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 he expected.

Among the things that caught Orwell’s attention was the everyday visibility of women wearing traditional veils in public life. They moved through markets and streets without appearing socially segregated from the communities around them. He also noted that relations between men and women seemed less burdened by the anxieties that many Europeans associated with Muslim societies. Ordinary social encounters, including casual interaction between the sexes, appeared far more unremarkable than prevailing Western stereotypes suggested.

Reading those observations today, another scene comes to mind on the opposite side of the Mediterranean.

Recently, Sagal Abdi-Wali entered the British Parliament as a Labour MP, wearing a traditional hijab and Somali dress without feeling compelled to downplay her origins or dilute the cultural markers associated with them.

Recently, Sagal Abdi-Wali entered the British Parliament as a Labour MP, wearing a traditional hijab and Somali dress without feeling compelled to downplay her origins or dilute the cultural markers associated with them.

At first glance, there seems little connection between Orwell’s Morocco and contemporary Britain. Yet an invisible thread links the two.

The connection is not the hijab itself. It is the fragility of the assumptions surrounding it.

What Orwell encountered in Morocco challenged the image he........

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