The Spectator’s Notes | 16 April 2011

The justification for banning the burqa and the niqab in France surely has nothing to do with the French ‘separation of Church and State’.

The justification for banning the burqa and the niqab in France surely has nothing to do with the French ‘separation of Church and State’. If it is justified — I would rather hesitantly argue that it is — it is solely because the veil hides identity. Common citizenship involves trust, and trust cannot exist where one cannot see people’s faces in public. Obviously there can be necessary functional reasons for concealment — surgical masks, beekeepers’ helmets, extremes of cold — but concealment in normal circumstances in an open society amounts to a hostile act. I have often seen this, in extreme form, on the hunting field, when saboteurs advance on riders and foot-followers wearing masks. Sometimes this prevents convictions for serious assaults because the wearers cannot be identified, but even where no injury is caused the concealment of the face is itself a form of menace. It is now a big feature of anti-cuts protests, where rioters often affect the Palestinian keffiyeh both to glamorise themselves and to conceal their identity. To claim the right to make noisy public statements and the right to hide yourself while you do so is strange indeed.

Not that Muslim women in the veil are necessarily being aggressive or threatening. Recently I went to speak at the Cambridge Muslim College, a small institution with the admirable aim of educating future imams and other teachers in non-theological subjects like British political history and social order. The college is exceptionally go-ahead for the Muslim world in recruiting women as well as men, and they sit in the same room for lectures. I spoke to more than 70 per cent of the student body (eight people) on the subject of coalitions.