The Quiet Practice of Tolerance
The event I am going to describe happened not so long ago, and it has stayed with me in the way certain moments do — because they are, in their own way, undeniably dramatic. My husband and I were standing in the underground, holding on to each other for balance as Vienna’s U1 lurched forward, unusually crowded for a late Friday afternoon.
Across from us sat a woman wearing an open‑face niqab. She wasn’t doing anything remarkable — just sitting, hands folded, eyes lowered, occupying no more space than her own body required. She radiated the kind of quiet presence that should have made her invisible in the best possible way: simply another person on a train, heading somewhere, minding her own life.
And then a man entered the train.
He saw her, and something in him snapped into place — as if he had been waiting for a target. He began harassing her immediately, telling her to stand up, insisting that someone dressed “like that” had no right to occupy a seat. His voice was loud, sharp, soaked in an Austrian dialect that made the insults sound even harsher, as if the language itself had been conscripted into his anger.
The woman didn’t react. She didn’t flinch. She simply stayed still, as if stillness could make her invisible, as if silence could protect her from the violence of being seen.
And the rest of the carriage — dozens of people — watched. That was part of the drama too: the collective silence, the way the crowd seemed to fold in on itself, each person hoping someone else would intervene, someone older, someone braver, someone fluent in German. Someone who wasn’t them. The air felt thick with the weight of unspoken calculations — fear, uncertainty, the desire to avoid conflict, the hope that the situation would resolve itself without requiring anything from us.
My husband and I were slightly too far at first, blocked by a cluster of young tourists who were pretending very hard not to hear what was happening. We kept hoping someone closer would step in. But no one did.
The man kept going, his voice rising with every second of her silence. Racist, ugly things poured out of him — the kind that make your stomach tighten, the kind that make you feel ashamed to be human. The woman remained still, and the stillness made the whole scene even more unbearable. It was the stillness of someone who has learned that reacting can make things worse. The stillness of someone who has been here before.
Finally, my husband pushed his way through the crowd. He didn’t have the German for a confrontation like this, so he used English — loud, clear, unmistakable. I don’t know if the man understood the words, but he understood the tone. He understood the stance. He understood that someone was no longer willing to let him perform his cruelty unchecked.
And just like that, the man deflated. Not apologetic — cowards rarely are — but startled. He muttered something, avoided eye contact, and at the next stop, he got off the train. The doors closed behind him with that soft pneumatic sigh that felt, for once, like relief.
What stayed with me long after the man stepped off the train wasn’t only the ugliness of his words, but the way a piece of fabric became the pretext for his cruelty. A niqab, a scarf, a hood, a hat — it doesn’t matter. Clothing is never just clothing. It is a language, a signal, a story. And for some people, it becomes a target — a surface onto which they project their fears, their prejudices, their fantasies of cultural purity.
But this dynamic is not limited to Muslim women or to religious garments. Discrimination based on clothing touches many groups, each in different ways, and each revealing something about the anxieties of the society around them. A young man in a hoodie can be treated as a threat. A woman in a short skirt can be blamed for her own harassment. A queer teenager wearing nail polish or a pride pin can become a target for hostility. A Roma woman in a long skirt, a Sikh man wearing a turban, a Jewish man in a kippah, a goth teenager in black eyeliner, a construction worker in dusty work clothes — all of them can be read, misread, or punished for what they wear. The specifics differ, but the underlying mechanism is the same: Clothing becomes a pretext for policing who belongs, who is “acceptable,” who is allowed to move through public space without being challenged. And in every case, the responsibility to intervene — to refuse the normalization of humiliation — remains the same.
I strongly believe that no one should be harassed for wearing a niqab in Austria, just as I believe I shouldn’t be harassed if I were to travel to any country around the world and wear shorts. The difference, of course, is that I cannot wear shorts everywhere. Some societies impose restrictions on personal autonomy that make such a choice for a woman impossible. Austria, by contrast, is a place where adults can generally dress as they wish — a place that aspires to tolerance, even if that aspiration is never guaranteed and always vulnerable.
And this is where the conversation about tolerance becomes real for me. Not in policy documents, not in parliamentary debates, not in abstract discussions about “values,” but in the cramped space of a Friday afternoon train. Because tolerance is not something a country possesses once and for all. It is something that must be enacted, protected, and renewed — constantly, quietly, often inconveniently.
Austria is, in many ways, beautifully tolerant. That’s why I am grateful to live here and never seriously consider moving to a place where personal freedoms are more restricted. Even the country where I grew up, Serbia, struggles with certain issues more than Austria — for example, the rights and safety of sexual and gender minorities. And while Austria is not a perfect sanctuary, it is a place where adults can generally dress as they wish, love whom they wish, and believe what they wish. That matters. But it is also fragile. It can be strained by public rhetoric that amplifies fear, or by individuals who convince themselves that harassing a Muslim woman somehow protects their cultural identity. Tolerance is not a natural resource; it is a practice. And practices can erode.
What I was reminded of that day is that tolerance doesn’t live exclusively in policies and laws, but also lives in people. It lives in the choices we make when no one is watching, or when everyone is watching but no one is acting. It lives in the moment when someone decides that another person’s dignity is worth defending, even if they don’t share the same language. It lives in the refusal to let cruelty pass as normal.
It also lives in restraint — in the ability to say: I don’t understand your clothing, but I don’t need to. It’s not my business. In the humility to accept that other people’s choices do not require our approval to be legitimate. In the recognition that autonomy means nothing if it only applies to people who look like us, dress like us, or make the same choices we would make.
This is why I care so deeply about dress codes. Because they are never just about fabric. They are about who gets to feel safe in public. Who gets to exist without explanation. Who is allowed to move through the world without being treated as a provocation.
Austria, at its best, understands this. But “at its best” is not a guarantee. It is a responsibility — one that belongs to all of us. To speak up when someone is being humiliated. To refuse the easy comfort of silence. To protect the fragile, everyday conditions that make living together possible.
A society that cannot bear the sight of a woman in a niqab is not protecting its values; it is betraying them. We cannot know her circumstances — why she dresses this way, what it represents for her, or what burdens it carries. And even if we assume the worst-case scenario — a woman constrained by patriarchal expectations — harassing her in public spaces will not empower her. It will only reinforce her marginalization and may lead her to disengage from democratic systems that fail to embody their own principles.
My insistence that we must protect Muslims from harassment does not stem from an endorsement of their religion, nor from a disregard for the very real challenges surrounding migration and integration in Europe. It rests on a basic commitment to human dignity—one that does not vanish simply because the broader political landscape is complicated. I can see that the topic is layered. I can also see that the European Union is continually negotiating how to balance openness with cohesion, tolerance with boundaries, and cultural diversity with social stability. None of these questions have simple answers, and acknowledging their complexity does not diminish the urgency of preventing discrimination. If anything, it underscores how essential that commitment is.
What stayed with me most about this episode is the realization that tolerance is shaped by the smallest human gestures — fragile, fleeting, and yet powerful enough to shift the atmosphere inside a train carriage. It is the quiet courage of standing near someone who is being diminished. It is the humility to accept that we do not need to understand a person, or even agree with their choices, in order to defend their right to move through the world without fear. It is the discipline of refusing the easy slide into indifference, the refusal to let someone else’s humiliation become background noise.
And so I think back to that woman on the U1 — her stillness, her composure, her refusal to shrink even as someone tried to make her disappear. I think of the man who targeted her, and of the crowd that hesitated. I think of my husband’s voice cutting through the carriage, not because he was fearless, but because someone else was being made small. And I think of how quickly the air changed once someone finally stepped forward.
What happened that day was not heroic. It was not cinematic. It was simply necessary. And perhaps that is the point. The health of a society is measured not only by its laws, but by the instincts of its people — by whether they allow cruelty to settle or whether they interrupt it, even clumsily, even imperfectly.
The ability to live side by side — in difference, in disagreement, in mutual incomprehension — is not a national trait. It is a choice. A choice made again and again, in moments that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or frightening. A choice made on a crowded train, on an ordinary Friday, when no one expects anything of us except to look away.
What happened that day was brief. But its echo remains — a reminder that the world we inhabit is shaped, hour by hour, by the choices we make when the doors close and the train begins to move.
