Driving while veiled Imbler Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy points me to this article article in the New York Times about a Muslim women refusing to show her face for a driver's license photo. OK. I believe that technically Islam enjoins modesty-and that veiling was a Persian tradition that was adopted by the Muslims. Though a large portion of Muslim women in the Gulf are veiled, a minority throughout the Muslim world (and obviously retrograde areas such as Afghanistan)-it is not standard practice. While Muslims can say unequivocally that there is no God but God and Muhammed is his prophet and that being Muslims is contingent on this statement-it is not agreed as to whether veiling is necessary for the practice of one's faith. It is almost certainly a matter of interpretation-so what this women wants to exercise is her interpretation of Islam (there are four main Sunni schools of religious law who have different interpretations for defining who is Muslim-the most liberal-the Hanafi, basically requires only the shahada [declaration of faith] and is rather lax in enforcing all five pillars).