LET me be clear right from the start.

The sight of two armed men forcing a woman to undress on a beach in the name of her liberation chilled me to the bone. The actions of the two French policemen who threatened to arrest a Muslim woman unless she removed her burkini is as oppressive as an Iranian police officer arresting a woman for allowing strands of hair to escape her hijab.

I’m a white working-class woman from the Gorbals, brought up a Protestant and now a confirmed atheist. So I cannot pretend to have any real understanding of what it is like to grow up as a black Muslim in what we like to think of as the liberal west.

But it cannot be left to Muslim women alone to decry and defy the French authorities who have waged a systematic, and racist, campaign against various means of expressing Muslim faith.

To equate all visible signs of adherence to Islam with terrorism is dangerously counter-productive. You cannot coerce people into abandoning the symbols of their faith without inflaming their sense of persecution. And you cannot treat one and a half billion people as a dangerous species to be bullied into submission without turning at least some of these people into deadly enemies.

France has much in its history and constitution to be proud of. It led the world along the road to democracy more than 200 years ago, when its people rose up against the feudal aristocracy that held the nation in subjugation. It opposed the Iraq War when the UK and the USA bombed and bulldozed the country into rubble, over the bones of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

But like Britain, it also has an unsavoury history of imperial oppression. After the Second World War, it gave French settlers in its century-old colony Algeria seven times more voting power per head than the native Muslim population. It took a full-scale war of independence to force France to surrender its stranglehold over the North African nation in the late 1950s.

Many French Muslims today are of Algerian origin, and just like many people in Britain of Irish origin, proudly maintain their ethnic identity and their religion.

Not that I think religion should be above criticism. Even though I attended what was nominally a non-denominational school, I was indoctrinated in the theology of the Church of Scotland from the age of five. We had religious services conducted by the minister and visits from the Band of Hope. At Christmas our walls were festooned with images of the baby Jesus. At Easter, we were told about Jesus rising from the dead.

I personally disagree with force-feeding children with religion. But I’m not going to try to impose that on other parents. And although I have long since given up any belief in Christianity, I believe in treating other people’s faiths with tolerance and respect.

I can also see why humans have gravitated to religion to explain the world and provide an ethical framework for our accidental life on this planet. For millennia, we have struggled to reconcile our consciousness to a universe that is still beyond the comprehension of the greatest geniuses who have ever lived. I can see the attraction in a ready-made code that binds communities together.

But there are other systems at work, that use faith, philosophy, and theocracy to ensure their dominance. Patriarchy, the dominance of men over property, laws and institutions thrives on "the family" and religious codes, ostensibly from God. Its aim is to ensure women are confined to being wives and mothers – and safely ensconced at home.

Muslim women in France, a minority of whom wear a full face veil or burkinis at the beach, feel under siege: their religion, culture and customs feared and disrespected. Some risk isolation from their family and community if they go out uncovered. And when they do go out covered, they turn into a target for racist and anti-Muslim abuse. And for state harassment.

As a woman, I suffer oppression because of my gender. But I am also privileged because I am white, and non-Muslim. Those who happen to be black, Muslim and female are subject to a triple whammy.

It’s not up to me to patronisingly tell Muslim women how to go about being liberated. And it most definitely is not up to white men to go about imposing "liberation" at gunpoint.

It’s down to women, in whatever situation they are in, to negotiate the way through the minefield of their lives. Women rebelling in Iran by defiantly letting their hair hang free, and Muslim women in France risking arrest by covering up their bodies in the blazing sun have a lot in common. They are all standing up for the right of women to decide how to dress – and how to live their lives.

The burkini ban only upholds one of the French republic’s three principles: fraternity. There’s not much liberty or equality to be found when looking down the barrel of a gun. French patriarchy might be in a tussle with Islamic patriarchy about how to control women, but they’re both at the same game, whether they realise it or not: brothers-in-arms.

The big point here? Any laws, systems, codes or whatever that involve men telling women what they can and cannot wear are oppressive. And, wherever we are, it’s up to women what we do about it.