The phone arguement does not always hold, and at the other end what if people are to be tried in Court and all the Legal professionals hidden behind masks.

They already wear silly wigs.

They already wear silly wigs.

what do people think about the current case of the woman sacked for insisting on wearing a veil at work?

The Veil Is a feminist issue by Joan Smith

Women don't wear the burqa in Afghanistan because they like it' they wear it because they are afraid of being killed if they don't. Women haven't suddenly gone back to wearing the veil in Iraq because they're pious' they do it because women who refuse have been murdered. I loathe the niqab and the burqa when I see them there. And I can't pretend I don't find them equaly offensive on my local high street

Last summer, I had lunch with some Lebanese friends, one of whom owns a hotel in Lebanon. When a Saudi prince turned up with his entourage, including his wife in a full-length black veil, my friend took him to one side and politely explained that the hotel does not allow covered women, on the grounds that they are offensive to female guests who wear swimsuits and bikinis. The prince promptly summoned his wife and sent her to the hotel shop, where she bought a string bikini and wore it for the duration of the holiday. (It later transpired that she wasn't his wife, but that's another story.)

The reason I Iike this anecdote is that, unlike Jack Straw's muddled interventions last week, it tells the truth about how many of us feel about the veil in all its forms: the hijab, niqab, jil-bab, chador and burqa. I can't think of a more dramatic visual symbol of oppression, the inescapable fact being that the vast majority of women who cover their hair, faces and bodies do so because they have no choice. omen don't wear the burqa in Afghanistan because they like it' they wear it because they are afraid of being killed if they don't. Women haven't suddenly gone back to wearing the veil in Iraq because they're pious' they do it because women who are courageous enough to refuse, including a well-known TV presenter, have been murdered by Islamic extremists.

Intimidation and family pressure play a role in the French banlieue where the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement (literal translation: Neither whores nor submissive) was set up by Muslim women to oppose both racism in the French state and the strict Islamic identity imposed on them by fathers, uncles and brothers.

Muslim women in this country may be telling the truth when they say they are covering their hair and faces out of choice, but that doesn't mean they haven't been influenced by relatives and male clerics. Just how prescriptive some British Muslim men are on this sub-ject was revealed in a startling exchange on last week's Moral Maze on Radio 4, when Dr Muhammad Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Mus- lim Schools and principal of the Leicester Islamic Academy, which is due to receive state funds next year, confirmed that even non-Muslim girls at his school would be expected to cover themselves. "We have a school uniform and that means wearing the hijab and the jilbab," he said.

On another Radio 4 programme, The World Tonight, a young Muslim woman admitted that Muslim women cover their faces as a "barrier" between men and women. To that extent, Mr Straw has a point when he says the niqab gets in the way of face-to-face contact, as well as having implications for community relations. Where he is wrong is in failing to frame the question of covered women as a human rights issue, just as he signally failed to defend the principle of free expression during the row over the Danish cartoons in February. It seems bizarre to ask individual Muslim women to uncover their faces in order to talk to a white, middle-aged man, rather than focusing on the wider meaning and effect of the niqab and the burqa.

Last week, the bodies of a young Asian woman and her two infant sons, aged two and one, were found in a flat in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. All three had died k by hanging, and the police say they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the tragedy. Neighbours said that the mother was unable to speak English and usually wore traditional Islamic dress, including a burqa -two factors that they felt contributed to her social isolation.

The veil in its various forms signals that women have conditional access to public space, allowed to participate in the world outside the home only if they follow certain rules. Islam isn't alone in this: for centuries, Christianity laid down similar conditions but the Enlightenment, of which feminism is an integral part, successfully challenged such rigid divisions between the sexes. The problem is that the most high-profile form of Islam in this country wants to reinstate those divisions' when women cover themselves, they are demonstrating their acceptance of an ideology that gives them fewer rights than men and an inferior place in society. If you read it literally, which not all Muslims do, the Koran is explicit on this point: "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient." If they are not, the same passage continues, "send them to beds apart and beat them".

There is also abundant evidence, from the morbid pronouncements of Muslim clerics, that the stricter forms of Islam have major problems with sexuality. Again, it isn't the only religion to do so, but discussions on Islamic websites, about whether the death penalty is appropriate for homosexuals and women who commit adultery, exhibit high degrees of sexual fear and disgust. Far from being a protection for women - it hasn't prevented alarming levels of rape in Afghanistan and Iraq - the veil protects men from casual arousal. It also establishes women as the sexual property of individual men - fathers, husbands and sons - who are the only people allowed to see them uncovered.

In that sense Mr Straw's interventions, while useful in kicking off an overlong debate, do not go nearly far enough. The practice of covering women is a human rights issue in two senses, not just as a symbol of inequality, but because accusations of racism, cultural insensitivity and Islamophobia are commonly used to silence its critics. But if I loathe the niqab and the burqa when I see women wearing them in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be hypocritical to pretend I don't find them equally offensive on my local high street.

The veil represents a warped view of both male and female gender and sexuality that suggests we are all incapable of resisting our sexual urges - and I know many muslim women say they wear it out of choice (it is not a stricture of Islam btw - it is tradition).

"We have a school uniform and that means wearing the hijab and the jilbab,"

If that is true then i am somewhat sceptical of her motivation.

And it was such a nice discussion.

You really don't know what you're talking about

You really don't know what you're talking about, that's why. Your generalisations are too painful for words.

Fact is that school teachers and other civil servants in both Morocco and Turkey are not allowed to weird veils or headscarves, or other religious symbols. I would like to see the same here: no religious symbol allowed if you represent government.

Leicester Islamic Academy, which is due to receive state funds next year, confirmed that even non-Muslim girls at his school would be expected to cover themselves. "We have a school uniform and that means wearing the hijab and the jilbab," he said

And that the numbers of people killed by aetheistic regimes, or in wars started by such regimes, dwarf the numbers who have died in "religious" conflict.

Rubbish

OK, where, historically, do you want to start from?

And that the numbers of people killed by aetheistic regimes, or in wars started by such regimes, dwarf the numbers who have died in "religious" conflict.

Yeah I would disagree with that statement, most massacres and wars down through history had one religions fingers directing them or influencing them. Not so long ago really christainity had its crusades and at that time the battle cry was 'kill the savage to save the soul' well now muslims are attempting their crusade of 'kill the infidel' which is just a hate the world mentality.

Seems this topic has drifted off course from dress code at work, which was really about, is it ok to wear a face mask at work. This issue is still continuing in the media because Muslims are still irrate about it. If only the slaughter of innocents in their name was so motivating to them..........people might not be so distrustful of them as a civilised body.

Well Nazi Germany wasn't atheist - and there's no proof that Hitler was either. As for the holocaust - let's not forget that European anti-semitism was widespread and actively encorouged by the church for centuries: the Jews, after all, did kill Jesus. Being anti-semitic was nothing unusual - the space had been created over centuries for Nazism's hideous ideology by religion!

Stalin - yes he was actively anti-church. But. His regime wasn't atheist - it was communist - he saw religion as a threat to communist ideology but he was just replacing one kind of dogmatism with another.

Atheism isn't an ideology or a religion - it is lack of belief in a God. It doesn't inspire anyone to acts of war or agression. The same cannot be said for religious belief*.

*That isn't to say that for the overwhelming majority of believers that they are inspired to commit acts of violence - but in a small number of cases, it does. Let's not forget that God told George Bush to invade Iraq.

Yes, I was thinking of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, but also China under Mao and Cambodia under Pol Pot.
Hitler was fundamentally opposed to religion, even the neo-paganism that some Nazis flirted with - Bullock in "A Study in Tyranny" shows that he intended to "deal with" the Christian church after he had won the war. The Soviet regime also surpressed all religion initially and throughout the Twenties and Thirties. Both Stalin and Hitler used religion during the war years to harness the loyalties of its adherents, but both were atheistic and anti-religion. Marxism and Nazism are essentially materialist and atheistic.
Although it's not that relevant, it's also true to say that the Nazis' anti-semitism was different to that of the historical Catholic church; it was not primarily founded on the myth that Jesus was killed by the Jews, but on a racist ideology that saw the Jewish people as a threat to the German race. And of course, Nazi racism extended to Slavs, Roma and Africans. They also persecuted Christians who refused to be manipulated.
I agree that atheism, per se, is not an aggressive dogma: but the fact remains that atheistic ideologies have tended to identify groups towards which they have behaved aggressively whether "racial enemies" or "class enemies".
And it should also be pointed out that conflicts described as "religious" are often the result of other factors: the "Troubles" in Northern ireland were as much a conflict between Republicanism and Unionism as Catholicism and Protestantism, the Arab-Israeli wars can be seen as a clash of secular nationalisms and at the end of the so-called "Wars of Religion" in France, the (protestant) victor converted to the religion of his Catholic enemies out of pure opportunism.

This is all very well Barmy - but what does it have to do with dress code, huh?

First, I should say that I hadn't read your later post properly when I responded.
Second, atheism is so central to marxism that it is sometimes referred to as dialectical materialism!! And Nazism was also atheistic.

My point was not that atheism causes aggression, but that the absence of religious belief does not guarantee that aggression is absent.

There is a tendency for secularists to blame religion for all the ills of the world (Richard Dawkins' "The root of all evil?" being a classic manifestation of that view) and I think that they're wrong.

If we are to achieve a peaceful world and a harmonious society, we are going to have to accept that religious belief is fundamental to human existence, and to learn to live with a range of different faiths.
Apologies if I misunderstood your initial comments.
And I thought that the "dress code" issue was about the veil debate, and thus about religion!

Are you ever going to say...

Australia's most senior Muslim cleric has prompted an uproar by saying that some women are attracting sexual assault by the way they dress.
Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali said women who did not wear a hijab (head dress) were like "uncovered meat".

A spokesman for Sheikh Hilali earlier said the quote had been taken out of context and referred not to sexual assault, but to sexual infidelity.

The sermon was targeted against men and women who engaged in extra-marital sex and did so through alluring types of clothes, he said.

Sheikh Hilali also condemned women who swayed suggestively and wore make-up, implying they attracted sexual assault.

Nazism was not atheistic. I'm sorry but that just isn't true. There were many Christian Nazi's; there was even a Christian Nazi movement.


Well I'm a secularist and an atheist but I don't blame religion for all the ills of the world. But equally religion is divisive: look at the role of religion in forming the modern English/British state. Look at the history of the Indian subcontinent, look at the Middle East, look at the horn of Africa, look at 9/11. Religion plays a role in all of them.


Live with a range of different faiths? Now I believe strongly in religious tolerance - what each of us privately believes is a matter of personal choice.

But, and this is a big but, I do not accept that religious belief is fundamental to human existence. I just don't buy it. The fact that there are so many religions is proof in itself that it is all a load of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

Superstitious mumbo-jumbo is harmless in itself, but get competeing mumbo-jumbo and you can end up with conflict and millions dead.

Religion doesn't give us morals, it doesn't direct our ethics. They come from inside of us. The world would be a better place without organised religion.

To quote Bullock "...in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist"; there were Christian Nazis and there were also Nazis who were Socialists, but Nazism as Hitler envisaged it was rooted in a perverted kind of Darwinism and a racism that was derived from ideas of nationality that were not religious in origin.

I consider myself to be a Christian Socialist;

however, I recognise that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Equally, however, terrible things have resulted from movements that are not religious.
And I think that the emphasis on religion as a cause of conflict is historically inaccurate: Al-Qu'Aida attacked the Twin Towers because US troops were stationed in the Gulf, but they in turn were there because, after the First Gulf War, Sadam still appeared to pose a threat to a region that was/is strategically important for reasons that have nothing to do with religion. It is possible to conceive of a similar scenario without religion as a factor, but difficult to do so without reference to oil. In all of the historical examples you give, religion has been an issue, but so have other factors such as ethnicity, culture and national sovereignty. Religion often serves as a proxy for these factors. Henry VIII's desire for a male heir, the wealth of the monasteries and independence from Rome were as important in British history as the schism.

I also disagree that morals are innate: there is a long discussion to be had if you like about non-religious foundations for ethics, but basically (and I think I'd say this even if I wasn't a Christian) any morality, in my view, is a construct based on socialisation and to ascribe it to "something inside us" or to "evolution" (which seems to me to be a process rather than a purpose) is intellectually equivalent to rooting it in God. I can accept that Christian ethics may seem to be "mumbo-jumbo" but if the alternative is a kind of "scientific mumbo-jumbo" I can't see that it is superior.

However, the real point is that religion isn't going to go away: if Secularists believe that it is, and base attempts to establish harmony and justice on that assumption, I'm afraid they are doomed to failure (which is pretty much what has happened in France). There is plenty of evidence from history that religions can co-exist, and if we are to avoid even greater conflict between faith groups in this country as well as internationally, we would be better off concentrating on what can potentially unite us rather than magnifying division.

So having gone wildly "off-topic", I'd say that as long as wearing the veil is genuinely a woman's own free choice, we as a society should be trying to accommodate that choice rather than turning it into the sort of divisive issue it has become in recent weeks.

How about you have your conversation about whether or not the Nazis were Christians or Atheists in another thread.
This one was SUPPOSED to be about dress code and religion.

I wouldn't say we have done this subject to death at all.

How about you have your conversation about whether or not the Nazis were Christians or Atheists in another thread.
This one was SUPPOSED to be about dress code and religion.

Now I wouldn't say that Hitler was a Christian. But I also think it is wrong to believe he was an atheist. Undoubtedly religion was a competitor for the hearts of those Hitler wanted to win over to his, to quote Dawkins, "insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings," but equally even if his ideas were not religious in origin (and I am not convinced of this) Hitler certainly used the space created by Christian anti-semitism and definitely borrowed it's language in order to fulfil his perverted ends.

I certainly wouldn't (and haven't) said that religion is the cause of all conflict. And yes - Nazism and Communism were not religious but they do have a lot of religious traits.

And whilst I agree that US "interests" in the Gulf are primarily economic, I wholly disagree with your analysis of 9/11. It was not so much that US soldiers were stationed in the Gulf, but the fact that they were stationed in Saudi Arabia, site of the holiest shrine in Islam, that caused bin Laden and al Qaeda to launch their attacks on the US; and the cult of religious martyrdom that helped devout middle-class men to hijack planes and fly them into the twin towers.

I think you are being disingenous to say that religion is a proxy for ethnicity, culture and national sovereignty. Religion is a part of all those things - not separate from it.

Evolution has no purpose. It is entirely a process; anyone who claimed otherwise does not understand the theory. And I do believe that morality stems from biology - humans have innate empathy - it is not something we learn - it is something we are born with - some more than others. I recommend reading the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (yes he is related to Borat!) especially "The Essential Difference".

And I'm sorry if I wasn't clear - I don't think Christian ethics is mumbo jumbo per se. At least not all of it What I think is mumbo jumbo is the belief in the supernatural - in God/Allah/Yaweh/Vishnu.

You are right to see morality as deriving in part from socialisation - (but socialisation itself is inherently moral because it occurs when we realise that it is better to work together than to just work for ourselves) - morality, if you like, is the (often changing) rules that we all agree upon.

No I don't think religion is going to go away. Religions can co-exist. Mostly

Yes we should concentrate on what can unite us. And I think the thing that should be uniting us all is human rights. (Interestingly earlier this year the International Gay Pride parade was going to be in Jerusalem which actually had the effect of uniting bigoted Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups in opposing the march - there you go - religious unity through homophobia - you have to laugh)

I agree. But how do you define a woman's free choice in a patriarchal religion?

Maybe it's difficult to draw a line: crosses, veils, headscarves may be easy, but jewish women's wigs?
But they can make up a list and everybody's happy, right?
If you can't live with those rules, you can't be a civil servant. Easy peasy.