Author: Ophelia Benson

You should listen to Radio 4’s Inside a Muslim School . It’s rather horrible.

It’s about a very small school in Blackburn, mostly girls with a few boys in the primary grades. The headteacher (who is a man) explains the dress code:

According to the Islamic principle, women should not show their hair. So if the hair is not covered properly, then we will ask them to do so. That’s why they have to wear scarves.

And outdoors, ‘veils’ as well, we find out later – although a lot of girls don’t. But right off the bat they get this nasty, creepy, prying, domineering, bordering on prurient stuff of a Boss Man telling little girls that their nasty dangerous hair is showing, and to cover it ‘properly’. I don’t think that’s good for the way they think about themselves.

We hear a recitation in Arabic, and a lesson in which a teacher tells the students what the Koran thinks of homosexuality (it’s against it), and a teacher telling the credulous reporter that of course the students are taught to ‘question’ everything. Oh yes? Such as why anyone should care what the Koran thinks of homosexuality, or why the headteacher has nothing better to do than tell young girls he can see their hair?

The head says something interesting:

The only restriction is that, because of the Islamic principle, I can’t be very open with my female staff, like you would in any other school.

Oh is that all. The only restriction – as if that’s a small thing. As if it’s a minor point, that relations between adults who work together should be so warped and impoverished by ‘the Islamic principle’ – or what it’s taken to be. As if the free unafraid between-equals open interaction between adults were not one of the best aspects of modern life.

Mind you, he does at least notice it, and think of it as a restriction. But the school is all about restriction – that seems to be the point. There’s more to Islam than that, but you’d never know it.

The credulous reporter does point out that the school is not well-equipped, that there is no science lab and that ‘the school regards music as unIslamic’ (another pretty, enriching thought). And there’s a very interesting bit where she talks to a girl who left and went to a state school to do A-levels. She did not like al-Islah, and she loved the state school. But al-Islah was a friendly place, wasn’t it, the reporter urges – warm, safe? Safe, yeh, the girl said – and you could hear the thought ‘safe and suffocating, safe like a shroud’. But she didn’t like it, no. She wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

And one can easily tell why, throughout the show. It’s that creepy note of suspicion, of over-supervision, of surveillance as Lucy Snowe disdainfully calls it in Villette, of coercion and overprotection, of more concern with ‘Islamic principle’ than with intellect.

Another girl says they were taught they were Muslim first, and she doesn’t want to be taught that. ‘I’m a human first,’ she says – and one wants to cheer, and give her a full scholarship to Cambridge. Her mother is Muslim, but she never taught her they were Muslims first.

That’s the problem* with ‘faith schools,’ isn’t it: that’s what they teach. The credulous reporter keeps using the maddening phrase, too – ‘faith school’ this and ‘faith school’ that. She also refers to state school as a place where there are people of all different faiths. Period. As if there were no people of zero ‘faiths’ in the UK. I thought it was only in the US that people assumed that, but apparently not.

*Well, one of the problems.

This question does keep coming up. And up, and up. When is free speech free speech and when is it incitement to murder? (That’s only one version of the question, of course. It can be phrased other ways. When is free speech protected as such and when is it not because it is incitement to violence? That’s another version. There are more.)

Scott Jaschik has an article at Inside Higher Ed where the question seems to be in play, although it’s not absolutely clear whether the people involved in the matter actually phrased it that way. It’s also not clear whether that was avoidance or just lack of clarity – confusion, in short.

An adjunct English instructor at Warren Community College in New Jersey resigned a few days ago, after an email he sent to a student who was organizing a pro-war lecture set off a controversy.

Daly’s e-mail said that “real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people’s needs.” He also wrote to the student, head of the campus chapter of Young America’s Foundation, that “I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won’t dare show their face on a college campus.”

Stark enough. Does saying ‘real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors’ constitute free speech – protected, protectable free speech – or does it constitute advocacy of murder? Or are the two the same? Ought advocacy of murder – in certain circumstances, or in any and all circumstances – to be considered free speech and protected as such? And does saying ‘until groups like yours won’t dare show their face’ constitute a threat, or is it clear that he means ‘dare’ in the sense of ‘for fear of shame and embarrassment’ rather than ‘for fear of being attacked’?

In interviews conducted as conservative groups organized a campaign to have him fired, Daly stood by the substance of his e-mail…But Daly said that since she had sent her e-mail from a personal account, and he had replied from a personal account, there was no reason for the college to be involved. He also said in an interview on Sunday that he was not advocating a literal revolt by soldiers, and that he would have replied with a different tone had he realized he was communicating with a student.

Enter mitigating circumstances. He thought he was sending a personal email. Casual conversation is subject to different norms from publication. On the other hand email to strangers perhaps falls somewhere between those two categories. Or perhaps not. Using threatening language to a stranger is different from using it to a friend; whether or not the threat applies to a third party also changes things; whether the more clearly threatening language applies to a distant third party while the more ambiguous language applies to a group that the stranger belongs to, also changes things. Complicated, isn’t it. As the president of WCC said.

Austin called the First Amendment “the most precious freedom all Americans share,” and said that he was “committed to working unceasingly” to protect the freedom of speech of students and faculty members at the college. But he said that he also had an obligation to enforce state laws and college policies “to ensure that all members of our college are free and encouraged to exercise their right to free speech without fear of intimidation or retaliation.”

There seems to be a real knot here, one that it’s hard to cut through. Daly seems to be in trouble (and hence to have resigned his job) merely for something he said in what he thought was a personal email. But the wording of his email was at least arguably somewhat intimidating, and intimidation is not a trivial matter. (Ask any civil rights worker or union organizer.) Threats and intimidation are where free speech law and practice and theory get very, very tricky.

Who’s Deborah Solomon? I don’t know, apart from the fact that she writes for that monument to mediocrity, the New York Times. She says dumb things in this article on Lynne Truss’s new book on rudeness.

To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to “republican manners” and promptly did away with titles.

Manners evoke visions of hoity-toity hierarchies, of earls and dukes, of kneeling and curtsying? What is she, an idiot? What’s kneeling got to do with anything? What have dukes? Manners is about things like not pushing in front of people, not grabbing things, not making a noise when people are asleep or studying nearby, being grateful when people do something kind, doing something kind yourself now and then, helping people when they need help – it’s about being considerate, and attentive, and observant, and kind, and helpful, as opposed to being selfish and mean and careless and greedy. Dukes and kneeling are neither here nor there. It’s imbecilic to think they are.

In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60’s, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post’s book of etiquette.

What belief? What belief? What belief? What cretin ever believed that? Manners don’t reinforce social inequalities – low wages reinforce social inequalities, along with signs saying ‘Whites Only’ and landlords who don’t rent to coloureds and people who go out on Mississippi back roads at night with guns. Does Deborah Solomon think racial segregation and union-busting are now or have ever been carried on in a polite manner? Does she think the goons who beat up the Reuther brothers did it in a ducal manner? Does she think the white people who expected black people to yield the sidewalk to them were polite about it? Does she think the white folks were polite to Rosa Parks that day? What can she be talking about?

But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled “Seduced by Civility,” the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn’t rather live with incivility – with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters – than with inequality?

Eh…what? Those are the choices? Those are the only alternatives? You can have civility, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. The one displaces the other. Kind of like the way you can be on top of Mt Everest or you can be in Fulham but you can’t be in both places. But – why would that be? Why would it be at all, even a little bit? Why would it be even microscopically true? Why wouldn’t it in fact be the opposite of the truth? Why isn’t it far more likely that equality goes with the idea that everyone should be treated politely, not just the rich or the white or the elaborately-dressed? Because…the same idea works if everyone is treated rudely? Is that it? Is that the idea? If so, it’s a hateful idea. To repeat – manners aren’t just some posh frill, they’re not about spoons, they’re about treating people decently. They’re basic. Arguably the same idea is behind manners as is behind equality – simply that people should be treated decently. Treating people badly on principle is not a good plan; I’m against it.

In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo.

Forgoing social analysis. Of the kind you just did? That kind of social anlysis? Gee, I wonder why.

And finally – as she winds things up – the coup de grâce.

For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people?

How true! How true, how wise, how deep. What, indeed, are manners, anyhow, but a way of shoving people back as hard as you can. Yes sir. The way to pull people close to you and give them a great big fuzzy hug is to run over them as they cross the street, push them when you want to get past, elbow them aside when you’re in a hurry, park your car in the middle of the sidewalk and then laugh when they fall down as they try to maneuver around it in the ice and snow, blow smoke in their faces, bump into them in crowded shops and then call them names for being in your way – and so on. Yes indeed – there’s intimacy for you, there’s closeness and trust and narrowing the spaces between people.

I tell you what – I just crossed Deborah Solomon’s name off the guest list for my next dinner party. Thank you.