Michael Collins in a review of Amartya Sen's latest book --Identity and Violence: the Illusions of Identity--- at Open Democracy says that Sen challenges the communitarian philosophy that our identity is something fixed, to be realised and acknowledged as one would a pre-existing natural phenomenon. This presupposition underpins the basis of fundamental neoclassical economics: the 'rational agent' who makes decisions independent of political, social and historical situations. The reality is that we all have multiple identities and so a single fixed identity involves have the fallacy of defining the multiple and shifting identities present in every human being in terms of a single, unchanging essence.

Edward Said has argued that the practice whereby the fluid and evolving nature of identities, as well as the differences within cultural or civilisational groupings, are obscured has been (and remains) part of the way in which the West has viewed and constructed identities for its 'others'. The superficially diverse but essentially monolithic body of humanity that Europeans began to encounter from the fifteenth century onwards, and which - bound together by their supposed irrationality - acted as a foil to Europe's self-identified 'Age of Reason' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In turn, however, the rise of 'Occidentalism' has come to countervail 'Orientalism' and inform the way in which 'the East' views Europe, America and 'the West'; often exhibiting a similar tendency to caricature and simplify.

This helps to make sense of the 'liberal' criticism of the small number of Muslim women who wear the niqab. This liberal opposition presupposes an explicit kind of freedom to choose within pre-defined boundaries. So we have the irony of liberals forcing women to take off their veils, thereby undercutting the western liberal values of tolerance and democracy. This reduces Muslim people to members of religious communities and to being carriers of a monoculture.

Collins says that the issue of the niqab:

...elaborates Sen's theoretical framework, encouraging us to address the web of meanings within which women might choose to wear such a garment. Some women may wear a veil through fear of punishment. Others may be rejecting the degrading commodification of the female body in modern capitalist societies. Or they may be computing a host of factors at the same time, allocating different weight to each.