Author: Ophelia Benson

What was that I was saying only a day or two ago about smelly little orthodoxies and the hijab? This article from the BBC certainly gives a good illustration of what I mean. Two mentions of Muslim opposition to the ban, and no mentions at all of Muslim support for the ban. If you don’t already know a little about the subject, and read that article, you’ll be left with the impression that Muslims who have any opinion on the matter are opposed. But that is simply not true. Forty percent of Muslim women support the ban, according to news reports I’ve seen.

Most of France’s political parties, and around 70% of the population, support the ban which some Muslim leaders say risks being perceived as intolerant…Some French MPs, backed by Muslim leaders and rights groups, have warned that the new law could be seen as intolerant and undermine the integration of France’s Muslims. They say young Muslim women are being forced to wear the headscarf, though the few hundred who have turned out for demonstrations against the new law say they wear it of their own free will. Many governments and human rights groups have criticised the bill – including the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the US-based advisory group, the Commission on International Religious Freedom.

That’s it, those are all the places the word ‘Muslim’ is used. It says ‘some’ Muslim leaders in that first sentence, but doesn’t bother to point out that other ‘Muslim leaders’ are not merely indifferent or neutral or not bothering to say anything, but are in fact in favour of the ban. Sly, subtle, sneaky, and not a very forthright form of reporting, I would say. Though it may not be deliberate. The malodorous orthodoxy may be so well internalized that the reporter wasn’t even aware of giving a partial (incomplete) account. It may be so taken for granted that all Muslims love the hijab, and that a school dress code is an interference with religious freedom, that the fact that some Muslims don’t see it that way simply fails to register. As does the fact that many of the people who favour the hijab and oppose the ban are not just nice pious people but extremely reactionary, are well to the right of your Jerry Fallwell and your Pat Robertson, are in fact the kind of people who beat up and rape women for not ‘covering up.’ That’s how smelly little orthodoxies work, isn’t it, they just get dug in until people stop noticing them and stop being able even to see alternatives. A good reason to point them out then.

I want to talk just a little more about this question of morality and motivation. The more I think about it the more of a wall it seems. A dead stop, an aporia, a permanent undecideable. A six of one half dozen of the other. Norm Geras put it very well:

I have read that in the Nazi camps, those who did best at maintaining their moral bearings, at not going to pieces in face of the horrors they daily had to experience, were people of very firm and definite convictions: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish rabbis, hardened communist militants. On the other hand, intellectuals, liberal and professional people, sometimes suffered a precipitous moral collapse…To have had to get used to conditions of life and death in places where there was no why would have been hard enough for anybody; but it may have been especially testing and cruel for those educated in the norms of a sceptical rationality. Would we want to say, though, that the religious or quasi-religious forms of certainty which have helped to save some people in such conditions are, on that account, to be given an unqualified pass as ethical motivators, when we know what else, what horrors, such certainties can themselves lead to?

That’s just it, you see. It’s precisely the qualities that enable people to maintain their moral bearings in an unspeakable situation, that also enable people to eliminate doubt, ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty, caution. That can be a good thing, even a splendid thing – but it can also be a bloody nightmare. Maybe overall, thin gruel is really a safer dish than stronger meats. Maybe all those lions with blood dripping from their jaws, all those dedicated impassioned righteous soldiers (one thinks of Opus Dei, and shudders slightly), are simply too dangerous, for all their courage and self-sacrifice. Especially since the things they believe in, the things that motivate them, are not testable or investigatable, not questionable or revisable. If they get it all wrong there is no one to tell them so; no one they’ll listen to anyway. Thin gruel is not an exciting dish, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t scald your insides, either.