Veiled threats

There has much discussion about Muslim women who wear the niqab, a form of veil that covers the entire face apart from a slit allowing the wearer to see. The debate became public after the Leader of the House (of Commons), former Foreign Secretary and MP for Blackburn, Jack Straw, revealed that he asked Muslim women if they would mind removing their veil during the regular meetings he holds for constituents (known as "surgeries" by most MPs). It must be made clear that he did not demand the removal of the veil; he merely requested it. He later said that many women were happy to oblige but that he understood those women who refused his request.

More recently, it was revealed that a Muslim woman working as a teaching assistant at a school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, had been asked to remove her veil during class by the school's headteacher. She agreed, on condition that she was allowed to continue covering her face in view of male colleagues. There has since been significant discussion about where it is and is not appropriate to wear the veil - if at all. A government minister went so far (too far, in my opinion) as to suggest that the person in question be sacked.

This is another argument where freedoms guaranteed under various human rights conventions come up against perceived threats to social cohesion. On the one hand, human rights law (in general and, in Britain, the Human Rights Act) demands that people be allowed to wear whatever religious dress they choose; on the other, the government has a responsibility to maintain a cohesive, integrated society.

Trevor Phillips OBE, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, once said that Britain is "sleepwalking towards segregation" - he was right. If we continue to allow people to differentiate themselves to the exclusion of others, we will indeed end up with a society that becomes increasingly segregated to the detriment of all. However, we should not try to find a solution to this problem using legislation, as this government is so fond of doing. Instead, we should ensure that the debate within the Muslim community about the validity, in Islamic law, of the niqab (and, indeed, the headscarf or hijab) in Western society continues, and that those who see it as an absolute requirement for all Muslim women - a minority of clerics and scholars, I am led to believe - are shown to be both unrepresentative and unauthoritative. In this way, fewer women will feel obliged to wear such restrictive forms of dress and, hopefully, more will find that integration is not only better for them on a personal level, but that it is better for society as a whole.

As an aside, it is interesting to note the opposition to both the niqab and hijab by the governments of some majority Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia. The reformed Turkish state, led by Kamal Attaturk, banned virtually all forms of religious dress in the country's constitution, and the Tunisian government has recently asked the police to arrest women wearing the hijab on the street and demand that they sign a pledge not to do so in the future. It is unclear how the Tunisian population will react to its government's actions, but those Turks who saw the hijab as a fundamental basis of their religion acted as one - and emigrated. Hence the ever-growing Turkish community in Western Europe, particularly Germany. So, now we have a subtly ironic situation, where the hijab is banned in a Muslim country, and those Muslims who wish to wear it choose to emigrate to liberal non-Muslim (indeed, majority Christian) countries where they are allowed to do so!

All this leaves me in a quandary: either we (by which I mean Western Europe) bans the hijab, the niqab, and similar forms of dress, as other countries have done (at least in public places); or we continue to allow it, but make sure that the voices within the Muslim community speaking out against the veil are heard by all. The first solution goes against my general opposition to legislation against what is, basically, a human right, even if it could be considered a minor one when the social cohesion of Western Europe is at stake. The second, however, seems rather altruistic and, frankly, I don't think it has much chance of working. Realistically, however, I think that a combination of these two solutions will be attempted by most countries: attempts will be made to make the wearing of the niqab, in particular, even more against social norms that it is currently, but then various levels of legislation will be enacted to ban such clothing in public places/government buildings/schools/everywhere (delete as appropriate!).

Many have said that such legislation would cause a crisis with regards to human rights but, in my opinion, that has already happened. In order to solve this problem in the very long term, the whole idea of human rights needs to be reconsidered from the ground up. The basic principle that such rights apply to every human being in every circumstance, within reason, should still stand - otherwise, what's the point? - but such universal rights should be more limited than is currently the case. "freedom of religious expression", in particular, needs to be looked at very carefully, given the level to which religion - and, therefore, this right - is being abused by those who wish to kill innocent people to further their political aims; one human right - "freedom of religious expression" - is being used to deny another, much more fundamental right - "the right to life". To summarise, there must be an exemption stating that those who deny others the right to life should not be able to claim that they are doing so because of another human right; currently this happens implicitly every time a Hamas suicide bomber kills a dozen Israelis in Tel Aviv, and every time a truck bomb is driven into a government building in Baghdad. It is painful to say that some people do not deserve the protection of human rights, but when they deny the most basic right - that of life - to others, it is difficult for the world to justify such protection.