Author: Ophelia Benson

When should ‘religious beliefs’ trump medical precautions? Hmm, let’s see. Never.

Many Muslim women all over the UK could be at risk of losing their jobs after the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson, introduced the “bare below the elbow” policy. This policy was first introduced in January 2008 and stated that, when any member of staff is in contact with a patient, they must have their full arm from the elbow and below completely bare.

That doesn’t put Muslim women at risk of losing their jobs; it puts them at risk of having to bare their arms below the elbow when in contact with patients. In other words it presents them with a not very onerous job requirement that is in place in an attempt to prevent lethal infections. In other words, big fucking deal. Some jobs come with requirements of that kind; that’s just a fact of life. You can’t dress any old way you want to when you’re working with food, for example. Religion doesn’t give people the right to endanger the health of other people. You can’t be a surgeon and say your religion forbids you to scrub your hands, and that’s all there is to it. There is no human right to ignore hygiene regulations in a hospital. Suck it up.

Ayesha believed the dismissal was unethical as it violated her equality and diversity human rights…Ayesha described the “continuous nightmares” she suffered regarding the situation and upon her dismissal how she was “emotionally torn apart”. She feels viciously discriminated against, and this incident has left her seriously doubting any future job security. Ayesha feels shocked that she was forced to choose between her religious beliefs and her livelihood. She hopes to “prevent the policy from being universally applied, so other Muslim women do not experience the same trauma.”

Trauma nothing. If you work in a hospital, you are inevitably going to have various dress and hygiene requirements. Period. Grow up, enter the real world, have some sense, deal with it. And bag the self-pity, too.

The reporter for Channel 4 is filming undercover as the woman preacher gives her talk.

What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? “We kill him,” she says, “kill him, kill, kill…You have to kill him, you understand?” Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death – and as for homosexuals, and women who “make themselves like a man, a woman like a man … the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place”. These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. “This is not to tell you to start killing people,” she continues. “There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough.”

What can you say? What is there to say? This is fascism; fascism of the worst kind; the kind that not only thinks whole large sets of people should be summarily killed, but also feels perfectly happy to say so in public (though highly exclusive and sectarian and carefully non-integrated) places. This is the worst possible nightmare – the worst possible kind of human being, and the worst possible vision of society. This is a utopia in which all the best kinds of people are ‘thrown from the highest place’ by a set of malevolent narrow mindless death-loving ignorant shits. This is hell on earth. Everything good wiped out, everything bad given power to tyrannize and control and destroy.

The mosque is meant to promote moderation and integration. But although the circle does preach against terrorism and does not incite Muslims to break British laws, it teaches Muslims to “keep away” and segregate themselves from disbelievers: “Islam is keeping away from disbelief and from the disbelievers, the people who disbelieve.” Friendship with non-Muslims is discouraged because “loyalty is only to the Muslim, not to the kaffir [disbeliever]”. A woman who was friendly with a non-Muslim woman was heavily criticised: “It’s part of Islam, of the correct belief, that you love those who love Allah and that you hate those who hate Allah.”

As Saudi textbooks teach children – in those words.

Like many of the other women at the circle, I was soon invited to private sessions in houses around London, to “learn more” about Islam – or their version of Islam. Um Saleem was also at some of these sessions. Here, the women were given strict restrictions on their lives: it is reiterated that British Muslim women cannot travel far without a male guardian, cannot mix with men, and have to remain fully covered up at all times. One woman in the audience queried the strict rulings that she cannot travel without a mahram – a male member of the family – escorting her. She asked: “Sister, if me and my husband, we can’t go together, what do I do if I want to go?” She was told she cannot travel by herself. She asked again: “So what do I do?” “You go with your husband,” Um Saleem replied. There were also restrictions on education or work opportunities. One woman, who works for the NHS, was told she should leave her job as it meant mixing with men and not wearing a full Islamic garment. “You know that working in an environment that is not Islamic, working with the kuffaar, all this takes you away from the religion and hardens your heart and it would be lying to you if I say it’s OK,” Um Saleem explained. Um Saleem also criticised Muslim women who integrate into society – a view that is counter to the aims of the Regent’s Park Mosque. “You see Muslims in every sphere of everyday life in this country, I see Muslims, it breaks my heart when I see them working in banks, short sleeves, tight scarf like this, make-up, being with the kuffaar all the time, even speaking their language,” she said.

Yeah, terrible, isn’t it, women out in the world doing ordinary work in ordinary places and being around people just as if they were people, even speaking their language – it’s shocking, isn’t it.

The Mosque’s official bookshop was another focus for the Dispatches film last year when our reporters discovered intolerant and fundamentalist DVDs…I found the same fundamentalist preachers’ works still openly displayed and sold there. DVDs preaching that disbelievers are “evil, wicked, mischievous people … they do the most evil, filthy things”; that men are in charge of women and should control them…Darussalam International Publications told me that the bookshop sells a wide range of material which they “do not necessarily agree with”. It said: “We try to represent a variety of…opinions through the products we sell…in order to spread peace, respect, tolerance and understanding.”

Ah yes of course! Peace respect tolerance and understanding! Of course selling ‘products’ that preach hatred of ‘disbelievers’ and subordination of women is just the way to spread peace respect tolerance and understanding.

This stuff is so bottomlessly disgusting. It makes me want to move to another planet, or become another species, or build myself a fortified bunker. It makes me despair of human beings.

No, it’s not just another ‘choice’.

It may be an unusual case, but it’s hardly the first time that extreme religious belief has resulted in cruelty to children. Now that the “misery memoir” has become a cliché of contemporary publishing, it’s worth remembering that many of the most significant accounts of childhood misery have been associated with religious repression…[I]n Memoir, one of hundreds of books chronicling brutal Irish Catholic childhoods, John McGahern writes of a life in which sudden physical blows were followed by sudden instructions to bow down in front of a crucifix (a fetishisation of extreme violence if ever there was one) and pray. “Authority’s writ ran from God the Father down and could not be questioned,” he says. “Violence reigned… in the homes as well.”

It’s a violent God. The crucifix itself (as Christina Patterson notes) is a symbol of violence. It’s one of the weirdest and most repulsive things about Christianity, that it uses an execution device as a pervasive symbol. Don’t tell me about atonement; the cross has no more to do with atonement than does the gallows or the guillotine or the electric chair or the lethal injection. People don’t walk around with little gallows around their necks – but crosses, oh, that’s a different matter. It isn’t though – it’s an ancient form of execution by torture. It was common as mud – it wasn’t special to Jesus, it was just what the Romans did with anyone poor and obscure and non-Roman who misbehaved, and that was a lot of people. It wasn’t glamorous, it was as squalid as possible. One might as well walk around with a photo of someone being waterboarded as a decoration.

We live in a country in which the proliferation of schools established only to impose particular sets of religious prejudices on young children unable to know, or seek, better is encouraged. Like everything else, it’s about “choice”…No, it isn’t. In this country – whose state religion, incidentally, rarely did anyone any harm, except a bit of boredom on a Sunday morning – we should do better. If parents have the right to believe what they like, their children have the right to an education that teaches them that certain things are wrong, and that, as Edmund Gosse says in Father and Son, it is “a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself”.

And to say no when the man with the knives comes around.

Self-flagellation is a good thing.

There are elements of the Zaidi case that will sound familiar to those who grew up in a Punjabi Shia household. There is nothing odd in the father of the household engaging in this particular practice. But I have personally never seen anybody coerced into it, although coercion can, admittedly, take many indirect forms.

Nothing odd, that is, in the father of the household engaging in self-flagellation. Well that depends on what you mean by ‘odd.’ It may be something one has seen before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not odd. I’m going to go right out on a limb here and say that whipping one’s back with knives is, indeed, odd, also stupid and undesirable, especially when done in front of other people, especially when some of them are children. The Dinonysian is not something to be messed with.

[T]he danger of this case is that the ritual of self-flagellation itself is demonised. Those adults who engage in self-flagellation with knives, chains or blades, do so with a consciousness of the ceremonial nature of the act, keenly watched by onlookers, children and adults alike, who, though they have seen it all before, continue to be mesmerised by the sheer spectacle of it – the display.

Exactly; hence the danger and the lack of desirability. It’s not a good (a humane, a responsible, a fair, a decent) idea to stage mezmerizing spectacles of severe self-injury in front of children, or anyone else either. There are things one ought not to mesmerize other people into wanting to do themselves; self-injury is one of those.

This excitement is, for most, mixed with an actual sense of profound identification with the suffering of Imam Hussain…[I]n an age where Muslim communities appear to be in a state of flux, it is this very sacrifice of Hussain that, paradoxically, provides an antithesis to extremism and violence. How? Because it gives a powerful sense of meaningful identification to those, especially among the younger generations, who see beyond the self-inflicted scars and the rituals themselves, and who in some way try and comprehend the significance of it all.

Paradoxically indeed; so paradoxically that it makes no sense. A sense of meaningful identification for those who see beyond the self-inflicted injuries and who in some way try and comprehend the significance of it all. Yes but in what way? And what is the significance of it all? And whatever it is why can’t it be comprehended without the blades hitting the back? If there’s something to be comprehended why can’t it be comprehended in a literal direct explicit rational way? And where – really, where – does the antithesis to extremism and violence come in?