Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

The arguments for and against the veil will rage on, but what increasingly alarms me is the emergence of a post 9/11 generation of young women in the West who are out to make a statement by wearing the niqab. They enjoy all the western freedoms but choose to flaunt the veil. They are the female equivalent of the radical young men who travel to Pakistan and come back wanting to blow up trains.

Such men see themselves as companions of the prophet and they are “high” on religion. Both groups have completely succumbed to totalitarian seduction; they are the worst enemies of Islam, both to its image and to its chances of reformation.

The existence of this noisy female minority, many of them wealthy and educated, hides the fact that there are thousands of poorer women in Europe and millions across the Muslim world who have no voice and no choice. They are punished and threatened for daring to follow a different path . . .

For a while now I have been asserting that the most effective way for EU governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders.

The best tool for that is education. Yet the education systems of some EU countries are going through a crisis of neglect, particularly with regard to immigrant children. And in the matter of faith schools we are now paying the price of mixing education with ideology.