Do Muslim women who cover their faces cut off communication?

In November 2025, the Adalah Center, which advocates for the rights of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, filed a lawsuit in the Tel Aviv District Court against Bar-Ilan University. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Hala Odeh, an optometry student who was prevented from continuing her studies after she began wearing a niqab, a face covering that leaves only the eyes visible. Odeh was admitted to her program wearing a hijab, a head covering that leaves the face visible, but during her studies, she switched to a niqab. The university refused to accept the change.

Odeh claimed a violation of religious freedom – a right grounded in Israel’s Basic Law. The university pointed to pedagogical and security concerns. Yet both frames miss the deeper question. Beyond law and religion lies the basic structure of human encounter: what kind of communication is possible when one participant sees everyone, but allows no one to see her?

The niqab is a model of presence in which one side reads the facial expressions of those around her, but they cannot read hers. In a classroom, where discourse is conducted through facial expressions, gestures, a smile of understanding, a raised eyebrow, or a frown of confusion – concealing the face is not a minor detail. Communication becomes asymmetric: not “discomfort,” but a structural gap. There is also a paradox here: the niqab says “I am here” and “I am not here” simultaneously – a presence that refuses to be present, at least not conventionally.

And there is a surprising reversal in the question of objectification: the traditional argument holds that the niqab protects women from the objectifying gaze. But one can also ask the opposite – does concealing the face not turn those present into objects? The one who covers her face sees others, reads them, responds to them – but does not allow them to do the same.

The distinction between head covering and face covering exists in the Muslim world as well. In Egypt, Cairo University banned the niqab in classrooms starting in 2015, arguing that it hinders pedagogical discourse. In Tunisia, a ban was introduced in public institutions in 2019. In Syria, even before the civil war, the niqab was banned for teachers and students. In Kyrgyzstan, a Muslim-majority country, a law banning clothing that impedes identification in public spaces came into effect in February 2025. The distinction between head covering and face covering is not exclusively Western; it also rests on the plurality of interpretations within the Islamic tradition itself.

The lawsuit filed by Adalah claims that there was no actual academic difficulty resulting from wearing the niqab, and that other institutions in Israel allow it. These are claims worth examining. But even if no concrete problem arose in this case, the principled question remains: can a space where communication is central forgo basic reciprocity of visibility?

This is not an examination of the possibility of a blanket ban as in France, where over a decade ago, face covering was banned in all public spaces. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the ban in 2014, in the name of “living together” as a legitimate value. In ordinary public space – street, market, square – the freedom to wear a niqab should be protected in the name of religious freedom, just as the freedom to walk around with a hat, wig, and sunglasses that conceal no less should be protected in the name of individual liberty. The question arises specifically in spaces where face-to-face communication is an essential part of the activity itself.

This discussion is not a feminist debate about whether the niqab oppresses or liberates women. The feminist debate is important, but it is not decisive here – even if we assume that this is an entirely free choice, the question of reciprocity in communication and the possibility of dialogue in a shared space remains.

Where does the boundary lie? Between full exposure and full covering there is a spectrum, and there is no “natural point” where exposure begins or ends. Any boundary will be somewhat arbitrary. But arbitrariness is not a contradiction to rationality – traffic laws and dress codes in courtrooms are also arbitrary in a sense but were established to protect shared conditions of operation.

And precisely because the boundary is somewhat arbitrary, a uniform policy must be formulated. If each institution improvises alone, every case becomes a personal confrontation, and every argument devolves into identity politics. The point is not what this or that institution chose to do, but why bodies like the Council for Higher Education have no clear policy on the matter. The issue also requires legal regulation at the national level, one that distinguishes between different spaces according to their conditions of operation.

One can imagine a future in which communication takes place even without facial visibility, as we experienced during COVID. Questions of identification and security, incidentally, are technical issues. They can be regulated, as is done in other countries, through one-time identity verification or a separate space where a female student identifies herself before a woman. But in the present, in spaces where communication is central – like a classroom – there are conventions.