If Mohammed Amin really believes that people like Boris Johnson who make fun of the niqab are unfit to hold high public office, then it isn’t Boris who’s the extremist – it’s him.

Amin, chairman of the Muslim Conservative Forum, has caused a stink by saying on this morning’s Today programme that he would leave the Tory party if Johnson becomes PM. He thinks Johnson lacks the ‘basic level of morality and integrity’ to hold such a position, partly because he once ‘chose to mock Muslim women who wear [the] niqab and burqa’. Amin doesn’t understand morality. What would be truly immoral in a free country would be to deny people high office on the basis that they have ‘blasphemed’ against Islamic practices. Amin was referring to the now infamous Daily Telegraph column in which Johnson said the niqab and burqa make women look like letterboxes and bank robbers. This is frequently held up by Corbynistas and commentators as proof of Johnson’s ‘Islamophobia’, which only confirms that the term ‘Islamophobia’ is now explicitly used to police not only abuse or discrimination against Muslims, which everyone agrees are terrible things, but also mere criticism of Islamic practices.

What these people, and now Amin too, always overlook is that Johnson’s column was a defence of Muslim women’s rights. His argument was that the state should not ban the niqab, as has happened on the continent, because that would denigrate the ‘spirit of liberty’. Yes, the niqab is ‘oppressive and ridiculous’, he said, but that’s ‘no reason to ban it’. Here’s the thing: many people agree with him that the niqab is oppressive and ridiculous. I do. It is backward to require women to cover themselves from head to toe, including their faces, every time they venture into the public sphere. This implies that society is full of mad, rapacious men who would go wild at the sight of a woman’s pretty face or long hair, and it reduces the women inside the niqab to sexual objects who must remain hidden behind black cloth, often at the insistence of their husbands or other traditionalist community figures. It’s sexist and stupid. But it shouldn’t be banned. The state should never interfere with an individual’s right to express their religious views in public, so long as that individual is not harming anyone else by doing so.