What a Somali-British MP Reveals About Europe’s Hijab Obsession

What would George Orwell make of today’s debates over identity, integration, and the Muslim veil in Europe? It is an impossible question, of course. Orwell has been dead for more than seventy years. Yet one of literature’s great privileges is that it allows us to bring the dead back into contemporary arguments, if only as witnesses against our assumptions. To imagine Orwell’s answer, it is worth returning to his lesser-known observations from Morocco in 1938. His notes were never intended as a comprehensive study of Moroccan society, nor should they be treated as one today. Yet they remain striking precisely because they were written by an Englishman who arrived with inherited assumptions and left with a more complicated picture than […]