IN HER bottle-green nylon skirt and matching veil, Aïcha* is an unusual sight on a university campus in strictly secular France. When she first decided to wear a headscarf, at the age of 15, her mother laughed. From a village in central Algeria, she had stopped covering her hair when she settled in France. Aïcha’s father, a retired dustman, also disapproved. “I had the worst weekend of my life,” she recalls. “But I felt something was missing. I was determined to wear it in order to feel at ease with who I am.”

A garment that Aïcha and other Muslim women consider to be a private choice is now under intense public scrutiny. As France begins to select a new president, there is a remarkable consensus for upholding curbs on religious dress, which ban the headscarf from public schools and the burqa—a full-body covering with a mesh over the eyes—from public places. François Fillon, a front-runner, backed local bans on the “burkini”, a modest all-in-one swimsuit, last summer and considers the spread of the veil to be part of what he calls “Islamic totalitarianism”. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front and possibly Mr Fillon’s opponent in the final round, would like to see both the Muslim hijab and the Jewish yarmulke banned from public places.

In the Netherlands the Senate is mulling a law passed by the lower house that would ban the niqab (which covers most of the face) and the burqa in many public contexts. With elections due in March, that would be a small sop to the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party, which wants a broad crackdown on Islam. Last month Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, told cheering members of her Christian Democratic party that exposing one’s features was part of normal interaction in a liberal society. Face covering, she said, should be banned “where legally possible”.

The strangest clampdown has occurred in Morocco. Earlier this month local officials told shopkeepers that the production, importation and sale of the burqa must end, and made them sign a document agreeing to the change. Burqa-clad women, of whom Morocco has few, promptly posted pictures of themselves on social-media websites. Some asked why the government was not cracking down on prostitutes or short skirts.

In the land of liberty

Anxiety over Muslim dress is running high partly because of a surge in Muslim refugees. In the 12 months to the end of September 2016 almost 1.4m people applied for asylum in Europe—many more than the 260,000 who did so in 2010. Islamist terrorist attacks in Belgium, France and Germany have stirred fears about immigrants. Xenophobic populists are on the march almost everywhere. But there is a deeper cause. Secularist doctrine and Muslim culture are both evolving in a way that causes a clash over attire.

Although Britons dislike mass immigration, they seldom get excited about Muslim dress. Nor do most Americans, although Donald Trump said offhandedly last summer that he “understood” a woman who complained about airline baggage-screeners wearing what she called “heebie-jobbies”. In America the constitution bans any “establishment” (ie, state sponsorship) of religion, and also guarantees the free exercise of faith. Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state has allowed both to thrive.

France is different. The roots of French political secularism, known as laïcité, go back to the revolution of 1789 and to an anti-clerical campaign in the early 20th century. By 1904 some 10,000 religious schools had been shut; thousands of priests fled France. “We have torn human conscience from the clutches of faith,” declared René Viviani, a Socialist minister.

To France’s current Socialist government, with its strong attachment to laïcité, the row over the burkini was a rematch of 1905. Manuel Valls, then the prime minister and now a run-off candidate in the Socialist presidential primary, said the garment embodied the “enslavement of women”. Its logic, added the women’s minister, Laurence Rossignol, was “to hide women’s bodies in order better to control them”. Many citizens concur. Fully 72% say they would back outlawing the veil from university campuses, and 64% would ban the burkini from beaches.

Muslim dress is contentious in other places where French influence is strong. One is Turkey, whose founders chose the French model when imposing secularism (see article). Another is the mainly French-speaking province of Quebec, in Canada, where a proposed law is being battled over clause by clause.

In 2008 a report for Quebec’s government proposed that judges, Crown prosecutors and police officers should be barred from appearing in a way that proclaims their religious affiliation. The separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) wanted to go much further. It proposed stopping all state representatives, including teachers, from conspicuous displays of belief.

Philippe Couillard, Quebec’s Liberal premier, explains that the province is part of North America and should be guided by Jefferson’s ideas on church-state separation rather than by French laïcité. As a result, the bill now being debated by Quebec’s politicians falls well short of the PQ proposal. It says that people delivering or receiving state services should not cover their faces. But civil servants can wear the hijab. That does not go far enough for critics, some inspired by concern for Quebec’s Catholic heritage (to which the bill makes respectful reference) and others by the battle to throw off Catholic influence.

In France, Quebec and even Turkey, a growing number of young Muslim women favour a live-and-let-live approach. “There’s no single meaning to the veil,” insists Ndèye Aminata Dia, a Senegalese-born woman working in Paris who has started a fashion line in stylish head-coverings. She wears her veil over a long flower-print skirt and carries a jaunty red handbag. “Wearing it doesn’t mean you are fundamentalist,” she says, “just as you can decide not to wear it, and still behave with modesty.”

Many educated young Muslim women consider themselves the beneficiaries of feminist battles fought by the previous generation. They have no time for arguments favoured by academic feminists about whether the veil is a form of emancipation or oppression. Instead they insist on their right to dress how they like, whether in tight jeans or a full-length niqab, and not to be judged for it.

From this perspective, the government’s attempts to impose and elaborate a dress code are not just an affront to their freedom but further proof of male chauvinism. “I’m a feminist, I consider that I’m equal to men and I wear what I want,” says Fatima El Ouasdi, a student in finance, who wears her skirt short and her hair loose and runs a women’s-rights group. “But the burkini ban really revolted me.”

Yet the trend of “reveiling” among young French women is sincerely regarded by many members of their mothers’ generation and by many politicians as part of a fundamentalist political project. They believe the government has both the right and the duty to oppose it. The French do not view the state merely as a provider of services but as a guarantor of norms. Lending legitimacy to certain individual choices is not just a matter of personal freedom but can have real social consequences.

For evidence, some say, look at the banlieues. The atmosphere in some heavily immigrant suburbs can curb freedom by making it hard not to wear the veil, argues Nadia Ould-Kaci, who co-runs a group called Women of Aubervilliers against the Veil. In recent years, she says, the spread of the veil in her district has reached “worrying” proportions. Girls of North African origin who do not wear it are insulted by being told that “God is ashamed of you.”

The challenge is to defend women from such pressures while affirming individual freedom. “Laïcité used to be about the neutrality of the state,” says Amélie Barras, a political scientist at York University in Canada. “But now it’s more about citizens, and what they can and cannot do.”

One moderate in France’s presidential debate is Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist minister. He argues that laïcité should not be “vindictive” and focused on prohibition. “I don’t think we need to invent new texts or new laws in order to chase the veil from universities,” he has said. Better to use other legal means of enforcing equality and women’s rights, such as child protection. Perhaps schools could take on the topic as part of civic education, and explain to girls that they can wear what they want within the law and do not have to dress how others tell them.

Such calm, nuanced thinking is rare. But France badly needs to work out how to marry secularism and liberty. If it cannot forge a more tolerant laïcité, it runs the risk of estranging a generation of its own young Muslim women.

Update: Aïcha's surname was removed from this article on August 7th