To wear the niqab or not: In search of common ground on Muslim dress code

In the late 1980s, the rock star Lou Reed, skewering a number of luminaries in his album New York, pondered aloud whether the expression “common ground” consisted of words with meaning, or was it “just a sound?”

It was a question that hung over the discussions at a recent forum in Zurich — entitled “One Young World,” a nonprofit organisation that was co-founded by the advertising executives David Jones and Kate Robertson and brought together about 1,600 people, mostly under 25, from 190 nations for what might be termed the ultimate gabfest.