Jagmeet Singh, a follower of the Sikh religion and the newly appointed leader of the NDP, said "Fundamentally, we can't have the state telling people what to wear, what not to wear."

Singh is responding to a recently approved Quebec law that would require citizens of this Canadian province to uncover their faces while giving or receiving public services. 

But that isn't strictly true, is it? The 'state' often does tell people what to wear: it tells soldiers, police officers, and judges, for example. Construction workers have to wear hard hats, we all have to wear seatbelts.   More importantly, we all have to wear something. Nudity is not an option on the streets, on the bus, in the classroom, at the government office you go to the get your passport or your driver's license.

It's interesting how things which seem to be diametrically opposite to each other share a number of qualities. Zero and infinity, for example, behave similarly when multiplied, divided, added and subtracted. Importantly,  neither behave as other numbers do, confounding the normal rules of arithmetic.

Nudity and niqab are not fashion choices, like bell bottoms and jeggings, and it is stupid to talk about them as if they are. They are opposite extremes that share the quality of confounding normal rules.

In India, one can still on ocassion observe naked monks and ascetics in the public sphere. I've shared a train carriage with a man covered in nothing but ash. Nudity is a requirement for the Digambara monks of the Jain religion. The poet-saint Mahadeviakka, shed her clothes completely, singing "when clothed in the morning light of the Lord White as Jasmine, I feel no shame...".  Her radical choice, which I portrayed in my dance-theatre piece "Walking Naked",  lead her to transformation and transcendence, outside of the bounds of normal society. But when she rejected  the regulations of the state, she lived without its protections in forests and caves.

Both nakedness and niqab in public impose a burden on the viewer that the 'state' is well within its right to regulate. This becomes clearer if we think about  the 'state'  as just us, after all. It is our collective expression of what is important and what we want to protect. The 'state' requires us to accept the responsibilites that come with the freedoms that it provides. One of these is equality. This equality is fundamental, embodied, reciprocal. John Berger pointed out that it resides within the very act of seeing -- whenever we see, we are being seen. Nudity and niqab impose a fundamental inequality on those of us not making these radical choices; one forces us to see what we don't necessarily want to see, the other forces us to be seen without seeing in return. 

Since no one is arguing to be naked in Montreal, with its frigid Canadian winters, it is only the niqab that is being defended as if it is a dress choice rather than as social action properly regulated. If niqabis stayed outside of both the protections and responsibilites of the 'state', as Mahadeviakka did, there would be no problem. But what they want in Quebec is to take the advantages of citizenship without accepting the responsibilities.

The English language expresses the embodied nature of the importance of faces in our interactions: 'face the music', 'face to face', 'face off', 'lose face', 'plain as the nose on your face', 'egg on your face', 'put on a brave face'. We have a specialized area of the brain and an innate cognitive competency for recognizing faces, with faces evolved to be unique. As behavioral ecologist Michael J. Sheehan puts it, “It is clearly beneficial for me to recognize others, but also beneficial for me to be recognizable." 

Quebec's Premier Philippe Couillard expressed it this way, "I speak to you, you speak to me. I see your face. You see mine. As simple as that." It is part of being human.