A Muslim student in England  was forbidden to wear a veil on the premises of her local college. The principal of Burnley College, in the Northern county of Lancanshire, claimed that the girl’s veil made it impossible for her to communicate with others.

“It is not possible to maintain this essential full communication of the face of any student is not fully visible,” Prinipal John Smith said.

This woman wears a traditional burqa like the one Bilqes was banned from wearing.

The school says it also feared the veil could lead to problems with identity fraud.

“All members of the college community should be identifiable at all times when in the college,” Smith said.

Shawana Bilqes, 18, who is pursuing a medical career, told Sky News that she was “emotionally traumatized” by the the college’s decision.

“I was willing to take it off as a compromise for identification checks, security or whatever,” Bilqes said. “But they said I couldn’t wear it anywhere on the premises.”

Bilques has now, as a result, decided to attend college somewhere else.

The issue of wearing a traditional Muslim veil or burqa, is not confined to this one college. The then-Leader of the British House of Commons Jack Straw said in 2006 that the veil was a “visible statement of separation and difference,” which sparked controversy across the United Kingdom

It has been an ongoing issue in France since the 1990s when three girls were suspended from a middle school for refusing to remove their veils. Veils and any other sort of religious symbols have been banned in French schools since 2004. The French President Nicolas Sarkozy called burkas a “sign of subservience” and advocated banning them from the country.

“In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said in June to the French parliament.

In Quebec, women were required to remove their veils in order to vote so they could be identified.

In Egypt, a girl was also ordered to remove her burqa at school, sparking a push by the minister of higher education to ban the garment from public universities.

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