A MUSLIM woman who has lived in Salisbury for more than a decade was told to f*** off by a stranger because her visiting relatives were wearing niqabs.

Munavara Ghauri, of Harnham, had been walking towards The Close to show her relatives the cathedral at twilight when she said she was “dismayed to hear a man in passing car in Harnham telling us to f*** off”.

“Thankfully, such an unpleasant experience was a first for me, having enjoyed almost 14 years living in this beautiful, warm-hearted and serene city,” she said.

“My aunt from the US and my sister-in-law from London were both in black and were wearing black niqabs, (their faces were uncovered except their chins).

“Then it struck me, this was the backlash of Boris Johnson’s comments last week rippling into our idyllic, rural Wiltshire.”

It comes after the former Foreign Secretary said Muslim women wearing face veils looked like bank robbers or letter boxes.

Munavara said the comments were “disrespectful and disingenuous”.

“As a Muslim, I could choose to say that a bishop’s mitre or a Sikh’s turban looks like ‘odd headgear’ but I choose not to, as I respect them as demonstrative of the values of other faiths,” she said. “In my opinion, all faiths are quintessentially the same...teaching us to be the best of humankind and to make the best of this one life that we have and I feel blessed to be doing so as a British Ahmadi Muslim.”

She added: “I wear a scarf on my head but I don’t wear a niqab or black coats regularly and maybe that is why, however Islam values modesty as a great virtue, so if I saw another woman as more covered then actually I would perceive it as a positive rather than a negative.

“However, no woman, Muslim or non-Muslim should ever be coerced to dress one way or another...this is a personal prerogative and I would be equally outraged if someone tried to enforce a scarf or niqab on the head of my English/Christian friends as I would if they tried to remove the niqab or hijab of my Muslim friends.”

She said she does not fear being victimised in Salisbury, adding “I know it to be a lovely city with a lovely community”.

But Munavara said high-profile individuals should be careful of expressing personal views that can “rightly or wrongly” influence others.

She added: “I suggest Boris could improve his life too by caring a little less about the far-right vote and a little more about the repercussions of his words, and if he’s offering Muslim ladies any tea with the same zeal as he does journalists, I’ll take mine with milk and sugar.”