Earlier this year, a French Parliamentary Commission recommended that a ban be placed upon all wearing of Islamic face veils in most public places. If the French Parliament follows through on the commission’s suggestions – likely, considering the 2004 ban on religious symbols in schools – Muslim women will be unable to wear the hijab in government offices, hospitals and on public transport.

Upon presentiation of the commission’s report, speaker Bernard Accoyer said that the face veil was undoubtedly a “symbol of repression of women”, following on from Sarkozy’s 2009 comments that “we cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity.” The idea of a veil ban was presented as a triumph for equal rights and interpreted by some feminists such as Fadela Amara as a triumph for the sisterhood.

It’s perhaps doubtful that the French Parliament’s motives were entirely driven by a wish for gender equality. Little is being done about the country’s horribly high urban rates of rape and violence against women, and the current right wing government has been frequently accused of blatant Islamophobia and racism. But whether or not they are sincerely concerned about the veil’s oppression of women or not, French MPs do have a valid point. Religion – of any sort – is simply incompatible with the vision of equality striven for by feminists across the world.

It’s very easy to reel off a list of women who have been abused, attacked, humiliated or harmed themselves in the name of religion. In 2009, Lubna al-Hussein faced forty lashes in Sudan for daring to wear trousers. In February this year, a 16 year old Turkish girl was buried alive by her strict Muslim family for having male friends. In India in 1987, 18 year old Roop Kanwar was allegedly forced to burn herself to death by taking part in the Hindu ritual of sati, in which a widow immolates herself along with her husband’s corpse.

Between the end of World War Two and the mid seventies, the Catholic Church was responsible for forcing thousands of unmarried pregnant women into convents, where they were forced to give away their babies and often made to remain in nunneries for years afterwards. The cases of Lubna and the murdered Turkish girl were not uncommon. During 2008, over 40,000 women were arrested for clothing offences in one state alone. There are at least 200 honour killings each year in Turkey.

Yet it would be nothing more than lazy journalism to suggest that these incidents – however widespread in their respective countries – are representative of the mainstream, watered-down religion which, luckily, permeates Western Europe. Furthermore anyone would be hard-pressed to find a Muslim who endorsed burying a child alive, or a Christian who advocated forcibly removing children from – and virtually enslaving – unmarried mothers.

Murders in the name of a religion are rarely carried out by moderates: the violence and killings described were all carried out by ridiculous fundamentalists. In fact, the moderate sects within certain religions have been praised as hugely empowering forces for female equality. Hinduism holds that the “mother exceeds a thousand fathers in honour”. Some Protestants allow women to hold significant positions within the church. And surely it is every woman’s choice to follow whichever moral code in which she believes most fervently.

But it is this last assertion which reveals the true reason why feminism and religion are incompatible. There are as many types of feminism as there are feminists, but one thing universally agreed upon across the board is that women should have choice. Each major world religion – from Judaism to Sikhism – is a method of control. Just like the legal system in any country, it has rules and regulations which must be observed. Unlike any legal system, the commandments and tenets of religions have not evolved to cope with an evolving society: they have stayed rigidly medieval. They are not open for discussion and change; they are followed or else. The choices they give women are few and far between, and based on either the ideal of the chaste homemaker or the sinful temptress.

Germaine Greer once wrote that “human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brainwashing”. Religion pre-empts a woman’s right to invent herself. From the moment she adheres to an organised belief she is subject to its ideas on her gender and her behaviour. When she falls pregnant, it is a millennia-old text which dictates whether or not she should keep the child. When she considers a career, it is one which must fit into the role her religion dictates. When dressing; when choosing friends; when choosing a partner; when doing anything – a religious woman’s first thought is not herself, but her God – her God invented and interpreted thousands of years before her birth by men living in caves and huts.

The reasoning behind the proposed French ban may have been faux-feminist, but disallowing a face-covering is to disallow a woman – whether she chooses to or not – to be oppressed. Those worried that taking religious symbols from a woman affects her identity need not be too scared. A female who sincerely wishes to hide beneath a veil or, for that matter, a crucifix, already has no face of her own.