Ideas can be dangerous. I have learnt that the hard way. But I know that when it comes to freedom and human rights these precious ideas, so valued in the West, are worth fighting for. As a young Muslim woman, born in Somalia, I abandoned my family to avoid an arranged marriage to a distant cousin and fled to Holland. I was just 23 and I had no idea back then that my refusal to submit to a traditional Muslim woman’s life would come to dominate my whole career.

So for me, the debate that is raging about the veil, particularly the niqab, which covers most of the woman’s face save for the eyes, goes to the very heart of the matter of liberty for Islamic women. Not just freedom for its own sake, but from a life of repression, subordination and violence.

Last week, for example, a senior Muslim cleric in Australia alluded in a sermon to unveiled women as “uncovered meat”. Sheikh Taj El Din al-Hilaly’s remarks prompted outrage, but he will have many faithful followers who agree with him.

Such insults to women are all the more reason to welcome the recent stand by Jack Straw and Tony Blair on the niqab. Not only is it a “visible mark of separation” as Straw described it, but also a visible sign of subjugation. At the same time it serves to condemn the male as well. If I were a man I would find it insulting because it supposes that all men are incapable of sexual self-restraint.

Like Straw I have also drawn on my experience of dealing with constituents. I served three years as an MP in the Dutch parliament, devoting myself to speaking out about female rights in Islamic societies. I often had to translate for poor women immigrants who were usually barely educated and nearly always in thrall to men.

In Islamic societies the veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of a stifling morality that makes a Muslim man’s honour entirely dependent on the respectable, obedient behaviour of the female members of his family.

I am living proof that Muslim women in the West can only benefit from turning away from the principles in their faith that justify subordination and embracing those of liberty in their host cultures. But there is a high price for urging Muslims to examine their beliefs. I have received death threats for becoming an infidel and two years ago the airing of a film about the oppression of women which I made with the director Theo van Gogh resulted in his murder by an Islamic terrorist.

The arguments for and against the veil will rage on, but what increasingly alarms me is the emergence of a post 9/11 generation of young women in the West who are out to make a statement by wearing the niqab. They enjoy all the western freedoms but choose to flaunt the veil. They are the female equivalent of the radical young men who travel to Pakistan and come back wanting to blow up trains.

Such men see themselves as companions of the prophet and they are “high” on religion. Both groups have completely succumbed to totalitarian seduction; they are the worst enemies of Islam, both to its image and to its chances of reformation.

The existence of this noisy female minority, many of them wealthy and educated, hides the fact that there are thousands of poorer women in Europe and millions across the Muslim world who have no voice and no choice. They are punished and threatened for daring to follow a different path.

In my book The Caged Virgin (Simon & Schuster) I tell the story of my friend Samira Ahmed, a 24-year-old girlishly pretty woman with a smile that seduces even the gloomiest of faces. Born to a family who left Morocco in the early 1980s and settled in the Netherlands, she is one of 10 children.

In the summer of 2005 I attended her graduation ceremony in Amsterdam where she received a diploma in education and a record 10 score (the highest possible) for her thesis. But behind the celebration lay tragedy. When I arrived for her graduation I noticed the happy class, a total of 35 students, gathered in clusters around coffee stands. Family and friends accompanied the students, chatting, carrying gifts and flowers. But not for Samira: no one from her family showed up.

Two years earlier Samira had had to sneak away from home because she wanted to live in a student house like her other friends. At home she had shared a bedroom with her siblings and every move she made was monitored by her mother and sisters; outside the house her brothers kept watch. They all wanted to ensure that she would not become westernised.