“So certain moderate Muslims are now suggesting that devout women can take off their shrouds and walk free in God’s sunshine. How very magnanimous of them. It turns out that rigging yourself up like a parrot’s cage with the covering on is less to do with flaunting your devilish female charms and thus inflaming bestial male passion, as we were told, than allowing Muslim women to go ‘unmolested’. So now, if wearing the hijab means women will be molested by us nasty infidels, they can go without.”

Julie Burchill in the Times, 6 August 2005