For Multiculturalist Britain, Uncomfortable New Clothes

SEEING BUT UNSEEN A British Muslim woman with her son and three daughters on Friday in Blackburn, England.

RARELY has Britain’s struggle to define its relationship with a disaffected and diverse Muslim minority seemed so fraught as it was last week, with the debate fixated on where a woman can wear a flimsy, kerchief-size item of Islamic dress called the niqab, the full-face veil.

The discussion, intensified by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s calling the veil “a mark of separation,’’ is not simply about dress. It seems to signal a broader shift as non-Muslim Britons set new limits of tolerance, not just for recent immigrants but for a younger, home-grown generation of more assertive British Muslims. READ MORE & "pray the news"