At an appearance in Drancy, Zemmour asked a woman in a hijab to remove it.

The woman in turn asked Zemmour to remove his tie, arguing that her hijab is a similarly personal clothing choice. She then proceeded to remove her hijab …

… “Hijab is not what makes religion,” she added, “just as wearing a tie does not make you smarter”.

So let us examine this equivalence between a hijab and a tie. Not very convincing at first blush, is it?

It would be convincing if the symbolic value of a tie involved expressing your personal submission to Brooks Brothers. But a tie is devoid of powerful symbolic meaning, beyond maybe saying I’m corporate, or I’m bourgeois, or something. When I was a hippie, ties were worth something symbolically, but that’s gone now. Nor are our thoughts liable to wander, in spying a man in a tie, to countries in the world where men are jailed for not wearing ties; or countries where men risk their lives to be free from having to wear ties.

So, step one in the renewed campaign to increase respect for the hijab: Be honest. Don’t play us secular people for fools. The hijab is very very far from a personal clothing choice. Parents stick hijabs on ten-year-olds and keep sticking them on. Obviously for these millions of little girls it’s not at all a personal clothing choice, and ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of choosing their own clothing. It’s fully imposed on someone incapable of knowing very much about, much less assenting in an informed way to, the laws of Islam. Having from a very young age known no existence in the public realm without a hijab, our ten-year-old is highly unlikely ever to take it off. Doesn’t sound very much like the history of your typical tie-wearer.

And no one will mind – or even notice – if Zemmour ventures outside without a tie on. His family, and larger community, will not shun him. Of course there’s not necessarily community pressure to cover up. But there certainly might be.

Plenty of adult women wear the hijab by choice. Again, I would ask that they not trivialize it so as to make people who might be uncomfortable with it more comfortable. Be honest enough to acknowledge the potent message about modesty and submission to God you mean to carry into the liberal public realm when you wear it.