Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: This is not about a woman's right of dress, it is about the values of our secular society

The gains Muslims have made are threatened by our brothers and sisters who cannot handle freedom

Yet another chapter opens in the veil controversy, as a primary school classroom assistant is suspended because she refuses to remove her niqab during lessons.

Aishah Azmi works at the Headfield Church of England school in Kirklees, Yorkshire. She removed her veil while at her interview, presumably because she wanted the job. Now she refuses to do the same in the classroom if men are present, and claims her covering up is not a problem for her pupils. A number of teachers and pupils feel it is.

Once again, Muslims are divided. Some feel strongly that this is another staged provocation of the state and others declare that to require any dress code of British Muslims is "Islamophobic".

All other Britons have to conform at some time to these codes - but not Muslims apparently. I wonder if Ms Azmi and her supporters, using the same logic, would then allow someone who dresses like I do to teach in a Muslim school? Of course not. That would be an "Islamophobic" dare to established double standards.

Another similar conflict has appeared between religious manifestations and employment rules. British Airways employee Nadia Eweida is at the centre of a dispute over her refusal to conceal the cross she wears around her neck.

Under New Labour, the religious identity has been privileged over civic responsibility and collective democratic action. Religion is a force for immense good, a truth spurned by fundamentalist atheists. But the state and institutions have got to be religiously neutral and rigorously so, particularly in a complex, mixed nation such as Britain.

Multi-ethnic India, a country steeped in faiths, saw off a Hindu fundamentalist government after just one term and has reverted to a non-religious state. Here, the secular state was a fudge with its established church. Then it went into further retreat - count the number of new faith-based schools.

The Government is facing the consequences of its godly policies - and the niqab is the most testing of these. Ministers are squabbling, and now Phil Woolas, Minister for Community Cohesion, has sparked a new row by saying Ms Azmi should be sacked.

I wish I could withdraw from this debate, bury my arguments in a shroud of silence and let the world be guided by others who know best. Why should anyone listen to me, they sneer, a Muslim woman who shows her hair, neck, lips, cheeks and ears - those sexy things. Who is always sounding off in the public space instead of quietly accepting her lot behind curtains.

White liberals, too, would like me to shut the hell up because they think I am encouraging racists to attack Muslims and infringing the women's right to choose. Some even claim criticisms violate the "piety" of women who don the niqab. By definition then, Muslim women who refuse the cloths are unworthy symbols of impiety.

Loyalists to the Wahabi cause are using liberty to curtail liberties, a Trojan horse with all that implies. Bin Laden must be celebrating, while women resisting the burqa weep with frustration. The combined forces of powerful liberals and regressive Muslims have managed to turn this quarrel into one between authoritarianism and freedom where objectors are cast as the forces of oppression and niqabis become the righteous martyrs to the most valuable tenet of open democracies.

Let us go through these rebuffs. It must be dreadful to face physical and verbal attacks. It is dreadful. I know because it happens to me too. Racists need no excuse to attack black and Asian people or Muslims. Fundamentalist Muslims, though, do use this excuse to warn us off what they consider is only their business. To say we may only praise what they do and not discuss it is a deal I will not sign up to.

Next, how do the defenders of niqabis know all such women and girls have made a free and fair choice? Or that six-year-olds in hijabs are independent little misses who have decided to cover their hair? We have no credible research, no qualitative studies to back the kinds of claims being made last week by Timothy Garton-Ash, David Edgar and others.

For a programme I once made for Channel 4, we filmed an entire class of teenage Muslim girls all in niqabs, all - they said - which they had chosen to wear themselves. Just as anorexic teens choose to starve to get the body they crave. Many niqabis (with beautifully made-up eyes) have queued up on our media to claim this is the case.

But do you really expect the coerced victims to come forward and say they that did not choose the garment? I know some such women, because they write to me, turn up at my doorstep, meet me in secret - which is easier as they are unrecognisable. Some are now hidden victims of domestic violence, others are runaways who cannot bear the way they are made to live their lives.

In fact, here is something Muslim parents might want to consider: once your daughter is covered up completely, she can do what she wants and you will never find out.

And is choice, any choice, the only consideration here? Will we go with women who say they choose to be genitally mutilated? Or with private schools who want to thrash kids? Or with parents who want only creationism taught to their impressionable youngsters?

Some readers writing in our letters pages argued that veiled women were preferable to sluttish women who let it all hang out. Both, as I wrote last week, represent the sexual objectification of womanhood.

It is good that the debate has finally broken through into no-go areas - and that this government is finally breaking from its traditional political settlements with religious lobbyists. We should go further, begin the process of dismantling faith-based education, remove the automatic entry of Bishops into the House of Lords, question the influence on the nation's public culture by communities hitherto left unattended - hardline Sikhs and Hindus, Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians.

What any of us does in our own lives is a private matter - a precious and inalienable right. But once we enter the job market or national and local authority domains, or tread into places where there is interaction with different citizens, privacy and individual choice become contested - quite rightly, for there is such a thing as British society.

That society - in spite of relentless racism and murderous foreign policies - has enabled Muslims to gain unique self determination and autonomy. Those gains are now threatened by our brothers and sisters who cannot handle freedom. Their liberal mates do not understand what is at stake. So it falls upon us refuseniks to protect what we have before all is lost.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk