Author: Ophelia Benson

This sounds like a fun moment, doesn’t it? An East End Sainsbury’s, staffed mostly by Bangladeshis.

A young Asian checkout operator, with pious beard and a crocheted Kufi Muslim skullcap, made a big deal out of serving a middle-aged white man who had included a bottle of vodka in his groceries. His wasn’t a discreet arm wave for the attention of a supervisor, it was a full-on hissy fit. At the sight of the vodka bottle he reared from his seat as if the conveyer had presented a freshly slaughtered pig’s head….The customer…was having none of it though. “What the bleedin’ ‘ell are you working in a supermarket for if you won’t handle booze?” he shouted, setting the queue to Defcon Two on the London racial tension scale…The hothead till worker’s protest was more testosterone than Taliban but he succeeded in making his point, loudly, in front of 18 female Muslim staff who won’t let their religion bother their job.

More testosterone than Taliban…that’s an interesting way of putting it. I have a feeling that’s a distinction without a difference. Taliban is testosterone, and vice versa. Taliban is all about men bullying women and telling them what to do and telling them they’re filthy and sexual and shameful, defective and wrong and above all subordinate – above all subject to being told what to do by anyone and everyone except themselves. The very first thing Islamists do when they get power is to start telling women what to do. They give one a nasty sense of the world being full of men wandering around fuming at how out of control women are.

Sainsbury’s, “keen to accommodate the religious beliefs of all staff”, now allows Muslim workers who object to alcohol on religious grounds to have a colleague take their place. The company didn’t see that such cack-handed posturing does Islam no favours, reinforcing a perception of an intolerant and unbending religion, which is not, I believe, where the majority of British Muslims are. Worse still is the atmosphere it creates within its own workforce. The craven attitude of Sainsbury’s creates a space the religious fanatics will use to bully their mostly female fellow workers, arguing they are not good Muslims if they choose to serve alcohol when they have the option not to.

Why isn’t Sainsbury’s keen to accomodate the religious or non-religious beliefs of people who want to buy one of the items on sale without any hassle or delay or display of shock-horror from some self-righteous bully at the till? And at that rate, what next? Muslim clerks in Waterstone’s allowed to refuse to sell atheist books or books by women or gays? Bus drivers allowed to refuse to let women on the buses? Muslim teachers in state schools allowed to refuse to teach girls?

Women women women – gotta keep them down, you know. If you don’t – sooner or later, they get up, and that won’t do.

Make sure they don’t go to school, and do it by threatening or killing them.

Buildings of two girls schools in the Kabal area of Swat were damaged by a powerful blast on the night of September 29th. Witnesses told Dawn that militants, who have been targeting women’s educational institutions for a couple of weeks, had planted an explosive device in the Government Girls’ High School…Recently, a string of explosions damaged some schools, including the Government Girls’ High School in Matta and the Government Girls Primary School in the Bedara area. An explosive device planted in the Government Girls High School in Qambar was defused by police a few days ago. Students of girls schools are in a state of fear and in some cases people have stopped sending their daughters to schools.

Kill the women who try to teach them, too – kill two birds with one stone. Haw haw haw, that’s a good one! Two birds, geddit? Two birds; killed; haw.

Almost all the girl schools at Lakaro sub-division of Mohmand Agency remained closed on Monday after the killing of one lady teacher by unknown miscreants and inability of the political administration to provide security to women staffers in the wake of threats to them…Some ten days ago the girl schools in Lakaro had received threatening letters from local Taliban warning them to avoid coming to school. Later, they were asked to perform their duties clad in Burqas. Majority of the teachers stopped performing their duties and the schools remained closed…However, the political authorities ignored the threats and avoided taking security measures for protection of the female teachers, which resulted in the tragic killing of one teacher, Khatoon Bibi, resident of Utmanzai, Charsadda.

Khatoon Bibi. Another martyr for education and women’s access to education. There are a lot of them. I hate the word ‘martyr’ because of all the revolting slobber about ‘martyrs’ who murder random people in buses and restaurants; but murdered teachers are genuine martyrs. We’ll miss you, Khatoon Bibi; the girls of Utmanzai and Ghazi Beg will miss you.

Hundreds of women staged a protest in front of the agency education office in Mohmand Agency headquarters Ghalanai on Monday against the threats received by female teachers in the area…The boycott of women teachers meant many schools in Safi, Haleemzai, and Khuvezai tehsils were closed…The administrations of eight schools in Aka Maroof and Sartilgram union councils have closed their schools for an indefinite period following a bomb attack on a girls’ higher secondary school in the Kabal area of Swat…Separately, around 100 people carrying weapons marched in Kabal bazaar and forcibly entered houses to bar residents from playing music. They warned the residents not to play music or they would break their television sets, radios and music players. They asked the residents to cooperate in rooting out “obscenity” from the area.

And since they were carrying weapons, I don’t suppose the residents felt able to reply ‘If rooting obscenity out of the area is your goal, obviously the first (and last) thing you should do is to remove yourselves.’

How very liberal.

Islam does judge actions. It tells Muslims that homosexuality is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that killing is wrong and that judging others is also wrong. But nowhere does it say that a homosexual or a thief or a murderer should be treated as anything less than a human being. What Muslims have done is mix the Islamic condemnation of actions with the person who has carried them out. This creates hatred and animosity – two feelings that Islam condemns.

Homosexuality is ‘wrong’ the way stealing is wrong and killing is wrong, because Islam ‘tells Muslims’ so. If Islam ‘tells Muslims’ that eating peaches, watching sunsets, sneezing, and reading poetry are wrong, will that mean they are wrong? Is it possible to have better reasons for thinking something is either wrong or not wrong than the fact that Islam ‘tells Muslims’ so? Would it be helpful if something told Abdurrahman al-Shayyal that treating homosexuality as comparable to murder is wrong? Would it be useful if something gave him the idea that command morality is only as good as the commands are?