Pauline Hanson wearing a burqa in Parliament was a political stunt. We know that. It was not meant as a defence for women's rights. Obviously. You do not have to like her politics or her party. Put your aversion aside and focus on the issue she was raising.

The burqa (niqab in Arabic) is a symbol. When you see it in a community, it indicates that an ideology and a radical form of Islam are spreading. In my field research on women and sharia law in Britain, South Africa and Middle Eastern countries, I heard this sentence a lot: "Ten years ago, we only had few women with the burqa. Today there are plenty."

Let's just get something straight: the burqa is not Islamic. It is a custom imported from Najd, a region in Saudi Arabia and the power base of its Salafi fundamentalist form of Islam. Within Muslim countries it is very contested and considered fringe. Even conservative Mufti of Al Azhar – the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam – said in a 2010 TV program that the burqa is a "custom" not a "religious requirement".

Until 1979 the burqa was not even mandatory in other regions of Saudi Arabia. It was the norm of Najd of course, but then in some Najdi Bedouin tribes, women won't even show their faces to their own sons. It was a tradition unique in its own right. Saad Al Salem, a Saudi writer, tells us in his autobiographythat before 1979 women in the southern region of Najran worked with men in the fields, danced together in their celebrations and did not cover their faces.