Covering an issue

The "issue" of whether or not to permit Muslim women living in Western cultures to wear the hejab has been raised recently in France, Britain, and the U.S., but it is a false one that encourages anti-Muslim discrimination. You can talk all you want about Muslims needing to adapt to the cultures they volunteer to become a part of...but to what standard are we asking them to adapt? Paris Hilton's? That of the Amish or Mennonites? Yours, mine, or some universal dress code devised by Congress? And since when do the self-described tolerant cultures of the West require anyone to dress *less* modestly than their morals and personal taste dictate?

I'm not a Muslim and I understand that the hejab can be a symbol of a patriarchal culture forced on some Muslim women as a means of control. But I also understand that "to cover or not to cover" is a deeply personal choice that other Muslim women make freely. I don't believe that we have the right to enforce one choice or the other, and I do think that the attempt to do so will actually be experienced by Muslims--both women and men--as religious persecution, resulting in alienation from rather than acceptance of or adaptation to Western culture.

The clothing that other individuals choose to wear, whatever reasons they have for their choice, does not cause me any harm. And in cases where public safety *is* concerned--as in Florida, where police want driver's licenses to show drivers' full faces--I can imagine ways to accommodate the needs of both traditionally dressed Muslim women and legitimate state interests.

If the American experiment has tried to prove anything, it is the proposition that people from different cultures can live side by side, free to practice their own religions but not to force others to do so. Abandoning that ideal is far more damaging to my freedom--as a person and as a woman--than my Muslim sisters' head scarves ever could be.