Dress and liberty

There has been a lot of talk about how we Muslims dress. Perhaps we are being loosened up for some legislative intervention. Perhaps wearing the veil will be banned in education and, in the long term, in other public buildings. Perhaps it will also be banned while driving, on the health and safety pretext that it can interfere with the peripheral vision. We will just have to wait and see- by turning up the heat in the debate, perhaps some people hope that they will be able to influence behaviour and avoid the need for intervention.

I know at least 3 people who changed how they dressed after July 2005. A number of others altered their sartorial preference after Straw’s anti-veil outburst last year. The debate has focussed on the veil, but many men have also donned their shirts and trousers and discreetly retired their shalwar kameez suits. Some have also trimmed their beards; others, torn between cultures, are trimming their beards in stages, so that eventually it will cease to exist, by which time they hope no one will notice.

All this is a far cry from the case for liberty presented in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill argued that the only reason society should intervene in regulating behaviour is to prevent ‘harm’ to others. Over their own bodies, individuals are sovereign. As long as the harm to others principle is borne in mind, people could be as eccentric and offbeat as they wished. In fact, Mill argues, eccentricity is a good thing. A vibrantly liberal society depends on such difference.

Now Mill’s essay is elegant and powerful. But the word ‘harm’ is slippery It can be applied to whatever you like. Politicians can argue that the shalwar kameez, or the veil, ‘harms’ integration (just as in some traditional societies conservatives argue that westernisation harms society). Anything that goes against your idea of how society should be organised can be regarded as ‘harmful’. Yet the whole idea of liberty is to keep the concept of harm limited. If harm is continuously expanded- for example to include how you dress- then liberty becomes an empty phrase. It no longer becomes the default position, but whatever can be saved from the ever expanding domain of regulation. For Mill, liberty was definitely a default position.