Potential disharmony

If I shake my head very very hard so that my thoughts get dislodged and fall like confetti they still seem to gravitate into the same pools.
Watching the people going into the packed mosques in Paris and hearing their solidarity with non Muslims after Friday's atrocity, one is again struck by the sight of a with male only congregation. Not a women in sight and this in an age when we are stressed to believe in equality and the rights of women.

How in this day and age can women be banished into the home, behind the curtain, bathed in medieval superstition inflicted by their husband to hide behind the niqab as a sign of modesty. This goes far beyond modesty and implies ownership, subservience, obedience, and has no place in western society. 

And yet we turn a blind eye to it we contrive to acknowledge a special case bound up in religiosity, we are tamed into not calling it what it is, a form of slavery.
How can we seek common ground and a shared identity if we hide the identity of 50% of the other group ? How can women who have striven hard to pull down the barriers between the sexes, especially the privilege men acquired through birth, only to see the most discriminatory practices acted out "within" our own society.
Remember, pre 1947 the number of Muslims living in this country was minuscule, most of the immigrants, after the  "Partition of India" (into Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India), came to work in the industries of the North and Bradford, my home town had a large segment living within an area called Manningham.
There was little attempt on either side to integrate but particularly the women were confined indoors, not learning the language they never assimilated with the local community and remain to this day isolated.
If the events of Friday's carnage tell us anything it is that we know little of the mind of the Muslim and I am not saying that the men who shot innocent people irrespective of who they were, represent the Muslim person you know in your office but I do say we underestimate the basic differences. We do not understand or bother to learn what those fundamentals are. We naturally take it for granted that our ways and our laws will be respected but if we were to learn that they are not and that there is a head of steam, not so much in the non Muslims mind for which much of our education and restraint is directed but in the Muslim diaspora who's religion tells them repeatedly that our western ways are unholy.
There can be little unanimity in an unholy alliance and whilst I have no answers I fear for the disquiet that has and will continue to brew up, irrespective of what the "spokes people" say.
It's a numbers game of course.
The Jewish Hasidic is a case in point. As you walk through Golders Green you see the dress and hair style and wonder at the person, living amongst the ordinary Londoners. What do they think and how their religious belief marks them out from us but because their numbers are so small they are not presumed a threat (although their attitude to their women has some convergence). The rapidly growing Muslim population and the nascent growth of their demand to be recognised with special rights can only bring disharmony, irrespective of how so many good minded people would wish otherwise.