Speaking Up
I plan to improve N&C by talking less. More links and quotations from the articles linked, and less of me commenting on them. That will be an improvement, right? Right.
There is this article in the Guardian about some reactions to David Bell’s speech to the Hansard Society in which he expressed some reservations about ‘faith’ schools.
The head of the government’s education watchdog prompted an angry reaction from Muslim leaders yesterday after claiming that the growth of Islamic faith schools posed a challenge to the coherence of British society. In a deliberate intervention criticised as “irresponsible” and “derogatory” by senior Muslim representatives, the chief inspector of schools David Bell claimed that a traditional Islamic education did not equip Muslim children for living in modern Britain.
The article goes on the cite three Muslims who disagree with Bell and one who agrees. Three seems like a smallish number to be called ‘Muslim leaders’ and ‘senior Muslim representatives.’ And then there is some vagueness in the very terms ‘leader’ and ‘senior representative’ in this context. Do the three people quoted lead and represent all Muslims? Does anyone? Or is that particular choice of nouns part of the habit of thinking and talking about Muslims as more of a single entity than other ‘groups’ or ‘communities’. Is it, for instance, a way of ignoring and obscuring the possible existence of Muslims who don’t like the idea of ‘faith’ schools, who share Bell’s reservations about the idea, and who aren’t entirely happy to have it thought that all Muslims want all Muslim children to go to faith schools? If so, wouldn’t that tend to reinforce the idea (surely already out there) that Muslims as a group are more eager to be, and to be seen as, Muslims-as-a-group? And also to be and to be seen as more keen on religious segregation than other groups are?
In other words is the article reporting on something? Or is it creating the something it aims to report on. Or both. Probably both. No doubt there is some anger about Bell’s speech, but the article could be doing its bit to create the impression that the anger is more universal than it is, merely by its choice of words. With, no doubt, the best of intentions. But I can so easily imagine being a Muslim who wanted to be a Muslim but also wanted to be various other things – call them what you like – modern, secular, urban, pluralist, universalist. Part of the world of comprehensive schools and public libraries and community centres and Citizens’ Advice Bureaus and the NHS; one to whom restriction to a smaller world of co-religionists would feel suffocating and limiting. I can so easily imagine feeling intensely exasperated if journalists always referred to the segregationist wing of my co-religionists as my leaders and representatives. ‘They’re not my damn leaders!’ I would want to shout. ‘I didn’t elect them, I didn’t nominate them, why are you calling them leaders and representatives? They’re just some people! They don’t speak for all of us!’
Well. That wasn’t a very good job of talking less, was it. I guess I’m not going to be very good at that.
One more. Letters to the Guardian about Ken Livingstone and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. From Ramzi Isalam of OutRage!
I fled to Britain to escape murder by Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria. Now I find the mayor of my adopted city embracing a cleric who provides theological justification for the homophobia of the people who wanted to kill me. Why is the mayor prepared to have a dialogue with fundamentalists like Dr Qaradawi and the Muslim Association of Britain, but not with liberal and progressive Muslims and not with the victims of Islamist repression and dictatorship?
Why indeed. And from Nadia Mahmood of Middle East Centre for Women’s Rights and Faz Velmi.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi may well condemn the September 11 attacks and the killing of hostages in Iraq. What he most certainly does not condemn is the fundamental political and social vision behind these atrocities – the project of establishing a theocratic state in which individual liberty and every trace of democracy are eliminated. Would the mayor embrace a Christian cleric who argued, as Dr Qaradawi does, that gay sex should be punishable by death, that wife-beating is sometimes justified and that the world is dominated by a Jewish conspiracy?
Would he indeed.
“…and less of me commenting on them. That will be an improvement, right?”
Nonsense. I have no opinions of my own and *rely* on you. Don’t touch a thing.
Fortunately I know you don’t mean it anyway and are just angling for reassurance so;
No! No! Ophelia please don’t talk less!!!
Feel better now?
OB ‘They’re not my damn leaders!’ I would want to shout. ‘I didn’t elect them, I didn’t nominate them, why are you calling them leaders and representatives? They’re just some people! They don’t speak for all of us!’
Yerrrse, as Jeremy Paxman might say. Further to that – an important point about the drama Yasmin was that she – like many Asian inpats, or 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation Asian/Brits – did’t give too much of a rat’s bum about her parents’ / grandparents’ faiths or their ‘church leaders’; it was just a matter of familial piety and obeisance (a learned behaviour rather than a ‘spiritual’ choice). It seemed a fair and accurate protrayal of contemporary urban existance. So who’s really representing whose interests ? By sheer logical inference a lot of these ‘represented’ people also go out and vote for town and district councillors as well as MPs, and at a push probably vote on Big Brother as well for all I know (The truth is so banal isn’t it – perhaps that’s part of the problem…). Whatever, they are UK citizens and happy that way. Furthermore, many of them want to be in Britain *because* it’s a secular place with a historic political will amongst the majority of its people for secular tolerance, and they have far more interesting things going on in their lives than to listen to a load of one-dimensional boring theocratic nonsense to boot. Of course the boring mundane reality doesn’t sell copy…
Keep up the good work, OB, remember, idle hands…
Argh! Last paragraph should read:
‘Furthermore using such terms as “modern”, “urban”, “pluralist” (which you do, there’s no need to define terminology at the point at which you do, you could have said “a Muslim who agrees with my perspective, perhaps. There will be those that do”) leads the argument into the territory which implicitly assumes the leaders and senior representatives who spoke out against the Chief Inspector of Schools are not modern, are not urban and are not pluralist.
This, of course, is insidious nonsense.’
Chris, no, really, I did mean it – there is a small but influential school of thought that N&C is the only bad thing on B&W, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I can accommodate it…without ignoring the other school of thought that seems to like N&C. That may be just flatly impossible, so I’ll probably just go on talking the usual amount.
(Anyway, thanks Joe and Chris!)
“unless you want to lead the argument into the territory which implicitly assumes the leaders and senior representatives who spoke out against the Chief Inspector of Schools are not modern, are not urban and are not pluralist.”
Yeah, you have a point there. I was being a little vague in that bit. Should have added a clause saying something like ‘and who worry that, for instance, those values or preferences are not compatible with Islamic or indeed any other explicitly religious education, or that they are in tension with separatist forms of education, and the like.’
N&C is the first section of B&W I read upon every visit! Pleae, do not deprive me of your prose.
Amy, okay! I guess I’ll just have to put up with the N&C-hatred of the small but influential school of thought.
True; that’s an assumption; re-phrase it as a question then. Do these leaders and representatives take polls? Do the journalists who ask for their opinion ask them if they’ve taken polls?
I’m not suggesting that Naseem and Sacranie don’t know what they’re talking about; that’s not my point; my point is about journalism, not about the people journalism phones up.
N&C, just like ‘Jerry Springer – the opera’, can be used or not used – there’s a choice. If people don’t like it they can ignore it.
And thanks for the link to the whole speech about citizenship. Makes one realise as ever that a lot of good stuff has been ignored by the hacks in the meeja for the sake of a rabble-rousing headline.