A ban on full-face coverings, which includes Muslim veils such as those worn in burkas, comes into force in Austria today as anti-immigration parties look poised to win national elections later this month.

The new law states that faces must be visible from hairline to chin in public places and includes off-slope ski masks and surgical masks outside of hospitals.

Austrian police are allowed to use force to make people show their face and can impose fines of €150 (£132).

Austria’s ban comes after France and Belgium bans in 2011 and the Dutch parliament also debating a similar law.



Muslim groups have condemned the law saying only a tiny minority of women in the country wear full-face veils. Carla Amina Bhagajati of the Islamic Religious Community in Austria said the "handful" of fully veiled women she knows of in Vienna "now are criminalized" and "restricted to their homes".

"This open society is, in a hypocritical way, endangering its own values," she added.

However, there has been strong support for the law reflecting growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the predominantly Catholic country.

"It's not right that those living here don't show their faces," said Emma Schwaiger, who expressed support for the ban in a straw poll on the streets of Vienna.

Parties campaigning on an anti-immigration message are on course win elections on October 15 that could see them form a coalition government.

Polling this week showed the hardline People’s Party and Freedom Party on 34 per cent and 25 per cent, with the centrist Social Democrats, who are the majority party in the current coalition government, struggling on 27 per cent.

The People’s Party, which is poised to be the largest party after the election, has been resurgent under their new leader, a telegenic 31-year-old called Sebastian Kurz.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/01/austrias-burka-ban-comes-force-prohibiting-face-veils-public/

Background History of the Burka

The Koran enjoins all Muslims – whether male or female – to dress modestly and refrain from revealing “any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary”.

Beyond this general instruction, the holy book offers no specific guidance on female clothing. Its pages contain no mention of the burka or, for that matter, of the other varieties of dress that are now associated with Islam, including the hijab, or veil.

The burka appears to have originated in Persia in the 10th century, before slowly spreading to the Arabian Peninsula and present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In Arabia, a variant known as the "niqab" was promoted by the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam; in South Asia, the burka was adopted by the Deobandis, the local strand of fundamentalism.

When the Taliban captured Kabul and seized power over most of Afghanistan in 1996, they made it compulsory for all women to wear the burka.

Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the garment remained largely unknown until relatively recently. It was the rise of the Wahhabi and Deobandi traditions which spread the burka to areas where it was previously invisible, including West Africa.

Hardly any women wore the burka in West Africa until two or three decades ago. Today, it remains rare in most countries in the region, explaining why some governments have imposed a ban without a public backlash.

The burka is a reflection of culture rather than an accepted interpretation of Islam and it remains an alien imposition in large areas of the Muslim world. Since the rise of Boko Haram, it has also come to be seen as a security risk, hence the gradual spread of the ban through West Africa.

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