With a society of "secularism", however, we all humans live right in it.
It doesn't just deprive them of the beauty of women's faces; it offends the secularism that goes deep in European—and especially French—culture.
Now secularism is shrivelling some churches, especially mainstream Protestant ones.
The more contemporary hatred of smoking stems in part from its equation with death at a time of secularism.
Whether this secularism has much to offer the millions of women who are, by socialisation or choice, religious, is a prescient issue that is being raised especially by postcolonial critics.
"Do not be wary of secularism. I hope there will bea secular state in Egypt, " Erdogan told private television channel Dreamon Monday.
And relativism and de-supernaturalism or secularism would ruin Africa-ness, it removes their Africa-ness.
Yet today's concerns about the niqab go far beyond secularism.
And this is the grand irony to the advocacy of secularism today, whether in France or Britain.
What seems to have escaped the cross-party purveyors of this so-called militant secularism is that a secular state is not the enemy of religion; in many ways it is its product.
And in France, Nicolas Sarkozy has been engaged in an ongoing debate about Gallic values, particularly the country's devotion to secularism.
