Following from a previous article I wrote on the viability of Asian Muslims to assimilate into Western Scoiety, a new development for Muslim women has occurred in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Legislation has been passed to make it mandatory for the face of a person making a statutory declaration or anything requiring an identity check to be clearly visible without ambiguity (it will be in effect on April 30th onwards).
There hasn’t been any general outcry as such, and various Muslim and Civil Liberties organisations have expressed their support for it, provided that people are culturally sensitive and aware. Contrast this to the reaction when France brought in its laws to ban the face veil, where the general feeling was that it was a direct strike at Islamic identity as well as a misguided attempt to try and preserve French identity. The obvious question then is, where is the line between personal liberty and national cohesiveness and security? Can we expect to protect what we consider basic rights whilst at the same time protecting society as whole?
There are those who argue that the power of the state cannot be constrained enough, and that individual liberty is more at risk from Big Brother than from anything else, and vice-versa that the state cannot act effectively without the loss of some individual rights. I believe that any and all religions have their extremist nut-cases, which includes Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism. Any religion has an ugly side, it’s just the fact that extremist Muslims have been more prevalent in their attacks on the world. It would be unrealistic to expect that diversity can fully flourish without some boundaries, being that the world is too small with too many people. Someone will always be offended, not everyone will be happy with the answer provided, and sometimes, just sometimes, we have to have faith in that entity known as the government, and hope to whatever God we pray to that they have the decency to be a responsible government.
