Niqab

The question of the face veil is a real disagreement within Islamic jurisprudence, not a difference between the devout and the lax, and it turns on a specific textual point.

Quran 24:31 instructs believing women to guard their modesty and not display their adornment "except what ordinarily appears of it". What that exception covers is the whole argument.

• Most classical scholars, including the bulk of the Hanafi, Maliki and Shafi'i traditions, read the exception as the face and the hands. On that reading covering the face is not obligatory, though it may be meritorious or advisable in particular circumstances.
• The Hanbali school and much of contemporary Salafi scholarship read the exception more narrowly and hold face covering obligatory.
• A substantial body of modern scholarship, including at al-Azhar, states plainly that the niqab is a custom rather than a requirement, a position that has itself been politically contested.

None of these are fringe. The disagreement is ancient, it is argued on shared premises from shared texts, and it has not been resolved.

What the law does with it is a separate matter, and the legal argument about face covering differs from the argument about headscarves in a way that is frequently glossed over. A covered face engages claims about identification, about security, and about the conditions of interaction in a shared public space that a headscarf simply does not raise. That distinction is what the European Court of Human Rights accepted in S.A.S. v. France, resting the decision on living together rather than on security, having found the security argument insufficient on its own. The UN Human Rights Committee, considering equivalent French law in 2018, held that the same reasoning did not justify a criminal penalty on a small number of women.

Both bodies were reading the same facts. They weighed them differently, and neither result binds the other.

France prohibited the concealment of the face in public space by a law of 2010, drafted without naming any religion but universally understood as directed at the niqab, and Belgium followed with a comparable measure. Similar restrictions have since been enacted in Austria, Denmark, Bulgaria and parts of Switzerland, and in various forms in a number of Muslim majority states for security reasons.

The French law was challenged at the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by a French Muslim woman, decided in 2014. The Court rejected the government's public safety argument as disproportionate on the evidence, and also rejected the argument based on gender equality, on the ground that a state cannot invoke equality to ban a practice that women defend as their own choice. It nevertheless upheld the law, on a different and much criticised ground: that the state was entitled to protect the conditions of living together, a minimum of open social interaction, as an element of the rights and freedoms of others. Several judges dissented, arguing that living together is too vague a notion to justify a criminal prohibition on religious dress.

Four years later the United Nations Human Rights Committee reached the opposite conclusion on the same kind of law, finding in individual communications against France that the ban violated freedom of religion and was not shown to be necessary or proportionate.

So two international bodies applying comparable guarantees produced opposite answers, and both decisions stand within their own systems. That divergence, rather than the merits of either, is the durable fact.

Enforcement in practice has been uneven, and the numbers of women affected in each country are small, which is itself part of the argument on both sides.