US President Barack Obama falls in the opposite camp. Asked where he stood on the 2004 French ban on the wearing of the hijab (headscarves) in school during his visit to Normandy in early June, he said countries handle such issues with their national sensitivities and histories in mind adding, “I will tell you that in the United States our basic attitude is that we’re not going to tell people what to wear.” “It (is) hard for an American to fathom — this idea that government would dictate a religious dress code,” was the US Christian Science Monitor’s editorial response to Sarkozy’s remark.

The average Western liberal or feminist can just about tolerate the sight of the “stifling, foreboding dark veil, the smothering, all-consuming piece of fabric that purposefully extinguishes the faces, bodies, and voices of Muslim women.” Yet, many are fiercely opposed to a ban. Forcing women not to wear the burqa is nothing short of replacing one form of oppression with another, one form of paternalism with another, runs the argument. A French law that forces women not to wear the burqa, they say, will place the land of liberty, fraternity and egality on the same moral plane as Saudis, the Iranian Ayatollahs and the Taliban who force women to wear it. For feminists, at stake is a woman’s right to choose.

If you dislike the burqa but you are also against the state dictating a dress code for citizens, where does that leave you? A bright spark from India offers the best route out of this bind: don’t ban the burqa, question it. Great idea! Let’s examine the pro-burqa arguments:

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