“Today’s decision is a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry.”

The decision to allow a a Muslim pupil, Shabin Begum, to wear the full jilbab to school worries me. I believe that rather than the policy of tolerance it is made out to be, it’s a micrcosm of a bigger problem, namely the legitimisation of religious extremists as representatives.

The school in this case has been made out to be some sort of intolerant, racist, anti-Muslim body, when actually it was quite tolerant - it allowed Muslim girl pupils to wear trousers, tunic and headscarf, which easily satisfies the Qu’ran’s guidelines on covering the body apart from the hands and face. The school was more than happy to compromise the rules on school uniform to fit with those laid out in scripture, but this compromise wasn’t enough for an extreme conservative like Ms Begum, who wanted nothing more than full surrender.

To claim this is a victory for all Muslims like she has is erroneous, since not all Muslims wish to subscribe to such an extreme interpretation of the rules; many are able to live their life under more moderate rules, and wear more moderate styles of dress, and still feel happy that it squares with holy scripture (or maybe it’s just the Muslims I know). This decision lets conservative Muslims the ‘right’ to speak on behalf of all Muslims, when there is little evidence that they have this right of representation.

OK, how a schoolgirl dresses is pretty small in the great scheme of things. But a much bigger issue is the new legislation on banning ‘religious hatred’, which follows exactly the same lines. As Nick Cohen has pointed out, by privileging religion, an highly variable and contingent quality, as the factor that defines people, it lumps all followers of a faith together and empowers the most devout and extreme religious figures to assume that they speak for all of them.

Why have we got into this situation? Because Labour keep on passing shitty anti-terror laws, like letting the state imprison people without trial, which will inevitably be used to target and victimise Muslims, moderate and conservative, in Britain. Rather than reconsider these mistakes, they decide that the best way of remedying this is to pass more shitty laws, in an attempt to appease the affected, or rather, to appease the most extreme and vociferous of the affected. State tyranny is being excused by pandering to religious tyranny.