It’s good that he’s raised this issue but the wide-ranging views among Muslim women have not fully been heard.

It has been hard enough to hear Muslim women’s voices in the media controversy about the veil. But it will be impossible when the debate moves into parliament next week because there are no Muslim women MPs. The sad irony is that the debate about the choices of Muslim women and the veil will take place without them.

How much better it would be if there were some Muslim women MPs at the heart of all our national debates. What a shame that young Muslim women cannot see Muslim women at the heart of our parliamentary debates.

Our Muslim male colleagues in parliament play an invaluable part in the debate about Muslim communities in Britain. Without them our debates on Britain’s Muslim communities would lack any legitimacy.

The controversy provoked by Straw reinforces the need for some Muslim women to be selected to stand for parliament.

In the meantime parliament should establish an Advisory Forum of Muslim women to provide the voice Westminster needs on these difficult and complex issues.

In a mature democracy we should be perfectly capable of having this debate, and recognising there are strong views on all sides. But there is not one single view from Muslim women. When we attended a conference of Muslim women in Quatar there was a heated debate about how they have have freedom of choice in male dominated societies.

Participating in this debate, the Moroccan women delegation wore brightly coloured clothes and their Lebanese sisters wore elegant suits that looked as if they’d come from the Paris catwalks. The Iranian and Saudi women wore veils that concealed their faces. The Moroccan women protested that they were no less Muslim because they were unveiled while some Saudi women regarded them as immodest.

Modesty is not a bad thing, but the idea that women who show their face are immodest is. Pride in the distinct traditions of your country of origin is a good thing. Lack of integration with the community of your country where you live isn’t.

Separateness is most likely to grow where communities feel vulnerable. The September 11 attacks caused fear of Islam. The Muslim community felt vulnerable. Vulnerability leads to separateness, which in turn leads to further hostility.

This has become a vicious circle of them and us.

The most striking physical expression of community solidarity among women, and the most striking visual symbol of separateness is young women taking the veil.

Here in Britain most Muslim women don’t wear the veil and would strongly object to the suggestion that they should. Some do because it is the tradition of the community in which they have grown up. Some do because they have no choice. And some young women are starting to wear the veil even though their mothers have rejected it.

A generation of Muslim women are bringing up their daughters where the girls will themselves choose if they wear the hijab.

It is standard for all communities and for all cultures for teenagers to rebel — sons against fathers and daughters against mothers. There are many Muslim mothers anxious about the fact that their daughters are rebelling against them not by casting aside the headscarves which their mothers have left behind, but by taking them up.

The normal pattern of the second generation being more integrated and women’s horizons expanding is reversed.

It is an irony that some young Muslim girls who would fight against the veil were they still living in the country of their family’s origin, should be taking it up in a country where it is seen by many as, at best, baffling and, at worst, require serious effort on all our part to understand.

We cannot have a debate about how Muslim women can make progress without their participation and leadership.

That debate needs Muslim women MPs.

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