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“We wanted to distance ourselves from that image,” Ms. Daoud said.

A niqab is a full-face covering with small eye holes. A hijab is a headscarf to cover the hair.

In fact, there is as yet no picture of the official Edmonton police headscarf, but a prototype is to be revealed later this week, Ms. Daoud said.

Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, called it a “natural evolution” for policing in Canada, that follows similar moves in the private sector, and opens up career options for minorities.

He compared it to the introduction of the Sikh turban to the RCMP in 1990, which was controversial at the time but is now broadly accepted.

“The Muslim community is growing in Canada, and [a police hijab] is certainly something that we welcome,” he said.

It is not the first time a Canadian security force has permitted the hijab. Airport Customs officers have been allowed to wear it, and it has been approved in Toronto.

In the summer of 2001, London became the first UK city to permit female officers to wear an official hijab. Its version includes a black and white check rim. Other British forces have headscarves on hand for female officers who have reason to enter mosques. Norway, Sweden and Indonesia have similar policies.

In 2003, Iran permitted women officers to wear the hijab, when women were admitted to the police force for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

In the U.S., former Philadelphia police commissioner Sylvester Johnson, himself a Muslim, was at the centre of a national fight over the issue in 2003, after he ordered a female officer to not wear her dark blue hijab.

“There is nowhere in the Koran that says you have to wear a beard or a hijab,” he said at the time. “We are a paramilitary organization, and we just cannot let people wear whatever they want.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided he was wrong, and following a legal battle that attracted many intervenors, Mr. Johnson’s view won out in 2007, when a judge found the uniform code has a “compelling public purpose.” That ruling was upheld on appeal in 2009.

National Post

jbrean@nationalpost.com