and widely worn pieces of women’s clothing in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, fewer women wear the burqa in Kabul, but elsewhere, in the provinces, the burqa is as ubiquitous as ever. The Zamarai family, shown in the video, have been tailors and burqa-makers for three generations. But recently there’s a new player in the Kabul burqa market: China, which mass-produces a style of burqa that many women here find more fashionable than the Zamarais’ traditional hand-assembled garments. The Chinese-made burqas’ tightly-crimped folds and machine-produced...