It’s a contentious and emotive issue, the wearing of the ḥijāb in liberal western societies. In supporting personal freedoms we usually include dress and self expression. We’re tempted to see the ḥijāb in tension between these freedoms of appearance and the possibility of coercion to adopt the veil on the part of parents or spouse. But that’s not the core problem with the practice.

The core problem in allowing public wearing of the ḥijāb in our culture is that it ultimately disempowers and devalues women.

We look at someone’s face to determine whether the person is known, whether the person is a threat, whether the person is trustworthy. Hooded jackets and balaclavas immediately make us uncomfortable. It follows that the only basis on which a society can accept the wearing of the ḥijāb in public is that the wearer is powerless: she cannot be a threat and her honesty must be irrelevant. This is not an acceptable assumption in an egalitarian society; each woman is important in her own right.

The possibility that some parents or husbands may coerce women into wearing the ḥijāb does remain a concern, and where a society accepts the practice compulsion is inevitably more likely to succeed. But this is not the most important reason for opposing public wearing of the veil.

It’s often claimed that women wear the ḥijāb in public out of a modesty born of piety. This claim appears to make the veil a matter of religious practice, and many of us are uncomfortable arguing against it on that basis. But as a society we’ve already drawn a line in the sand that outlaws sacrificing animals and physically disciplining children regardless of how important these rituals are to anyone’s religious observance. As France has done, we need to maintain that delineation for the ḥijāb.

If we don’t – if we allow the practice of wearing the ḥijāb to persist – we’re abetting the social disenfranchisement of women. Our support for personal freedom is being manipulated to remove the public worth of some of our citizens.