Female Muslim Becomes Nigerian First Lawyer to Wear a Niqab

NOT the Babylon Bee.

As a fiercely proud woman, these garments deeply, deeply offend me.

Nigeria: Female Muslim Becomes First Lawyer to Wear a Niqab

By: Robert Spencer, Aug 5, 2026:

A victory for women’s rights, right? Not quite.

The photos started circulating last Wednesday, and many people assumed that they must be a joke: a female Muslim lawyer in Nigeria who wears the niqab published photos of herself wearing that Islamic garment, which conceals everything except the eyes. These photos, however, had a twist. On top of her head, the lawyer, Rodiyah Omotoyosi Mikail wore the eighteenth-century-style court wig that lawyers and judges in Britain and some of its former colonies often sport.

It was an emblematic photo for our absurd age. The wig sat atop not Rodiyah Omotoyosi Mikail’s natural hair, but her Islamic head covering. The whole effect epitomized the Islamization of the West: a woman wearing a garment that was never seen in the Western world until recently perched a quaint artifact of a dying legal system on top of her head, giving the world the visual effect of a hollow and desiccated Western tradition that has by this point retained only its outer shell, while everything in the photo that is living and animated is Islamic.

Yes, the photos are ludicrous, but many will point at the achievement of Rodiyah Omotoyosi Mikail as evidence that Islamic law doesn’t deny or impede the rights of women, and that women who wear the hijab, niqab, or even the burqa can be and are just as accomplished as anyone else. And while Rodiyah Omotoyosi Mikail’s achievement is undeniable, she is still proclaiming in her manner of dress that women are subjugated to men. She is wearing a garment that women have been brutalized, imprisoned and even killed for daring not to wear. Is that really an advance in women’s rights?

In the West, non-Muslim annually don the hijab on World Hijab Day, in order to show solidarity with the allegedly oppressed Muslim women who are supposedly persecuted for wearing the hijab. The actual oppression related to the hijab, however, is not linked to wearing it, but to not wearing it. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab in the U.S., meanwhile, are extraordinarily hard to find. It’s much easier to find examples of Muslim women in America who falsely claimed that they were being harassed or discriminated against in order to score points on the left’s insane scale of victimhood worship.

Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself.

Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then, some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.

innumerable women in Iran today, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it.

The Iranian authorities call their morality police the “Guidance Patrol,” an Orwellian name that makes them sound as if they’re a bunch of benign, avuncular individuals selflessly dedicated to helping young Iranians avoid moral pitfalls and stay on the straight and narrow. A more accurate name, however, would be the Terror Patrol, for the morality that these officials enforce is not the virtuous person’s free choice of the good, but the enforced obedience of those who are frightened into submission.

There are numerous examples of this, even in the West. In Mississauga, Ontario, a few years back, Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab.

Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.

The hijab allows others to see the wearer’s face. The niqab does not. The idea behind both is the same: Women must cover themselves to avoid tempting men. If they tempt them anyway, it’s the woman’s fault. If a woman chooses not to wear it, she could be beaten, imprisoned, or killed. That is the legal system for which Rodiyah Omotoyosi Mikail stands. Her photos may be absurd, but Sharia itself is no laughing matter.