Question How does one approach the question of whether a Western nation should permit women to wear full-body-covering Islamic dress? I'm not asking for the answer to the question, but for guidance in attacking it. How do you balance individual freedom and religious freedoms against other values? Thank you, Mark M.

Accepted:
June 29, 2010

Comments

Some people take the line that any woman who wears this outfit is irretrievably caught up in a submissive relationship with men, and so the costume should be banned, or at least discouraged. Any woman who says she really wants to wear it is suffering from false consciousness, and the same policy applies. But the evidence is that many woman want to wear it, and say they feel liberated by wearing it, and say with some plausibility that it is the women who are wearing clothes which they think are alluring to men who are in a submissive relationship, not them.

I often disapprove of the clothes people wear. On cold days young women often wear very few clothes since they wish to display their bodies. They have on their feet shoes which look dangerous, even if they are not. There is now an enthusiasm for tattoos, and I am sure they are often dangerous and certainly painful things to have applied to the skin. I remember in the past having a discussion in class about Muslim clothes and the class all highly disapproved of this sort of subjugation to a certain style, while at the same time their faces and bodies rattled with a huge number of piercings that they had enthusiastically paid to have applied to them.

There is a lot to be said for the traditional liberal policy that if something does not harm anyone else, you should allow someone to do it. If I want to walk down my road with a sheet over my body, or dressed as Superman, or as a giant rabbit, I think I ought to be free to do so.