Author: Ophelia Benson

A reader sent me the link to this interesting item in the Guardian. The subhead starts things right off – ‘Colonial attitudes linger, finding their most xenophobic expression among liberal defenders of free speech.’ Uh oh.

The argument is basically a ‘taboo’ argument. Every culture has some sacred things, which should be beyond criticism, and certainly beyond mockery. In the UK, it’s the Queen that’s sacred; all cultures have ’em.

Neither is rationalism alien to eastern cultures. Science and mathematics thrived both in the great age of Hindu civilisation and Islamic ascendancy. Eastern cultures have long traditions of theatre, reform movements and of absorbing criticism. But when a creative work offends the sacred, it loses its message.

Well, that’s debatable.

Sikhism believes that the rational is as speculative, variable and subjective as any other construction of belief. From that philosophical premise, the sacred cannot be dismissed. Jacques Derrida similarly analyses the subjectivity of rationalism. Further, Sikhism holds that language is limited. The Guru Granth Sahib uses several tools of communication including poetry, music and pragmatic symbolism. Again, a 20th-century western philosopher – Foucault – has also articulated the limits of language.

And therefore ‘Behzti’ had to be stopped? Not sure I get the connection.

The sacred may not make sense in the constructed paradigms of rationalism, but it sustains people through traumatic times, as well as giving strength to the successful. Offending the sacred wounds those whose hopes and culture are orientated around the subjective inscrutability of sacred icons. Fifty years after the end of colonialism, most British people are comfortable living with people of different colours. But many are still uncomfortable with different cultures. The legacy of colonialism lingers, now disguised as a defence of “free speech”. Ironically, it finds its most xenophobic expression among liberals.

What if the defence of free speech is actually not disguised colonialism but in fact a defence of free speech? How can you be sure it’s the one rather than the other? Are you sure you can tell the difference? Or are you in fact using the dread phrase ‘legacy of colonialism’ as an intimidation-device.

Now if you want to see someone else, this time a ‘Westerner,’ take on the dratted old legacy of colonialism, here’s a fun item. It’s at Salon, so that means clicking through an ad, but it’s worth it. The item you get is really quite staggering. This link was also sent by a reader. The item is an advice column, the question is from a guy in love with a woman who can’t bring herself to introduce him to her family because he’s not of the right religion or ethnic background. The columnist pins his ears back. The columnist gives that man what for. The columnist is a piece of work.

Consider how you have been indoctrinated since birth in a secular, scientific, cosmopolitan faith. Cosmopolitanism teaches us to be broad and accepting, but it’s easiest to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. When the other seems genuinely narrow and parochial, we see that narrowness and parochialism as a barrier to some other higher, truer reality — our Western reality.

Very true. It is easier to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. I’ve noticed that myself. Similarly it’s easier to be kind to people who are also kind, and polite to people who are also polite, and considerate of people who are also considerate. In a like manner it’s easier to be a pissy rotten bastard to people who are also pissy rotten bastards.

In order to see things a little differently, try to imagine that she is not being held prisoner by a narrow-minded family and culture but rather is struggling to preserve her identity against the onslaught of your intoxicating Western-ness, your powerful banjo of I, your hypnotic gaze, your KitchenAid mixer of desire and promise, your Cadillac and your Camels, your plantations and riding mowers and frontier hats, the echo of imperial riches in your thick, sweet voice, your arrogant swagger…

Wha…? Cadillac? Plantations?? The guy didn’t mention any Cadillac or riding mowers, let alone any plantations. I like purple writing now and then, if it’s done well, but there is a limit.

For the sake of argument, consider how innocently our genocidal forefathers went about curing the world of its savagery, and consider how harshly they later were judged. Consider how with progressively fine gradations each generation codifies its righteousness. Consider even the possibility that you may be in fact a wretched criminal in the eyes of history…You don’t need to lie to yourselves or to anyone else. If you do the hard work of accepting how closely she, her family and her culture are knitted together in one collective, diffused identity, you may come to feel a little differently about what we in the West revere as “telling the truth.”

Aaarrrggghhh! The kind reader who sent the item said this: ‘I’ve been enjoying b&w on and off for a while now. I made the mistake of reading this, was completely deflated with revulsion – and thought “what would Ophelia Benson think?”‘ Well, that’s what I think – a loud guttural inarticulate scream of disgust, that’s what.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as a legacy of colonialism, or that I think ‘Westerners’ are never arrogant or intolerant. But – oh well. You get the idea.

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.

I had a thought earlier today [medium close-up of Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey after Hacker has told him he’s just had an idea – expression of delighted surprise: ‘Prime Minister!’]. Yes very funny; anyway, I had this thought.

A bit from Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah:

Amiri was the first Muslim woman I contacted in Paris, and she cried as we spoke on the telephone. That day she had received an e-mail saying, “Do you realize what you are doing to your own people?” It was, she told me, one of many threatening messages she had received, and they were not to be taken lightly.

The thought was just about the meaning of that phrase – ‘your own people.’ Specifically of ‘your own.’ I mentioned that the other day – the way ‘own’ can be used as a bit of rhetorical manipulation or coercion. It’s one of a long list of words that get used that way. ‘Community’ is one of the most popular right now, and ‘own’ is another way of saying ‘community.’ At least the way it’s used there it is. Your own people=your community – and don’t you forget it. Right? That’s the point, right? Choose this community, be loyal to this particular set of people, and not any of the other possibilities.

But there’s more than one community, and more than one ‘own.’ There are usually lots – especially for people who’ve had some education – which is one of many compelling reasons why everyone should have as much education as possible, throughout life: to keep increasing the number of possible communities. (Of course, that’s scary. I realize that. The more communities there are, the less mandatory any one community will be. The more there are, the freer we are to go from one to another, to belong to several, or many, to choose our allegiances with due deliberation, to leave if we want to. And that’s scary for communities and own people who don’t want to lose members, who don’t want to be left looking forlorn and unwanted because everyone has run off to the disco. That’s always been the threat of education. But there it is. That doesn’t mean good progressives should agree to limit access to education in order to keep people in the communities they were born into.) One’s own people may be other people interested in politics or science or movies or popular music or mountaineering, rather than or in addition to being people of the same religion or ‘ethnic’ background as oneself. But the assumption in that email is that there is only one meaning of ‘your own people.’

One way to force people to choose one ‘own people’ instead of others is via hostility. Start the Week had an interesting discussion of that last week, in talking about the movie ‘Yasmin.’ Someone pointed out that al Qaeda got what it wanted: it shoved a lot of Muslims back into the mosque because of the hostility towards them that September 11 triggered. Yeah. Victimization can work that way. People who could escape, or widen their horizons without escaping, may choose not to because they want to be loyal to people who are not being fairly treated. A good thing to do; an admirable, touching, moving thing to do. But also a very sad one. It would be better if the choice were not forced by such considerations, especially for the people whose decision to stay amounts to a kind of self-imprisonment.

Here’s a good passage. Not apropos of anything in particular, I just happened to read it and I liked it so thought I would pass it on. It’s from Three Seductive Ideas, by Jerome Kagan, page 44.

Some scientists are uncomfortable with this level of uncertainty because they seek facts that are unlikely to be proven wrong. They resemble hunters who, having trapped a secret of nature, want it to stay fixed on the trophy wall forever. Other scientists are chess players who derive joy from following the many complex rules for doing science – the correct assignment of subjects, the proper balancing of conditions, the most appropriate statistical analyses. Those who are butterfly chasers – a third group – are willing to work years for an aesthetic moment that follows a discovery, no matter how infrequent or transient. These investigators accept the temporary nature of all scientific generalizations and are bothered least by the message ‘maybe.’