The appearance of a small number of students wearing the face-veil or niqab at two unrelated universities, The American University in Cairo and Leiden University, led to official bans on face... Show moreThe appearance of a small number of students wearing the face-veil or niqab at two unrelated universities, The American University in Cairo and Leiden University, led to official bans on face covering. The bans were justified on remarkably similar grounds, at the core of which were arguments that face covering is inherently incompatible with principles and practices of liberal education. Yet the prohibition of face veiling speaks t o issues far larger than pedagogy in liberal educational settings; it gets to the core of critical issues relating to integration, liberalism and the possibly uneasy place of Islam in it all. Show less
