The Muslim face covering, which reveals only the eyes, appealed to the then Harvard grad student as a symbol of piety and fidelity to the religion increasingly asserting itself in her life.

But Khan’s experiment with the niqab lasted only a few hours and she settled instead on the hijab.

“I tried it and I hated it,” says the author of “Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.”

“I couldn’t breathe.”

Yet her own unwillingness to don the niqab hasn’t stopped her from offering a biting critique of the Quebec government’s proposed law that would prevent women wearing the covering from receiving government services.

“It’s abominable,” Khan says. “I can’t believe this is Canada.”

Khan has never been one to hide her opinions.

She was the vocal founder of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations and served on the board of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Khan, who holds a doctorate in chemical physics, has spent the past several years chronicling Canada’s sometimes complicated relationship with Islam for the Globe and Mail, culminating in her first book.

There is perhaps no place in the country where that relationship is more fraught than Quebec.

Muslim practises frequently get hashed out in the media as part of the province’s ongoing debate over reasonable accommodations for minorities.

The proposed niqab law provoked surprisingly little dissent within Quebec’s political class.

Khan, who grew up in Montreal after her family emigrated from India, has noticed a chill descend on Quebec society in recent years.

“I feel the environment is getting less and less comfortable for those who don’t ascribe to the majority view of Quebec,” she says.

“The previous generation had a very different view of Quebec as being a very inclusive society.

“It seems like especially now it has become a much more narrow vision, and that is very troubling.”

As a de facto spokesperson for Canada’s Muslim community, Khan acknowledges her role, and indeed one of the goals of her book, is to debunk some of the popularly held myths about the religion.

Chief among these myths, at least in Quebec, is the belief that those wearing the niqab invariably do so against their will.

Not so, says Khan, who knows several women who wear the covering against the wishes of their family.

“They’re making a conscious choice,” she says. “Stop treating them like people who need the guardianship of the state.”

This, however, is not to confuse Khan for an apologist for some of the more conservative elements of the Muslim community.

Her outlook is resolutely liberal, which has prompted clashes with imams in the past.

She relates how when scheduled to speak at a mosque several years ago, she was asked if she would allow a male to read her speech instead.

Khan held her ground, but says the incident typifies the challenges women can face within the religion.

“I could write a whole book of idiotic, stupid restrictions that are imposed on us,” she says.

But Khan refuses to let such tensions affect the foundations of her faith.

“If anything it makes my faith stronger,” she says. “My faith isn’t in the institutions, my faith isn’t in the men or the culture. It’s beyond that.

“If anything my faith impels me to try and change these things.”

Chrystelle Khedrouche is 36 and lives in a suburb just outside Paris. She has been wearing a burka in public for around 12 years. She is French-born, has five children, and is married to an Algerian. She is a convert to Islam.

These are her views about the proposed ban on wearing the burka and niqab in public places:

“I’m really very sad about this, but I’m not so surprised because it is part of the French mentality, but it makes me sad and it’s hard that this is the stage we have got to. It’s been several years that we live like this and we have been perfectly fine, but then I’m not so surprised because the French like the idea of everyone being of the same mould and that mould must be ideal. Everything that is not part of their ideal model doesn’t suit them.”

Polls suggest that a sizeable majority of French people support a ban.

“This is a political strategy. It is always easier to knock the Muslims because all French people are in agreement about it.”

Isn’t it through the face that human beings relate to each other? It is the most basic way of communicating?

“Do you think we do not have contact with people? No, I don’t agree with that at all. Throughout this debate we have heard lots of excuses. I disagree. I did my studies in communication. I know that if I smile on the telephone a smile is heard. For me, we can have human contact and a piece of cloth will not stop this contact. I don’t agree that human contact is established through the face. I still have human contact, it doesn’t change anything.”

Many Muslims say that nothing in Islam requires women to wear the full-face veil.

“It saddens me a lot because our community is not united enough. For me there is no difference between myself and other Muslim women who show their veil, their hair or show their full head; there is no difference between us. But to say that it is not part of our religion I find very difficult, because we know that the wives of the prophet were dressed like this, they were fully covered.

“When God ordered that women be veiled we know that they were already veiled. Look at the mother of Jesus, Mary, she wore a veil and I have never seen an image of her where she is not veiled. So we know that women were veiled at that time and if God ordered that women be veiled it was to add something more to what there was already.”

What would you do if the ban becomes part of French law?

“Am I ready to break the law? It’s been 12 years that I have been like this. Yes, I am ready. In fact I can’t accept the fact that the French fight for the freedom of women. I believe a woman should be able to dress as she likes, so I do not understand why they want to stop me from dressing as I want. I have made a choice to dress like this and I have made the choice not to be unveiled, so to force me to unveil – that’s not freedom.”

What happens if you are fined for breaking the law?

“If we are stopped we do not have any intention of paying fines – that is sure. I personally will not pay a fine and I think there are lots of women who will not pay. I find it terrible to stop someone for the way they dress and it is against European laws. First they say they will introduce a law, now it is a decree, a resolution…

“They know that it will go against the European constitution. I don’t know where this will lead, but they cannot arrest us in front of our children, we have done nothing wrong.”

By Sana Saeed
Published: 6:00 am

 The proposal to ban the wearing of any kind of “full veil” in public approved by the House of Representatives should now in theory go to the Senate. But Belgium does not have a government at the moment so the procedure will begin again after elections next month.

So why did the vote take place at all? Because enough politicians wanted to be seen to approve this largely symbolic measure because of the impact they hope it will have on public opinion, especially a few weeks before elections.

 The proposal was initiated by the Liberals (centre right) and received backing from every political party, because it gave the kind of signal that they believe Belgian people expect. The general population is becoming increasingly anxious – if not downright hostile – to an expanding Muslim community and the supposed growth of fundamentalism. These fears are fed by headlines predicting that Brussels will be a “Muslim city” by 2030 or alleging that state schools are being corrupted by Islamic fundamentalism.

 This surge in hostility is in turn driving Belgium’s Muslims towards introverted ways of asserting their identity, and to a religious revival that can be observed by the numbers of females wearing head scarves. The hijab is a common sight on Belgian streets, but burkas and niqabs are seldom observed, another sign of the pointlessness of the ban. Belgian politicians have been arguing among themselves for a long time about banning Islamic headscarves from schools and other public buildings.

 Progressive forces are themselves sharply divided among those who favour the French model (banning all public expressions of religion and safeguarding the neutrality of public offices and servants) and those who prefer the Anglo-Saxon model of religious tolerance and would like to see a reasonable accommodation, of the kind we see in Canada.

 A real debate about the kind of model that multicultural Belgium should promote has yet to take place. Unfortunately, populist moves such as this week’s vote do nothing to build the atmosphere of trust among our different communities in which such a debate could take place.

By  Caroline Sagesser:The writer is a social policy expert at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — To listen to French politicians now making the round of TV talk shows, there is no issue more urgent than the burqa, the head-to-toe Muslim garment worn by very few women in France.

What’s spooky about the debate over the burqa, or the niqab as some call it, is that there is hardly any disagreement. Everybody is against a full-length veil that hides women’s faces because it offends the “values of the republic.”

That’s what makes the movement headed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling center-right party to ban the burqa so off the mark and pointless. It has less to do with elastic notions of republican values, and more to do with reaching for political fodder before regional elections in March.

Republican values are to the French what the flag is to the Americans. They are invoked in all sorts of ways, by all sorts of people. No one is a more ferocious defender of “republican values” than the leaders of the far-right National Front party, champions of French xenophobia.

The idea behind the burqa ban is to remove from public sight an offending symbol of a deeper problem. That problem, depending on who is talking, is women’s rights, or the spread of a dangerous strand of Islamic fundamentalism, or both.

It’s hard to see how Muslim women or moderate followers of Islam will benefit from a law that obliges French police to chase down burqa-clad females and fine them $750 ($1,087). It’s very likely that veiled women will simply stay at home, more isolated than before.

Cloth Prison

The burqa-niqab is indeed offensive on any number of counts. It is scary-looking; it hides a person’s identity and it is appalling to think that some women are forced — either by their male partners, or their religious leaders, or both — to walk around in their own individual cloth prison.

If the goal is to stop the spread of medieval notions of the role of women, then challenge those who preach it. If they are breaking the law with their hate-filled rhetoric, then arrest them, or expel them. As for women’s rights, there are other ways to protect wives or daughters from the tyranny of their husbands and fathers.

There’s another little problem, and that is enforcement. How would French police go about fining Saudi princesses who come to Paris to shop?

Last year, France’s intelligence service said 367 women wore the burqa. Later in the year, the Ministry of the Interior put the figure at 1,900, out of France’s estimated 5 million Muslim population.

Willing Participants

Yet hard as it may be to believe, there are women who choose to dress like this: A 22-year-old law student named Dalila appeared recently in a TV debate during which she was able to face down — through the slits in her niqab — one of the ban’s most vigorous defenders.

Brought up by a non-Muslim mother, who sent Dalila and her sister to a Catholic school, the two decided as teenagers to obey what they believed were the laws of their father’s religion and don the niqab. Dalila said she would readily drop it when asked by civil authorities — police, customs officers, exam takers or teachers.

“My freedom is to wear the veil,” she said.

Proponents of the law insist it’s not a matter of religion. They say it’s about the dignity of women, about public security, about identity, about the importance of facial expressions for communication — above all, about the values of the republic.

‘Not Welcome’

“The burqa is not welcome on the territory of the republic,” was Sarkozy’s battle cry in June. “We shouldn’t be afraid of our values, we shouldn’t be afraid to defend them.”

This is where the French model of integration departs from the U.S. or the U.K. approaches, which the French dismiss contemptuously as ”communautarisme.” That word, really a slur, means the fostering of separate communities where minorities set themselves apart, clinging to their old language and culture.

The French idea, by contrast, expects immigrants to adapt to French ways, trusting in the assimilating power of “republican values,” which include a rejection of intrusive religious symbols.

To non-French ears, this can sound like an attack on personal or religious freedom. A 2004 law that banned head scarves, yarmulkes and heavy crosses in schools has been widely criticized. President Barack Obama in his speech last June to the Islamic world in Cairo obviously had France in mind when he called on Western countries not to dictate “what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.”

Secular Democracy

It’s hard to imagine lawmakers in the U.S., for instance, coming up with a law to ban the burqa. What would be the point?

Most countries have laws or ordinances banning outright nudity, but few enforce dress codes, or dictate hemlines. Those that do — Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example — are hardly models for France’s secular democracy.

This isn’t the first time European lawmakers have targeted the burqa. Such a ban was enacted in the Belgian city of Maaseik. The Netherlands also flirted with a burqa ban in 2006, but stepped back in 2008 on the grounds that it would violate the country’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion.

No matter how much advocates of a ban try to say it has nothing to do with religion, the debate always seems to come back to Islam. At least that’s the way some of France’s mainstream Muslim leaders see it.

Like others, they oppose the wearing of the burqa, which they insist isn’t a religious obligation. Like others, they see it as a sign of the influence of a radical form of Islam.

Female Stigmas

However, they strongly object to a law that they say would stigmatize not only the few women who wear it, but Muslims as a whole. That, they argue, would only serve to further inflame Islamic radicals.

There are better ways to fight back against unwanted religious extremists. Just last week, France expelled back to Egypt a radical imam who had been preaching violent jihad from a mosque outside Paris.

“The republic respects religious freedom,” said Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, “but preachers of hate, who have nothing to do with freedom of religion, have no place on our territory.”

Now that’s a ban that makes sense.

Editors: David Henry, James Greiff.

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at +33-1-53655081 or cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at +1-212-617-5801 or jgreiff@bloomberg.net