Author: Ophelia Benson

The Guardian on Dilpazier Aslam and his critics, part 2. Scott Burgess pointed out this article by Shiv Malik in the New Statesman.

What readers of the Guardian were not told was that Aslam is a member of the extreme Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir. Though it publicly dissociates itself from violence, Hizb ut-Tahrir is shunned by most British Muslims and banned from many mosques…My strongly held view is that members of such a group should not be allowed to write on this subject in the national press (just as the British National Party, which also claims to be non-violent, is very rarely given space), but if they do their connection should be made clear, preferably at the beginning of the article.

Seems reasonable. Let’s not ask the BNP to write think pieces, and let’s not ask Hizb ut-Tahrir either – and if we do ask them, let’s sure as hell make sure we say what their affiliation is, as opposed to keeping it a secret from the readers. But apparently the Guardian didn’t think it seemed reasonable at all at all.

How had it come about that this Guardian journalist was reporting and commenting on such events without his background being made known to readers? When I raised this with the paper, it confirmed that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir but would only say the matter was “under review”…When I approached the Guardian again, it accused me of being “irresponsible in the extreme” and said it had complained to the editor of the Independent on Sunday. As for the key questions, it said only: “This is an internal matter which is currently under review and we have nothing further to add.”

The Guardian accused Malik of being irresponsible. That’s rich.

Just last Monday the responsible Guardian reported on a Hizb ut-Tahrir conference. It did a remarkable job of it.

Tony Blair is fomenting anger and frustration in the Muslim communities by branding widely held Islamic ideas as extremist, a conference was told yesterday…”After the bombs on July 7, before the dust had settled, before the dead were removed, before any investigation, the British prime minister was pointing an accusing finger at the Muslim community.”

Yeah right. I remember that – there was Blair at Gleneagles, pointing his finger, saying ‘The Muslim community did this.’ Uh huh.

“But, regardless of the amount of provocation, we need to stand firm with our Islamic principles. The problem is more than violence. The problem is an idea that you and I carry.” Those ideas, he said, included living under sharia law within a caliphate of Islamic countries, opposing the “corrupt and dictatorial” regimes in the Middle East and central Asia and resisting occupation of Muslim lands. “According to the logic of Blair and Bush, this is terrorism.” Hizb ut-Tahrir, he said, had been banned across the Muslim world for its political radicalism.

Note the ‘living under sharia law within a caliphate of Islamic countries’ bit – what that means, of course, is not just ‘living’ under sharia law, but imposing it on everyone with the misfortune to be living within the borders of that caliphate. Just imagine how pleased and excited we would all be if the House of Commons or Congress suddenly up and established sharia as the law of the land. Well, guess what, people living in Nigeria or Pakistan or Indonesia or the Philippines or Iran or Egypt don’t all automatically want to live under sharia just by an accident of geography. As a matter of fact a lot of people in those places loathe and detest the very idea. They prefer basic human rights and secular law, oddly enough.

So that article looks depressingly peculiar and sinister in the Guardian. Would it report on a BNP conference in the same bland, neutral, anodyne tone? Have they ever reported on the BNP in such a tone?

Allen Esterson gave a link in comments to this article by Dilpazier Aslam from last January on ‘a Muslim school.’

This is Manchester Islamic high school for girls, one of the 107 independent Muslim schools criticised last week by the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, for educating pupils “with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society”…Next it is year 10 biology with Saduf Chaudhri, and the lesson is about drugs…”Why can’t you take drugs? From your own point of view, because, remember, you are Muslim,” says Chaudhri.

How’s that again? From your own point of view because you are a Muslim? That’s a contradiction, isn’t it? ‘Because you are a Muslim’ means something like ‘what is the rule on this for Muslims’ or ‘what does the Koran say on this’ – which is hardly the same thing as ‘from your own point of view.’

“Because you’re not meant to do anything that harms your body, because it’s not our body,” says one of the girls. Chaudhri flicks the overhead projection on; it’s a list of verses from the Qur’an. She reads aloud. “O you who believe. Intoxicants and gambling, [dedication of] stones, and [divination by] arrows, are an abomination – of Satan’s handwork: reject such [abomination], that you may prosper.” The girls are reminded that, not only are drugs bad for your health, they’re also bad for the next life.

Ah – bad for the next life. In other words the girls are reminded of something that is not true. They think their bodies are not their bodies, and that there is a next life which things can be bad for, and that there’s someone called Satan. Yeah, that’s what happens in religious schools, I realize that. But I don’t think it should be treated as just ordinary and acceptable and reasonable. Fairy tales are fairy tales, and they shouldn’t be taught to students as if they were true.

Remember that peculiar article in the Guardian after it fired Dilpazier Aslam? It was two weeks ago now, but I want to mumble a few belated words.

Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.

That’s peculiar stuff. There were leftwing bloggers not from the US who criticized Aslam. And why call it ‘targeting’? (To make it sound illegitimate, that’s why.) And ‘did not care for’ is a silly way to characterize the issue. And what is this ‘obsessively personalised attacks’ business? It was disagreement and criticism; it was neither obsessive, nor any more personalised than any other disagreement with and criticism of a particular commenter is, and it was not an attack. So what’s up with all the rhetoric?

These ravings were posted alongside more legitimate questions as to whether a newspaper should employ a reporter who belongs to a controversial political group linked to the promotion of anti-semitic views. Aslam’s comment piece…did not mention that the author was a member of the radical but non-violent Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, proscribed in Germany and Holland as anti-semitic.

There it is again – that word ‘radical’. Along with ‘controversial,’ which is an anodyne way of describing Hizb ut-Tahrir. That’s one reason I want to mumble a few words. I think the Guardian has that problem I mentioned the other day, about getting all confused when the word ‘radical’ turns up. Yeah, Hizb ut-Tahrir is radical, but not in the way Greens or socialists are radical. It looks to me as if the Guardian kind of thought they were. You know – angry, militant, activist, radical, sassy, boat-rocking – it’s all kind of the same thing. Well – no.

Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian…

Spends his time indoors?? Oh, come on…

Indoors-staying Burgess quotes from Private Eye’s take on the Guardian’s silly-looking hissy fit.

Nothing in the brief Guardian career of Dilpazier Aslam – even the “exclusive interview” he conducted back in March with Shabina Begum, the girl whose legal fight to wear the jilbab was backed by Hizb-ut-Tahir, the same radical group of which he himself was a member – became him like the leaving of it. When the paper belatedly decided on 22 July that his ‘continuing membership of the organisation was incompatible with his continued employment by the company’, it was not without a last shriek of defiance on its website. A lengthy rant claimed that ‘right-wing bloggers in the US were behind the targeting’ of Mr Aslam, pointing out that ‘the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed’, before mounting one of its own, on ‘Scott Burgess, a blogger who spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian’. And who was the author of this piece which sneered at bloggers for their anonymity and the speed at which they rushed to judgement on the net? ‘A staff reporter’.

The thing that Scott Burgess reports that I didn’t know, however, is that the ‘staff reporter’ byline is unusual – very unusual. I wondered about it – I certainly noticed it, because as soon as I started reading that truly ridiculous article, I wanted to know what buffoon had perpetrated it, and was a bit staggered to be unable to – but I didn’t realize how unusual it was.

In fact, a search of the Guardian archives indicates that, within the last 3 years, a total of only three stories have been published completely without attribution. Two of these involved memorial services for individuals associated with the newspaper, and one was filed from Zimbabwe by a reporter with very good reasons for anonymity.

Not the Guardian’s finest hour.

Disability studies has hit town. Actually it did that a longish time ago – this reporter may be a little behind the times. I noticed a new ‘Disability studies’ section in the University bookstore several years ago, and there are jokes about the subject in the Dictionary, which we started writing three years ago.

Now disabled people have gotten into the business of problematizing: Disability studies has arrived in academia. Of course, the medical study of disability is long-standing, but the new approach establishes an interdisciplinary field on the model of women’s, queer, and ethnic studies…”Disability studies is us looking out at the world and seeing how that looks to us.” It also critiques “how disability is represented in all kinds of texts—in literature, film, the annals of history.”

Should I be polite and serious and respectful and say I think that sounds like a good idea? But I don’t. I think it’s boring and scab-picky and whiney and trendy and tiresome.

For the past two years, Columbia has hosted a monthly seminar for area faculty and grad students. Organized by Linton and colleagues, its topics range from disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies. Just last May, the field was officially recognized as a division by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

That’s quite a range! From disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies – it’s breathtaking in its scope. And the MLA has recognized it as a division – well no wonder I don’t feel polite and respectful. If it were sociology or history, I might be, but just yet another branch of literary Theory? Er – no thanks.

Disability scholars aim to revolutionize the way disability is imagined in our culture. Rather than pathologizing individuals, they ask how society accommodates different bodies (or doesn’t). Disability, they point out, highlights the dynamic nature of identity itself: Entry into the disabled community could be a matter of an overlooked stop sign or the emergence of a lurking gene.

Cackle! Yeah, I suppose it could. Kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone – you overlook a stop sign and – run over three pedestrians, and the next thing you know, You Have Entered The Disabled Community.

The what? What community? Why is that a ‘community’? Well we know why – the MLA has just said – because there are studies programs, that’s why. If there are studies, there’s a community. Don’t fret that it seems kind of insulting and stupid and oversimplifying to assume that everyone who has some sort of ‘disability’ therefore belongs to a ‘community’ of people with some sort of disability – it may seem that way but really it’s a Liberation Movement. Or something.

Anyone who’s taken a women’s studies class or read Edward Said will be familiar with the terms of the field. The study of disability, like that of gender, race, and sexual orientation, is rooted in bodies perceived as “other.” All of these disciplines use the language of critical theory—Foucault, with his interrogations of power, the body, and pathology, is big in disability studies. And these related fields can cross-pollinate. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who teaches in the women’s studies department at Emory University, promotes the integration of feminist and disability studies.

Doesn’t that sound exciting! Doesn’t that just sound like a stimulating cross-pollinated field? I’m tempted to enroll at Emory right now, so that I can learn why feminists are disabled and disabled people are feminists and all of them will be saved by the language of critical theory.

Although disability has fruitfully integrated with other identity studies, the field has not always received a warm welcome. Alison Kafer, who teaches feminist and disability studies at Southwestern University, attributes resistance in part to funding, but on a deeper level, she notes that “women and queers and people of color have often been cast as sick. That’s how discrimination was justified.” Now those minorities are saying, “You know what—we’re not sick,” and they shun association with people still seen as defective. The ambivalence is mutual; some disability scholars want to jump from what they see as the sinking ship of identity studies. As University of Illinois at Chicago’s Lennard J. Davis pointed out in a 2004 conference paper, “We are in a twilight of the gods of identity politics, and there is no Richard Wagner to make that crepuscular moment seem nostalgic and tragic.” So disability studies has arrived, but is it too late?

Oh, I do so hope so. I do so hope identity politics and especially identity studies are on a sinking ship. I do so hope scab-picking will at last go out of fashion and people can go on to something better.

But institutionalization may not be the primary goal. As Garland-Thomson says, “We don’t necessarily need people majoring or minoring in disability studies. We need to create a system in which educated people have it as a category of understanding.” She observes that many canonical literary works have a neglected disability aspect: Ahab in Moby Dick is an amputee, Shakespeare’s Richard III is a hunchback…In studying literature—or any subject—disability is simply an additional lens at our disposal.

Yes but – so what? So the hell what? Many ‘canonical’ literary works have people with hair, too; many have people who walk around; many have food; many have travel; many have characters wearing clothes. So what? Does that mean there have to be hair and walking around and food and travel and clothes studies? What do people see through the ‘additional lens’ of disability? Especially, what do they see that requires a new division in the MLA, or section in the bookstore?

Exciting scholarship is being generated. Last March’s issue of the PMLA (the MLA’s publication) featured papers from a recent MLA conference, including “Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography” and “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies.”

Exciting? Exciting? Hoo-boy.Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow needs to get out more, or do I mean less.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education has an article about criticisms and criticisms of criticisms of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s hard to tell without reading a great many academic blog posts (I read part of one and decided that was more than enough of that), but it all seems to have a whiff of self-righteous orthodoxy-sniffing about it. But since I haven’t actually read all those academic blog posts, I could be wrong about that. But in any case, Jaschik turned up one comment – by a commenter at Crooked Timber – that sounds like exactly the kind of thought that started B&W on its erratic but dogged course.

Both Savage Minds pieces seem to exhibit one of the worst tics of the academic left — a tendency to evaluate arguments exclusively with reference to whether or not they might, in some distorted form, serve the rhetorical purposes of one’s political opponents. It’s exactly the same approach to debate you find coming from the most thuggish members of the war party – whole lines of argument (e.g., Do our actions lead to more terrorism?) are ruled out from the start on the grounds that they stray too close to the other side’s manner of thinking. What is so depressing about this approach isn’t just that it’s bad scholarship. It’s that it rests on a complete misunderstanding of the point of scholarship, or at least a refusal to see arguments as anything rhetorical strategies.

So I felt like preserving that comment.