Nigella Lawson wore a burkini on a beach in Australia five years ago

As purveyor of the nation’s knickers, sensible shoes and cosy knits, Marks & Spencer is just about the very last organisation I’d expect to make me hot with indignation.

A bastion of everything that’s comfortingly British, it’s also an unlikely institution to make a political statement. Yet, with the arrival of the burkini in its stores and on its UK website, it has managed to achieve both these feats.

For those who have yet to encounter the burkini, it’s a two-piece swimsuit that comprises full-length loose-fitting bottoms and a top that covers the torso, arms and also the hair. The M&S version will set you back £49.50.

While Nigella Lawson wore a burkini on a beach in Australia five years ago, the garment is more usually associated with Muslim women who want to cover their bodies to be ‘modest’.

In fact, my first reaction to M&S’s latest launch was: ‘I hate the way I look in a swimsuit, I’d love to cover up.’ But my second thought was that this is exactly why it’s wrong. Why? Like it or not, female clothes carry messages.

When companies sell overly revealing clothes to girls, they are colluding with the poisonous idea that women’s bodies are there purely to attract the sexual attention of men. Ironically, the same message is given when women and girls accept that they must veil parts of their bodies or disappear under full veils. These are two sides of the same coin.

French minister Laurence Rossignol attracted controversy earlier this week for accusing shops such as M&S of being ‘irresponsible’ for selling clothing such as burkinis.

I, too, think M&S is wrong. Unfortunately, Miss Rossignol has a history of using inflammatory language that provokes confrontations which are exactly what stops Muslim women from speaking out. The issues are also much more complex than her words suggested.

M&S is only one of an increasing number of fashion companies which have seen a gap in the market for ‘modest fashion’. And no wonder. This market is estimated to be worth around £200 billion worldwide.

John Lewis sells a hijab for girls (a scarf that covers the head and shoulders) as part of its school uniform range; House of Fraser stocks parrot print and pink versions for grown-ups.

Meanwhile, Uniqlo and Mango offer special collections of floor-length party dresses with high necks and long sleeves that women can wear for the traditional parties that mark the end of Ramadan.

At the luxury end, Dolce & Gabbana’s range of hijabs and abayas (full-length robes similar to kaftans) sell for more than £3,000.

Oscar de la Renta produces an abaya embroidered with gold thread, while Givenchy’s couture hijab is crafted in delicate black chiffon.

These companies might not think they are encouraging fanaticism, but they are. They’re complicit in a version of Islam that believes women must be subjugated in public.

Many Muslim women like me fight this pernicious belief system. Now these big businesses, by normalising veiling, make it harder for us to reclaim freedoms we once had and that are now being taken away.

Growing up as a Muslim in Uganda, nobody ever wore the veil. On trips to the beach in Mombasa, I would see women in conventional, modest swimming costumes .

M&S is only one of an increasing number of fashion companies which have seen a gap in the market for ‘modest fashion’ (file image)

When I arrived in Britain in the early Seventies, you hardly ever saw a woman covering her hair. Muslim women would wear a scarf lightly draped over the head to go to Mosque, in much the same way that Roman Catholic women would cover their heads in church. Hair then was not seen as ‘haram’ — sinful if exposed.

I taught English to women who’d come from countries like Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Bangladesh. Many wore saris or shalwar kameez (trousers and a tunic-length top), but their hair was uncovered, their necks too, and their arms would be on display. It was normal.

These women weren’t vamps or flirts. They just hadn’t been brainwashed into thinking such clothes were ‘un-Islamic’. Often they had taken jobs in factories, and discovered that wearing trousers and jumpers was preferable to a sari, which was dangerous when you were working with machinery.

But nobody criticised them for their dress. No men told them they were immodest, or that they couldn’t leave the house unless they covered up. No women said to them — as they regularly say to me now — ‘Sister, you shouldn’t show your hair. Sister, you are wearing clothes that are forbidden in the Koran.’

There wasn’t the shaming of women’s bodies by other women as there is now, that both divides and isolates communities, or this toxic idea that women have to cover up or men won’t be able to control themselves. None of those women felt that.

To see young women now with drab grey or black head and neck coverings which mean they can’t wear necklaces or earrings makes me incredibly sad. Humans have used ornaments to decorate themselves since we’ve been on the planet, yet now it’s denied to an increasing number of females.

Now these big businesses, by normalising veiling, make it harder for us to reclaim freedoms we once had and that are now being taken away (file image)

Yet while the insidious subjugation of women by controlling what they wear is justified on religious grounds, nowhere does it say in the Koran that you should cover your hair. The Koran simply says to women — and men — lower your gaze, dress modestly. For women, additionally, there’s one verse — cover your bosoms, and something that translates as ‘cover your sexual parts’. Many choose to ignore that the Koran also exhorts people to ‘live your life here in this world’.

Those who claim covering your body increases your spirituality are fibbing to themselves and others. This is not about spirituality, but religious one-upmanship. It’s about: ‘I’m more Muslim than you, a better Muslim than you.’ But faith should never be a competition.

Secretly, many women would love to be able to wear Western clothes. I’ve had young women come to my house to tell me how they hate wearing the hijab or veil, but say that it’s a condition of their parents letting them go to university or even out to the shops. This isn’t a choice. This is domination.

More alarmingly I’ve seen baby girls as young as six months in hijabs. Their mothers say they are ‘training’ them to make this ‘choice’. But once you’ve been trained to do something, you are unlikely to question it. And then it will be no choice at all. Other women say they cover up as a reaction to the ‘nakedness’ of British society.

But shrouding yourself is not the way to challenge this. Instead, we need to question a society that makes young women believe the only way they can get male attention is by showing every bit of flesh.

By covering up entirely, the message you’re sending is: ‘I won’t show them anything because my flesh is dangerous.’

Surely, both extremes feed into the view that women are ‘meat?’

Fifteen years ago I wrote a piece, very controversial at the time, about why I rejected the idea that the headscarf was an innocent garment. I said it started with the headscarf but would end with the full veil.

People criticised me for being ‘intolerant’ and a Muslim hater. How that was possible for a practising Muslim I don’t know. But it was indeed the start of a journey that led to full shrouds now seen everywhere.

I talk as someone who is completely for the faith I believe in and wholly supportive of the Muslim people. And I never want racism to be directed at anyone.

But more Muslim men and women — especially those Muslims in the Houses of Lords and Commons — should be speaking out against what I see as the pernicious creep of Wahhabism. This is the extreme branch of Islam, state-funded in Saudi Arabia, that promotes a hideously joyless form of the religion that’s anti-woman and anti-Western and is now infiltrating the West.

That is why companies who seek to make money by exploiting the ‘modest clothing’ market must think very carefully whether they want to be complicit in sending out messages that, no matter how subtle, ultimately reinforce this skewed view of the world.

The fact that it’s happening in mainstream chains such as M&S, John Lewis, Uniqlo and Mango, is particularly alarming.

Does a woman ever wear a burkini out of choice? Ironically, even Nigella Lawson later admitted she had covered up because her then husband Charles Saatchi preferred her with pale skin. Her burkini, then, was not a free choice after all.

In around 1988, I went to Carnaby Street after I heard there were Asian shopkeepers selling T-shirts with fascist slogans. I asked them: ‘How can you be doing this?’ They replied: ‘It’s business.’