Author: Ophelia Benson

You can keep your Tariq Ramadan. I’d much rather hear from Gina Khan.

Gina Khan is a very brave woman. Born in Birmingham 38 years ago to Pakistani parents, she has run away from an arranged marriage, dressed herself in jeans and dared to speak out against the increasing radicalisation of her community…The trouble is, says Khan, that many of the Pakistanis who have come to Birmingham are all too easily swayed. “Most of them are ignorant, uneducated, illiterate people from rural areas. It is very easy for them to be brainwashed, very easy. These are people who have been taught from the beginning that our religion is everything, it is the right way. You are going to Hell simply because you were not born a Muslim.” Khan is far too independent-minded to accept these beliefs wholesale…”I had too much rubbish fed in me that I would be too Westernised. I was told to keep my distance from you because I am a Muslim. It is still really hard to explain to you how you are conditioned. From a young age those thoughts are put in your head: ‘I am a Muslim. I do not mix with those people’. I would honestly say that we are more racist and more prejudiced than the English.”

Being conditioned is one thing, and being independent-minded is another. The difference is crucial. Some conditioning is of course useful. (Don’t hit. Don’t touch that, it will burn/cut you. Look both ways. Don’t bite. Say please. Don’t push.) But it should be minimal, and it should be good in itself. Some independent-mindedness is of course harmful. (I will hit. I will take what I want and the hell with everyone else. I will push, I will not say please.) But if it is coupled with decent minimal conditioning (or teaching, if you prefer), it is mostly preferable to the alternative, especially when the alternative is really bad conditioning, such as ‘keep your distance from those people because you are a Muslim’.

What has been done to her — and so many other Muslim women — is what incenses Khan most, and has emboldened her tospeak out. Muslim society, she says, is based on male domination and the oppression of women. The mosques are run entirely by men, the Sharia councils are run by men, the “voice” of the Muslim community is always male. And it is women who suffer as a result.

Well exactly. That’s why the long love affair with the MCB was so mystifying.

Khan herself was pressurised into marriage at the age of 16 by her father, against her mother’s wishes. “I was manipulated by my dad’s side of the family into a teen marriage – you know, you are a passport for someone from Pakistan. My mum wanted me to study and make something of my life because she knew what this country had to offer.” Khan married and became pregnant, but after her baby died she says that she suffered terrible postnatal depression and left the marriage. Her family disowned her, as did the Muslim community…She is full of praise for the instruments of the British state: social services, the police, job centres. If she were prime minister, she says, the first thing she would do is ban teen marriages. “They are still being pulled out of the local girls school here and taken back home, aged 16 or 17, not allowed to get an education.”

Creepily, yet not surprisingly, that exactly echoes what happened to girls at Goldenbridge. They were pulled out of school to do domestic chores, and not allowed to get an education. I sense a pattern here…

[A]lthough polygamy is illegal in Britain, it is still, says, Khan, being practised with a Muslim seal of approval. The “marriages”, after all, are being sanctioned in the mosques. “My mum would turn in her grave if she knew Sharia was here. This is England, how can this be happening, how in this country? People in Pakistan are fighting for it not to happen there.”Khan is also vociferous on the subject of the veil, which is not, she says, a religious requirement: “It’s a 7th-century garment that should not be in this country.”

Read it all. It’s hard to extract bits, because it’s all good. Don’t miss it. Go, Gina Khan.

More Tariq Ramadan. Maybe a little more Buruma, too, although I made at least one reader very cross the last time I disagreed (somewhat) with Buruma. Anyway, mostly Ramadan.

Buruma notes that he says different things in different contexts, then talks to Scott Appleby, who tried to get Ramadan to Notre Dame.

He is accused of being Janus-faced. Well, of course he presents different faces to different audiences. He is trying to bridge a divide and bring together people of diverse backgrounds and worldviews. He considers the opening he finds in his audience. Ramadan is in that sense a politician.

Okay. Fair point. He is trying to bridge a divide; he is a politician. Okay; but then that does tell us that what he says and writes is not necessarily entirely reliable. It’s as well to be aware of that.

Just as Marxists claim a universal validity for their political ideology, Ramadan says he believes that religious principles, as revealed in the Koran, are universal. It was as a universalist that Ramadan promoted the right of Muslim women to wear the veil at French schools. “Rights are rights,” he said, “and to demand them is a right.”

How about the right of Muslim women to be confined to the house, forbidden to drive, forbidden to travel without the permission of a male relative? Is it as a universalist that Ramadan promotes those rights? How about the right to be stoned to death for adultery? Or, to put it another way, how about the right of people to reject the ‘universal’ religious principles ‘as revealed in the Koran’? Does he take that to be a right?

“Whatever your faith,” he explained to me, “you are dealing with your fundamental principles. The message of Islam is justice. The neoliberal order leads to injustice.”

‘The message of Islam is justice.’ Is it? Justice for whom? ‘Ramadan’s defense of certain practices rooted in Islamic tradition creates much suspicion among those who might otherwise agree with his politics.’ Well, good; I’m very glad to hear it. Hold that thought.

Two media-driven controversies helped to make Ramadan both famous and notorious. The first was an exchange on French television in 2003 with Nicolas Sarkozy…Sarkozy accused Ramadan of defending the stoning of adulterers, a punishment stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as huddud. Ramadan replied that he favored “a moratorium” on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright…“Personally,” he said, “I’m against capital punishment, not only in Muslim countries, but also in the U.S. But when you want to be heard in Muslim countries, when you are addressing religious issues, you can’t just say it has to stop. I think it has to stop. But you have to discuss it within the religious context. There are texts involved.”

Well that’s exactly where we differ, and why I want no truck with his universal religious principles as revealed in the Koran. No truck at all. I know there are texts involved, and I don’t want to negotiate or bargain or compromise with them, I want to ignore them and do better. I think you can, precisely, say it has to stop. Period. Not temporize or shuffle or suggest a moratorium, but say No. Forget bridging divides if it means shuffling on questions like this. Just say it has to stop.

The main reason his European critics, Jews or non-Jews, have turned against Islam, and political Islam in particular, is not Israel so much as a common fear that secularism is under threat. That fear is coupled with a deep disillusion, in the wake of failed Marxist dictatorships, with the kind of anticolonial leftism that Ramadan now promotes in the name of universal principles rooted in the heart of Islam…On global capitalism he speaks like a 1968 left-wing student revolutionary, but on social affairs he can sound like the illiberal conservatives whom those students opposed…The question of women is key to this.

It is. The question of, you know, more than half of the population. Hardly a minor issue.

I wanted to know what exactly Ramadan meant by “Islamic femininity”…He replied…”We must have the struggle for equal rights of women. But the body must not be forgotten. Men and women are not the same. In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives or daughters.”

Right. And that again is (it should be needless to say) why I want nothing to do with it and why I find all this shuffling so frightening. It’s because I’m a woman. Let me explain: I don’t want to be seen in terms of being mother or wife or daughter. It’s very simple. Does he? Would he like to be seen in terms of being father, husband, son, full stop? It doesn’t look as if he would, does it. So I don’t want his ‘justice’ or his universalism.

Which is why I disagree with Buruma’s emollient concluding sentence: ‘His politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.’ No it isn’t. This is one of the things I disagreed with in his reply to Bruckner. Violence isn’t the only problem. I’m sorry, but I do fear people who say we must not forget the body, men and women are not the same, women are mothers or wives. I may be forced to engage with them, but I’m not going to pretty that up as a good thing, because I don’t think it is.