Spain may be the next country to prohibit the public use of the burqa and the niqab face coverings worn by some Muslim women and girls.
Several initiatives are underway in the country to stop the wearing in public of the garments that for some Muslim women are part of religious observance. The niqab covers the face but leaves the eyes open, usually with a headscarf, while the burqa is a single garment covering the entire body and face, with a mesh screen over the eyes to see through.
In November, the Vox party registered a bill in Spain’s congress to prohibit wearing the burqa, niqab, or any other Islamic garment that covers the face, on the grounds that they are incompatible with the culture of the country, trample the rights of women and pose a security threat.
The bill filed is laxer than the initial proposal Vox had in mind, which would have banned all “Islamic” garments in public as “a serious threat to the survival of our identity, our culture and respect for our legal and social system”.
The centre-right Partido Popular (PP) has said it would support the more limited ban targeting only the burqas and niqab.
That same month, Lara Hernández, a Socialist politician on the city council of Alcantarilla in southern Spain, proposed a resolution that would have banned the burqa and niqab in public within the municipality. She made the proposal on purely feminist grounds.
Controversy around Muslim clothes and face coverings for women in Spain is nothing new; neither are bans on their use.
In 1566, Philip II – whose great grandmother Isabel the Catholic had toppled the last Muslim caliphate on the Iberina Peninsula over a century before in 1492, promulgated a law prohibiting even making clothes in the Muslim fashion, specifically “marlotas, almalafas, leggings or other kind of dresses of those that were used in times of Moors”.
The marlota is a tunic. The almalafa is a wide, long sheet-like garment that is wrapped around the head and hangs over the body. It could be pulled to cover the face as well.
The king dictated that all clothes were to be made “for the use of Christians”.
He also specifically prohibited women from covering their faces, “because it was understood that in order not to lose the habit they had of walking with their faces covered through the streets,” they would simply substitute almalafas with “cloaks and hats as had been done in the kingdom of Aragon” when the customary Muslim dress was banned.
According to researcher Gregorio Garrido Garcia, writing in 2023, such bans on women’s face coverings were reiterated down the centuries, sometimes to little effect.
He noted, too, that many sources from the 16th and 17th centuries attested that Spanish women customarily covered their faces, either halfway or almost entirely, so that only one eye was visible.
Head-to-toe covering of women in Spain persists even today as has become a symbol of local identity and even feminism.
Vejer de La Frontera is a small town in southern Spain. One of the country’s ‘white villages’, it has all the Andalucian charm that has made it a featured destination of no less than National Geographic.
That allure includes Las Cobijadas, a reference to women who wear the traditional dress – an outfit consisting of an ankle-covering black skirt and heavy veil. The veil cinches around the waist and is then pulled over the head and face so that only the left eye is visible (see photo below).
Historians generally agree that the garments are Castilian in origin, a version of the saya y manta – basic dress or skirt and veil–common for women in all of Christian Spain for centuries.
In the 19th century, Romanticists and the first modern travel writers were struck to find this peculiar confection still common street wear in a cadre of small towns near the southernmost tip of Spain.
Marcos Moreno
Richard Ford, traveling Spain in 1832, describes the women of Tarifa, another Andalucian city near Vejer de La Frontera, as the city’s “lions”.
They only thing more dangerous than the wrapped up females walking the streets were the bulls people let loose for fun, he wrote. The one visible eye, he observed, “pricks and penetrates, emerges from the dark veil like a star, beauty is concentrated in a single focus of light and meaning”.
A century later, another prohibition ended the custom of Las Cobijadas.
In 1931, the then-Spanish government, at that time republican, again banned its use, citing concerns over security and the possibility of even men employing it to conceal delinquent behaviour or the movement of arms.
Those were turbulent times in Spain when governments lurched from coup to coup, swinging between republics, dictatorships and restored monarchies.
The country descended into three years of civil war in 1936 during which Las Cobijadas remained prohibited.
Under the regime of Franco, the dress was not formally banned but in the scarcity of the postwar period the garments had all been repurposed for men’s clothing. Only in 1978, after the death of the dictator, did they appear again in the streets of Verjer de la Frontera, now mere folklore in a world where women wore trousers and flowing hair.
Today, they are donned by a few women of Vejer de la Frontera a few days a year as part of the town’s annual festival for the crowning of La Cobijajda Mayor.
What these head coverings meant in the past for those who wore them has also become controversial. Ford, for example, considered the clothes to be Castillian in origin but with the manner of covering the face “obviously of Oriental origin”, an opinion widely shared at that time and still held by some today.
Almalafa morisca, jaique magrebí, tapada limeña y cobijada de Vejer de la Frontera, probablemente herederas de una misma tradición. pic.twitter.com/GqtbnSa7xH
— Aníbal Martín (@anibal_mb) November 19, 2020
Como las mojaqueras de Almería
Esta foto de 1954 en Mojácar pic.twitter.com/udLCpRtfnx— Mar Verdejo Coto (@verdejomar) November 19, 2020
In contrast to these theories, others have seen in it an act of female liberty that had nothing in common with Muslim customs.
Carmen Bernis, a Spanish art historian whose work focused on clothing, (1918-2001) vehemently defended Spanish veiling customs as a form of female resistance.
“When Spanish women began to cover their faces half a century ago there were no Muslims in Spain, and the time had passed when Christians and Hispanic-Muslims exchanged fashions and garments from their respective wardrobes,” she wrote in her 2001 book Dress and Social Types in the Quijote.
“Muslim women covered their faces for a social imperative, so as not to be seen by men and left both eyes exposed.
“The Spanish women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries covered themselves to enjoy freedom, going out into the street without being known; not by imperatives of society but in total rebellion against what is required by good customs and laws. Covering up for them was not a sign of modesty, but of provocative coquetry,” she wrote.
Contemporary descriptions of the intrigue the covered women aroused in men and the flirtatious expressions that emerged from the gaps of such veils has also been referenced.
At the same time, the question of the influence of Muslim customs on Spanish women is also one that dates back centuries.
According to Garrado Garcia, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Spaniards and foreigners alike mused about the Muslim influence in the habit of Spanish women to cover their faces except for one eye.
In 1641, the Spanish historian and jurist Antonio León Pinelo wrote: “The Half-Eye Cover, as Arabic usage, entered Spain, or became more common, with the Arabs, and has remained until today in the Spanish.”
Some historians also think that the wimple, commonly worn by married women all over Europe from the late 12th until the 15th century, is also a piece of Muslim-Arabic influence.
This head piece, still worn by some nuns, covers the head, the chest and the shoulders in an often identical fashion as the hijab.
Its appearance in Europe coincides with cthe rusades and was worn by no less than Elenor of Aquitaine, the most powerful and supposedly best-dressed woman of her time and, coincidentally, a crusader who joined the march to Jerusalem in 1147.
According to historian historian Rosalia Gilbert, the wimple was often worn covering part of the face, too, such as the chin and forehead in order to be more modest.
“The most modest way to wear a wimple was over the chin, not under it, as is generally supposed. The image detail at left, Madonna, painted in 1345 by Vitale Da Bologna, shows the correct positioning of the wimple,” wrote Gilbert.
(Wikipedia commons, Madona with her child)
Today in Spain, freedom continues to be one of the most important aspects around the questions of prohibiting Islamic female headcoverings.
In some cases, wearing it is not only a religious expression but one of resistance to the impositions of authority. Wearing the hijab, for example, is banned in some but not all Spanish schools, usually as part of wider ban on all student head coverings of any form on the grounds that students could conceal the use of earphones. For some Muslim women, this feels oppressive.
“I decide to wear a veil, the scarf, or I decide not to wear it, no one is forcing me. So, why should you force me to take it off?” one female student in La Rioja complained recently of her school’s prohibition.
Hernandez sees prohibiting the burka as a different situation, as a prohibition of an unjust imposition on women.
“My motion was very clear,” she told Brussels Signal. “There is no liberty when a woman disappears behind a garment that erases her face, her expression, and the possibility of looking at each other as equals.”
When asked about the possibility of Muslim women adopting or adapting traditionally Spanish garments that veil the hair or face, she responded that their use has become totally optional and limited to voluntary participation in specific cultural or religious events such as the local celebration in Vejer de La Frontera or Spain’s famous Holy Week processions.
She also pointed out that it was not so long ago in Spain that custom did require women to wear veils and even cover their faces in public such as during prescribed periods of mourning.
“But feminists fought hard for these and many other rights,” she added in regard to face coverings.
She said the fight for women’s liberty applies to “any imposed garment that completely erases a woman from public space. It doesn’t matter if its for cultural or religious reasons, or imposed by a spouse.”
Brussels Signal reached out to Vox for comment but had received no reply at the time of writing
Whether any prohibition of the burqa will become law in Spain remains to be seen.
