Life may be more important than food and the body more important than clothes, but both food and clothes have a strange habit of raising the big questions of life.

Just as halal and kosher foods highlight the tensions between particular, religious cultures and public norms, so too, today, do the veil and the necklace.

Last week, Aishah Azmi, a classroom assistant in a Church of England primary school, was suspended for insisting on wearing the niqab, the full veil, during lessons. Meanwhile, Nadia Eweida, a Christian working at a British Airways check-in counter, was ‘forced’ to take unpaid leave for refusing to remove or conceal the small cross round her neck.

Both stories have been understood in terms of a conflict over individual rights. But ‘rights talk’ has real problems in settling such intricate issues. Do I have the right to wear whatever I like, wherever I like? Or do you have the right to see my face when we’re talking?

More worrying, rights talk can easily transform the public square into an arena where everyone competes to see who can shout loudest in their attempts to secure their own interests.

Were we to think primarily in terms of the consideration we owe others rather than the rights society owes us, the debate might take on a rather different tone.

Are there valid reasons why others might object to someone wearing the niqab? I would suggest that there are. Allowing other people to see your face and read your expression is a small gesture of openness, vulnerability, communion. Hiding yourself is the opposite. Muslim fears about Western over-sexualisation are justified, but it is quite possible to dress modestly without concealing your face.

Are there valid reasons to object to someone wearing a small cross? I would suggest not. Not because it is a Christian symbol, but simply because it is too unobtrusive to alienate anyone in the same way. Other Christian accessories, such as a monk’s cowl, might not be judged so acceptable.

This kind of approach will not decide whether we should legislate for one type of clothing and not another. In reality, the state simply cannot deal effectively with such micro-details. What it will do, however, is remind us that if we are to live in anything approaching concord, we should think first of what we owe others rather than what they owe us.

Nick Spencer