As of writing the school has refused to comment, although the school's website does list a school hat or headscarf as required from kindergarten onwards, while other sources claim the hijab is compulsory from grade four onwards. There is good reason for Muslims to be reluctant to air any so-called dirty laundry in an increasingly xenophobic climate. As well as the obvious threat to her job, this teacher is also at risk of admonishment from her fellow Muslims who would be all too aware that any criticism, no matter how constructive and well-intentioned, can and likely will be appropriated by those with an explicit anti-Islam agenda. This agenda was clearly demonstrated in the furore over the billboard, with the original outrage concerned purely with the "disgrace" of associating Muslims with Australia Day. However, with fundamentalism a growing worldwide problem from which Islam is certainly not immune, hostility from outside the Muslim communities should not mean that "anything goes" inside them. And so, with the backlash to this xenophobia centred on objecting to clear bigotry, and with a campaign to reinstate the billboard gaining steam, what everyone seems to be overlooking is the very young age of the girls themselves. The modesty dress code is meant for sexually mature women, and girls who have reached puberty. If girls in kindergarten or grade four are being made to comply, then this flies in the face of any claim that observing hijab is a choice for individual women to make according to their own faith.

A girl of this age is not only incapable of an informed decision, she is far too young to have connotations of "modesty" and "purity" imposed on her child's body. This issue is only going to keep flaring up as Islam spreads in Western society and its more conservative elements receive the bulk of attention. In the past few months, German and Swiss courts have both ruled that girls from conservative Muslim families cannot be allowed to skip co-ed swimming classes on religious grounds, partly on the basis that Islamic scripture simply does not contain a clearly outlined requirement on what women "should" wear. The modesty dress code is meant for sexually mature women, and girls who have reached puberty. That the situation has come to this only now, despite Islam's presence in the West for more than a century, indicates a palpable trend towards ultra-conservatism in Muslim communities of the diaspora. Recently arrived Syrian refugees in Germany, for example, are shocked at the conservatism preached from European minbars (pulpits), in mosques funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Undoubtedly, this has much to do with the lingering reverberations of colonisation that still has the Middle East reeling, as well as escalating racism and xenophobia in the West, both of which propel many Muslims to embrace even the most patriarchal practices as genuine expressions of their faith and culture. However, also to blame is the tendency of Western liberals to associate the most visible forms of Islam with the most authentic and most persecuted. This idea is nonsense. Alawites (the small sect my own family belongs to), do not observe hijab for women or facial hair requirements for men, meaning they are not "obviously" Muslim, and yet they have been amongst the most persecuted and oppressed minorities in the Middle East for centuries, with no less than five fatwas issued by extreme clerics calling for their complete eradication. Of course, this does not mean anyone should call for banning any specific interpretation of Islam, which clearly goes against the grain of any liberal democratic society. But it does mean, at the least, we refrain from using taxpayer money to fund discrimination against girls under the guise of religion. Young girls being forced to comply with the notion that their bodies ought to be completely covered up, before their minds are mature enough the process the concept of hijab and how it relates to faith, is essentially teaching them that their bodies are shameful. Along with practices including the segregation of menstruating girls, which also breeds shame, this must be rejected no matter where it is coming from.