Secular Global Institute

There is 3 categories of Islamic female head coverings that all other styles fall into.

Over the past few years I have bitten my tongue when statements about Islamic women wearing burqas and veils have cropped up in the press. The common, misinformed perception is that Muslim women mostly wear the burqa to express their religious devotion. That's rubbish. I am not anti-islamic, I lived as a Muslim woman from the age of 17 until I was 22, I have four children - two of whom are Muslims. We are a loving family regardless of religion, and I have worked with and for Muslim people for much of my professional life as an international aid worker in war zones. But I would like to put the record straight once and for all, to wear a burqa, hijab or headscarf during daily life is not wajib (mandatory and prescribed by the Koran) but only Sunnat (recommended culturally and as a matter of personal choice).

Having married a prince in an Islamic country, Malaysia, and originally hailing from Australia, I was required to undertake four years of Islamic study under the tutelage of the royal household's iman and religions teacher, a respected national scholar. These twice-weekly classes were chaperoned - not for my chastity or purity but, as the iman explained to me, for his! He truly believed that neither I nor any woman could be trusted alone with a male without the baser female instincts coming to the fore.

I learnt that husbands can beat their wives providing they don't mark their faces; and that fathers who instigate their daughters' circumcisions will be rewarded in heaven, even though this abhorrent mutilation has nothing to do with religion but is a cultural practice to control women and temper their sensuality. In fact, much of the teaching, rather than being religious, was cultural and archaic.

The primary reason that women are required to swathe themselves in fabric, covering their collarbones necks, arms, legs, ankles, elbows, shoulders, throats, thighs, ears, the napes of their collarbones, necks, their hair and in some cases their faces, is because culturally, they are considered untrustworthy and immoral, condemned to the role of seductress. The fine shape of an ankle or tendril of hair are the tools of seduction. In essence, the veil, much lauded by so-called Islamic teachings, is a protection for men against us voracious vixens of the mortal world. Not, as so many pundits state, a protection for women against men.

A devout woman wearing a niqab at Lakemba Mosque.

Yes, during prayer women commonly don a full-length white hijab, but this is because no hair or skin other than the face must be visible. Similarly, a man must not have hair between his forehead and the prayer mat as he kneels and prostrates himself. Technically, he must be covered from knee to waist, though little white crocheted caps have become popular for keeping hair under control.

But not one of the lines of the Koran bids a woman to have her face completely obliterated by a burqa, even in prayer; her face may be shown to Allah and all around her. Culturally, no stanza of the Islamic teachings I studied exhorts a man to order his woman to cover her face - everything else, yes, but wending her way along streets covered in a tent with slits for vision is never mentioned.

Similarly, I am deeply perplexed by the current custom for small girls attending schools - whether secular, state-run or Islamic - to wear hijabs as part of their uniform. No teachings direct females to cover their hair before puberty. If a girl has not yet menstruated, a headscarf is not part of the dress code under Islam. I have heard it argued by a young Muslim teenager that a hijab or burqa denotes that a female is a "girl or woman of dignity". My gentle reply was that demeanor and deeds denote dignity, not a piece of fabric.

Often it is the strictures imposed by fathers and husbands in Islamic communities that lead women to take up the hijab or the burqa. Fear of how they will be perceived in male circles leads men to demand that female relatives cloak themselves in what their perceive to be the trappings of honor - not unlike preserving the wrappings on valuable goods before they are purchased.

In other words, the worth of a man is valued by how he controls his womenfolk. But it is implicit in well-educated Islamic circles that female head coverings are a cultural and/or personal choice, not a religious one, except during prayer. Noted women who align to this point of view are Queen Rania of Jordan and Amal Alamuddin (Mrs Clooney).

It is a shame that so many men have coaxed or pressured their womenfolk into wearing the burqa, or demanded that their toddler daughters put on a hijab, are probably unable to read the Koran in its original Arabic and are dependent on incorrect interpretations preached to them by immoderate clerics and on cultural exhortations that are not based on pure religion. Many clerics in powerful positions in immigrant Islamic communities around the world do not allow intellectual freedom or personal interpretation or self-assessment in matters of modesty.

Surely, in 2014, human beings can be trusted to walk down the street, safe in the knowledge that a glimpse of hair will not cause a riot or an orgy. A veil worn in any form should be a personal, fully informed and independent choice. A perambulating shroud should not be used to effectively excise women from the society in which they live and deny them the possibilities of freedom we should all enjoy.

By Jacqueline Pascarl is an author, documentary filmmaker and Fairfax columnist. She is also an international lobbyist on human rights and refugee issues. A version of this article appeared in The Times, London.