Bosnia’s Niqab-Wearers Brave Insults to Show Faith

“I was born here. I was raised here… I think of this city as my city,” says M.Z., a medical doctor from the Bosnian capital who has worn the Islamic face-covering veil, the niqab, for the past 17 years.

But even in majority-Muslim Sarajevo, M.Z., who did not want her full name published, says she often faces insults while walking down the street – people call her a ‘ninja’ or ask why she is hiding her face – insults that sometimes cause her to decide to stay at home “because I do not want to spoil my day”.

M.Z. says that her parents did not support her decision to start covering her head because they feared it would prevent her from achieving her goals in life, although they eventually accepted it.

She says she was subjected to criticism from the very beginning, and recalls being told by one of her professors: “You are a good student. I don’t know why you need that thing on your head. You will never succeed in that way. Why are you making your life more difficult?”

She managed to complete her university studies and find a job as a doctor, but says she cannot cover her face at work.

“It is simply impossible to work with a niqab. I take my niqab off in front of the Health Centre. Children become scared if they cannot see your face. I have accepted the fact that there is no other way to go,” she explains.

But she argues that people who are against her wearing the niqab are effectively telling her to hide her religious identity: “Be a Muslim woman, but only in your heart. Practice your religion inside your house. Pray to God, but you should not tell everyone you do it… I thought I should show what I kept in my soul and my heart,” she says.

She says however that she has noticed that when she gets a chance to introduce herself and say who she is and what she does, people change their opinion about her, irrespective of the fact that she wears a niqab.

The exact number of women who wear the Islamic headscarf or veil in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not known, because no records are kept.

But the increase in the number of women wearing face-coverings in the years after the war is connected to the rise in the number of Bosnian Muslims practicing a stricter Salafi interpretation of Islam than the one that was predominant in the country before the 1992-95 conflict.

Muslim women in Bosnia and Herzegovina wear headscarves to show that they respect religious rules, but clerics in the country have differing opinions about whether they should cover their faces completely.

A.S., who also did not want her name to be published, lived in Germany during the war and did not know much about religion.

But when she returned to Sarajevo and began researching religious rules, she decided to cover her hair and face. She recalls how one woman told her in the street she was a Baba Yaga – a scary witch from Slavic folklore – while another talked her three-year-old child into throwing stones at her.

“I regularly go to the alley in order to run there. Everybody found it strange in the beginning.

They used to say: ‘Look! A ninja running.’ But they all greet me now,” A.S. said.

Another Bosnian woman who has chosen to wear the niqab, Edina Talic, says she started to cover her face when she began learning the Koran by heart.

“The niqab is an accessory that makes me feel more dignified. When I put it on, I thought everybody was looking at me, but I felt good and I was at peace,” she explains, adding that wearing it makes her feel like she has a crown on her head.

B.S., who also wears the niqab, says she used to wear a headscarf when she was in secondary school, but then decided started to covering her face completely.

“When you realise it is your obligation to do it, you start moving in that direction. I am trying to do whatever satisfies Allah,” she explains.

She says that sometimes children tell her in the street that she looks like a ninja, but she doesn’t mind because they are just “curious”.

Some secular Bosnians object to the overt display of religious affiliations in public, however. A scandal erupted last month after Bosnian reporter Lejla Colak compared the wearing of the burka and the niqab to the public display of sex toys.

“Religion should be intimate, just like sexuality. Keep it to yourself and the like-minded. Do not impose it on others,” Colak wrote in a Facebook post that resulted in her receiving threats of murder and rape.

Sociologist Dino Abazovic suggests that the negative reactions to women wearing the niqab are a form of objection against “retraditionalisation”.

Women who wear the veil are sometimes accused of only doing so because they have been paid by Saudi Arabian clerics who introduced stricter forms of Islam to Bosnia’s traditionally moderate Muslims after the collapse of Yugoslavia.

But there is no evidence for this, and A.S. insists that is not true: “Whoever thinks we get paid should cover themselves with headscarves and see whether they will get money from anyone,” she says.

“Some women who thought they would be paid to do it came to my place and said: ‘I have started wearing a headscarf. Will I get any money for that?”