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“There’s a lot of myths that’s going on about us, that we women are oppressed and we are forced to wear niqab” said one woman. “I must say that it’s the other way around, because you have to do a lot of work to actually convince other people.”

Clarke, whose 2013 research for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women was based on interviews and surveys of 81 niqab-wearing women in Ottawa, Toronto and elsewhere, said she was surprised by some of the findings in what is the largest study of its kind in the western world.

The women interviewed were generally young and the vast majority had chosen to wear the niqab on their own, often despite the protests of family.

Clarke said she had a sense from the research that choosing to wear the niqab in Canada “may be a bit of a youth movement,” and “a lot of it is done in the spirit of defiance.”

The typical profile of a woman in niqab, according to the study, “is that of a married foreign-born citizen in her 20s to early 30s who adopted the practice after arriving in Canada.” Most are highly educated.

It is important to do research first and find out what is going on before making statements and forming policies and laws

Their reasons for wearing the niqab were “highly personal and individual,” the study found, with “expression of Muslim identity” figuring prominently in the explanations, although the women were split on whether they thought the practice was mandatory.

What surprised Clarke was how “integrative” the women are, despite choosing to cover everything but their eyes. She said she would not have been surprised if niqab wearers would also want to live in separate communities, but that is not what the study found.