Losing face: Zunera Ishaq.

Self-effacing: Canada, by diktat of our judges.

Because she won’t show hers, therefore we must turn the other cheek to a slap. This is profoundly misguided — not a reasonable accommodation but a capitulation.

Ishaq wants to become a Canadian. I welcome her and anyone else who pursues the privilege of citizenship.

I cannot and would not compel her to remove the niqab she chooses to wear in public, though it pains me that any female would adhere to such a cultural — not religious — stranglehold on individual openness, which is a precious trademark of this society we share.

The niqab isn’t a commandment of faith for Muslim women. It’s a practice steeped in patriarchy and orthodox interpretation of the Hadiths. In some regions, in some Muslim countries, a woman dare not appear outside her home without her face hidden. But those countries aren’t this country.

I’ve no fear that Ishaq will ever rob a bank or commit other crimes by shielding her identity. For a politician, or just any hostile citizen, to cite such an unlikelihood as justification for banning the niqab whilst taking the oath of citizenship is preposterous. There’s no need to go there.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper got it right when his government tried to prevent women from covering their faces in citizenship ceremonies. And the judges who have twice now — most recently, last week, at the Federal Court of Appeal — kicked the stuffing out of the government’s policy change to the Citizenship Act are profoundly wrong.

In fact, Tuesday’s appeal decision — delivered hastily so that Ishaq can take the oath in time to vote in October’s election — arises from a narrow legal basis: That the Citizenship Act delegates authority for making changes regarding the oath to the Governor in Council, and this amendment didn’t proceed properly. Thus, the lower court’s ruling was upheld. The decision is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

The legal dance-upon-a-pinhead don’t interest me much, certainly not since the bizarre 2012 Supreme Court decision — in relation to a Toronto woman who wished to keep her niqab in place while testifying in court — that the religious validity of the request was irrelevant. The key, those judges determined, was whether the complainant believed it was a religious obligation.

It is discomfiting to be in opposition to feminist lawyers who have taken up Ishaq’s cause, on the grounds that government has no business telling women how to dress; nor should they be discriminating against religious practices. Again, I repeat, there is no Islamic injunction compelling women to cover their faces — only to be modest, and that applies to both sexes.

Fundamentally, I object to Ishaq’s conviction because this isn’t, in truth, about her desire alone, or that of any other woman who embraces the niqab. It’s about me, too, and every other female in this country. If her face is too intimate a physical feature to be exposed during a Citizenship Oath — a core act within the covenant of becoming a Canadian — then what adverse connotations, about morality or chasteness or impiety, can be deduced about me and others of my persuasion? Are we lesser women because others can see our faces? Because that’s the message I’m getting.

I do not want such discrimination slipping into Canada. I do not want any man, regardless of religion or cultural sensibilities, to view us as inferior, and have that perception reinforced by laws of accommodation. Every woman who says, no, you cannot see my face, makes it just that fraction less acceptable to show mine.

I too grew up in a profoundly chauvinist culture where females chafed under the hammering thumb of patriarchy and paternalism. Perhaps not as oppressive as the female-squelching symbolized by a niqab, but bad enough. It was excruciating, and I’m deeply displeased by judges opening the door even an inch to the medieval.

Most Canadians intuitively grasp that endorsing the niqab, however obliquely, in a citizenship ceremony is contrary to our collective values. That this should play into Harper’s wheelhouse during an election campaign — as argued by Star and Globe editorialists — isn’t necessarily or innately manipulative. I’ve little truck with Harper and most of his policies. Maybe he is playing politics, hoping to profit from a wedge issue, but that doesn’t make him misguided on the principle of the thing, this thing.

We, the West, have bartered off women’s rights to some very bad and backward men in fundamentalist Muslim countries such as Afghanistan so that the internecine conflicts — essentially tribal-centric insurgency — can be brought to an end. That has meant betraying women we’d promised to dis-enslave. It will take years, generations, for Afghan women in their fish-gill burqas and niqabs to emerge from the darkness.

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Such darkness should never be permitted a toehold by rule of law in Canada, under the rubric of religious accommodation for you, Zunera.