Not merely because she’s learned a lot from his scholarly work, but because of his attack, last year, on “the arrogance, self-indulgence, and recklessness” of Harvard’s managers as they speculated away massive amounts of its endowment.

Now, via James, a reader, she sees she has a third reason to admire Higgonet. He writes in today’s Harvard Crimson:

… [The French have a] highly communitarian definition of what citizenship should be… [P]ublic space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive citizenship.

… In my head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed.

Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere…

What happens to women who might just be habituated to covering up? Will there be any help for them if they experience agoraphobia and panic?

An Australian writer worries about what will happen to a class of women who have been so smothered all their lives that the very act of being in the world of humanity will cause them to need mental health treatment.

I mean, I see her point. Far kinder to keep them covered up.

… Barcelona.

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… We know there is no Koranic injunction to cover the face, and we watch helplessly as organised brainwashing is leading to the blanking out of female Muslim presence and individuality from the public space.

… For me, the overwhelming argument against the burka (and various coverings for children, another growing abomination) is that there is such a thing as society. Community fetishes cannot override social communication, connection, obligations, equality, duties and understanding. Security and safety-measures too require facial identification. Politicians need to get assertive and argue that they believe in non-racist, universal human development. Effective policies to halt the spreading habit (in both senses) will then naturally follow.

And reformist Muslims too should speak up more frankly without fear or favour. A traditional Pakistani friend of mine – who always wears the shalwar kameez – recently refused service from a burka-ed librarian in one of our big libraries. The next time she went in, the face was no longer hidden. Maybe our new government should consult her. She could teach them how resistance, not acquiescence, gave us our past freedoms and will preserve our present ones.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent

Graeme Wood describes teaching at a totally burqa’d university in Yemen:

… When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. “I am a pharmacist!” chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.

Only Samuel Beckett, or perhaps Monty Python, could do justice to this scene.

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Beckett’s friend James Joyce captured the inner truth of these students, each one of them “a batlike soul, waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”

An Andrew Sullivan reader writes:

I live in the extremely multi-ethnic Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The high-rise across the street from me has a large fundamentalist Muslim community living in it, and there are several dozen fully-veiled women who live in the building. I run into them at the bus stop, the grocery store, McDonald’s – pretty much all over my ‘hood.

And although I’m an uber-liberal urbanite who embraces my multi-culti neighborhood, I have to confess: there is nothing creepier than having a burqa-wearing woman coming at you in the cereal aisle. I’ve lived here for years and see them all the time, but I can’t help but find them spooky. They’re wraith-like and eerie. I know I’m not supposed to admit that, but it’s true.

I understand that it is (theoretically) their choice to wear the veil, but the same is not true of their daughters. I have seen few sadder things in my life than the day I ran into one of my neighbors at the store, and saw that her adorably goofy and energetic little daughter had suddenly been converted into a somber, ghostly, black-clad shadow of herself. That was the first time I felt like a burqa ban might not be such a bad idea….

But surely the daughter chooses to wear it.

… the burqa.

Jean-Francois Copé, “majority leader in the French National Assembly and the mayor of Meaux” attempts, in the pages of the New York Times, to explain.

… The visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement. It was so obvious that until now it did not need to be enshrined in law. But the increase in women wearing the niqab, like that of the ski mask favored by criminals, changes that. We must therefore adjust our law, without waiting for the phenomenon to spread.

The permanent concealment of the face also raises the question of social interactions in our democracies. In the United States, there are very few limits on individual freedom, as exemplified by the guarantees of the First Amendment. In France, too, we are passionately attached to liberty.

But we also reaffirm our citizens’ equality and fraternity. These values are the three inseparable components of our national motto. We are therefore constantly striving to achieve a delicate balance. Individual liberty is vital, but individuals, like communities, must accept compromises that are indispensable to living together, in the name of certain principles that are essential to the common good.

… [I]n both France and the United States, we recognize that individual liberties cannot exist without individual responsibilities. This acknowledgment is the basis of all our political rights. We are free as long as we are responsible individuals who can be held accountable for our actions before our peers. But the niqab and burqa represent a refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others. The person who wears one is no longer identifiable; she is a shadow among others, lacking individuality, avoiding responsibility…

Let’s take a look at the first woman fined for doing so.

[Amel Marmouri, a Tunisian immigrant resident in Novara, an Italian town,] was in a post office when police officers stopped her and issued her with [a 500 euro fine for wearing a burqa].

“As far as I know this is a first in Italy,” said police officer Mauro Franzinelli.

Her husband, Ben Salah Braim, 36, said the family would struggle to pay the penalty.

He said his wife would continue to wear the full-length item of clothing because he did not want her to be seen by other men, but in future she would be forced to stay at home most of the time…

And what does Amel have to say?

Amel?

Amel?

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As for the struggle to pay the penalty: Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia, which feel strongly about fully veiling their women, should establish a Save the Burqa fund for this purpose.

Next up, France and Denmark.

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“We’re the first country to spring the locks that have made a good number of women slaves, and we hope to be followed by France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands; countries that think,” said Denis Ducarme, a liberal deputy.

Salman Rushdie talks about body bags.

… the Poles will be leaning – very visibly – in the next few weeks of masses and memorials make the most recent New York Times column by Stanley Fish particularly topical.

He’s reviewing a book by Jurgen Habermas, titled An Awareness of What is Missing, in which Habermas — long associated with the view that “the authority of the holy,” is in the process of being successfully replaced, in modern, secular culture with “the authority of an achieved consensus” — seems to change his mind. Fish writes:

In recent years … Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

What’s missing, then, is the “substance of the human,” “normative guidance” …

[The] modern Liberal state, … Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”

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You see the moral paralysis Habermas has in mind in a recent interview about the burqa with historian Joan Wallach Scott in Salon.

Scott insists that “One can’t assume …that [the burqa] signifies oppression.”

Why then, her interviewer asks, “does the [burqa] so dominate conversations about the rights of Muslim women?”

Well, that’s an interesting question. I think it is a way of avoiding talking about the discrimination Muslims (men and women) face in Western societies, a way of indicating “our” superiority to “them,” of blaming “them” for the discrimination they suffer, a way of depicting “them” as less modern, less enlightened than “us.”

There are, that is, no standards of enlightenment or modernity among us. As Scott’s quotation marks suggest, there’s no us. There are only bunches of people making choices and suffering discrimination as a result of some of those choices.

Muslim women, Scott says, must be choosing the burqa. Some of them must be choosing it. Enough of them for our liberal states to honor their choice.

We’re forced into this assumption because we have no general moral point of view from which we could assume otherwise, or, more importantly, from which we could put aside questions of the motivation of these women and instead defend our own set of collective moral principles.

Scott seems unable to perceive, in other words, the evisceration of “the substance of the human” that the burqa makes visible to pretty much everyone else.

On a deeper level, defending our own set of collective moral principles would be, for Scott, a logical absurdity, since we don’t exist (only individual choosers or groups of choosers exist). And its realization would be an abomination, since acting collectively on behalf of what can only be, as she describes it, a self-aggrandizing myth, would make us savage bigots.

… for women in Belgium’s universities. For women all over the country. For the country.

Support for the ban in Belgium transcended party lines, ranging from the Greens to the far right, and also resulted in a rare show of unity between the linguistically divided halves of the country.

In April 2009, organisers invited three radical Islamist preachers to address the [City University London’s Islamic] society’s annual dinner, with the “brothers” and “sisters” segregated, and the latter forbidden to ask questions.

Put aside the radical preachers; can you imagine any American university sponsoring a student group that segregates women students and makes them shut up?

A diversity event sponsored by a group called Project Dialogue at Vanderbilt University generated some interesting give and take:

[Chaplain Awadh] Binhazim… suggested that he, as part of his religion, would support the death of individuals involved in homosexual acts.

“Given the recent controversy surrounding homosexuals in the military, under Islamic laws if a homosexual engaged in homosexual acts, then the punishment under Islamic law would be death,” [a questioner said]. “As a practicing Muslim, do you accept or reject this particular teaching of Islam?”

“I don’t have a choice to accept or reject teachings,” Binhazim responded. “I go with what Islam teaches.”

… Binhazim, however, calls for perspective.

“As Muslims, we don’t just go around killing gays. That is a ridiculous misconception,” Binhazim said. “There is a set of strict criteria that must be met before this punishment is enforced. The rule is in place to promote the Muslim values of family. Even in rare cases where all criteria is met, it is even rarer for this conclusion to be reached.”…

Curbs on wearing the full Muslim veil come a step closer in France today with a report that will call for a ban on the dress in post offices, universities, hospitals and state-owned premises, as well as public transport.