"Please Uncover Your Face-It's Our Custom"

Nice one from The Daily Telegraph.

In Western European society, to go out in public with your face masked is (unless done for comic effect) disturbing. Hiding the face is felt to be threatening, and slightly scary, and subliminally this goes way back, and quite deep I think: it certainly frightens children.

Would it be wrong to try to convey to communities in Britain who adopt the full hijab that, though it is a woman's legal right to dress as she chooses, she should recognise that she's in a country where many people will find a masked face disturbing, and that (without meaning to) she is acting in a culturally inappropriate manner, which may offend?

Do the masked women I see in the street in Whitechapel actually know this? I cannot say, because I've never spoken to them: or, rather, when I do, they look away and walk away. This too, in Britain, is rude. Do they know? Shouldn't they?

I sense a fatwa in your future Mr. Parris!