Author: Ophelia Benson

You want tradition? Here’s some tradition.

In this quiet northern valley, tucked into the Himalayan foothills, tradition and threats have forced Shad into an electoral profile so low it is almost invisible. She will never leave this high-walled compound to canvass votes, never knock on a single door…And even if Shad wins a seat in Lower Dir, an arch-conservative corner of North West Frontier Province, there is no guarantee the local Pashtun men will allow her to occupy it.

They don’t like the idea, you see. It’s not the tradition.

Since 2001 four women councillors have been killed in Frontier province. The latest victim died in June. Zubeida Begum, a veteran women’s rights campaigner, was shot nine times at her home in Upper Dir, close to Shad Begum’s home. The gunmen, who included one of her own relatives, also killed her 19-year-old daughter.

Thorough.

Hostility has been stoked by tribal and religious leaders who view women politicians as an insult to Pashtun custom and an unforgivable affront to Islam. “There is no place for a woman’s authority under sharia law,” says Maulana Hifz ur-Rehman, a cleric and former jihadi fighter who runs a madrasa on a mountain slope outside Ziarat Talash.

No, of course not, for obvious reasons – because men’s authority is so much more wise, and just, and compassionate.

Still, intimidation and social pressure is rife. Shad Begum says she has been tarred as a “Jewish conspirator” in a whispering campaign against her family because her aid agency receives help from western donors. “They say we are brazen people without honour,” says her brother, Shad Muhammad, whose pharmacy in Ziarat Talash has been attacked. “They say you want to take your women into the streets, and take ours with them.” Shad says the struggle is worth it. In the cloistered, tradition-bound world of Lower Dir, where women hardly dare step on the street, access to health and education is woeful. The district has just three female doctors for a population of more than 800,000; hardly any girls attend school; and so-called “honour killings” are common.

Honour. What a joke.

Roy Hattersley in the Guardian.

At one level, the attack on multiculturalism is no more than a refined, middle-class version of “Paki-bashing”. Yet people who ought to know better have joined in the chorus of intolerance. To demand that Muslims abandon their way of life – what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives – is to make a frontal assault upon their faith. Islam is a total religion. People who go to church on Christmas Eve and think that makes them Christians may not realise that devout Muslims believe that the Qur’an should inform their whole lives.

Well, I don’t go to church on Christmas eve and I don’t aspire either to be or to think of myself as a Christian – so I do indeed realise that ‘devout’ (there it is again) Muslims believe that the Qur’an should inform their whole lives. But so what? That’s the problem, not an explanation that causes the problem to disappear. By the same token, ‘devout’ Southern Baptists believe that (their selective reading of) the Bible should govern their whole lives, too, and that therefore God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve and all the rest of the nonsense. That doesn’t make it okay – that doesn’t make it not a problem that they want to impose their religious views on other people. Nor does it with other holy books. Or any other books. ‘Devout’ Nazis could believe that The Passing of the Great Race should inform their whole lives, too, but I doubt Hattersley would urge us to respect that. So surely the mere fact that a group believes that a book should inform their whole lives is not automatically a reason to agree with them.

And then, Hattersley’s gloss on ‘their way of life’ is a tad inadequate. ‘what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives’ – that leaves out a few items – such as ‘honour’ killing, female subordination, ‘which way they choose’ their underage daughters’ husbands. Even that ‘what they eat’ is evasive and euphemistic, because the issue there is a form of animal slaughter that is considered cruel to the animals. It is simply not self-evident that ‘devoutness’ should trump concern with animal suffering, and the issue should not be concealed by the choice of words.

Britain has to decide if the freedom that we so value is consistent with attempts to suppress the religious practices of the country’s fastest-growing faith. The fact that most of us do not share their beliefs (and some of us have no beliefs at all) is irrelevant. Only primitive people want to destroy everything they do not like or understand. The civilised, and sensible, approach is to welcome diversity as a stimulus to renewed vitality.

Oy veh. Here we go again. (Seriously. This kind of thing is so stale. Is that really the best they can do?) Which ‘religious practices’ does he mean? Does he in fact even really mean ‘religious practices’ or does he mean social customs. And as for beliefs and sharing or not sharing them – that’s just silly. The issue is not beliefs, it is indeed practices. What is done to people. And then destroying everything they do not like or understand – again, that’s just an empty, beside the point bit of abuse. And ‘welcome diversity’ – another evasive formula, as I said a few days ago about Canon Chris Chivers’ ‘It is to be hoped the proposed commission will identify ways grudging tolerance can now be transcended by genuine acceptance, understanding and respect, which turns neighbours into friends because it accords difference the dignity it always deserves.’ Not all difference does deserve respect, and neither should all diversity be welcomed. Some norms are desirable and necessary. One assumes that in other contexts, MPs are pretty well aware of that. It may be ‘different’ or ‘diverse’ to demand the death of a novelist or playwright for writing something that ‘offends’ our ‘beliefs’ – but that doesn’t make it worthy of respect or welcoming. So blanket endorsements of diversity and difference are worthless, and confusion-producing.

But it is the assault on Islam – its culture as well as its theology – that has alienated some Muslim youths to the point at which they will not condemn anyone who champions their religion…Assaults on their habits as well as their faith will alienate them still further.

Maybe so. But what can be done about it? What is the alternative? Huh? Just to give up and endorse all the ‘habits’ of ‘Muslim youths’ without further examination? What if those ‘habits’ include pushing women around and telling them what to do and what to wear, and calling them whores if they don’t obey? Does Hattersley expect everyone to smile placatingly and keep silent about situations like that?

But the laid-back British still failed to recognise the passion with which British Muslims support their culture and their religion. At the beginning of the row over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, I told worshippers at the Birmingham central mosque that they should be as calm about their faith as most Christians are about theirs. A man called Saed Moghul told me: “You may not care about your religion, but that is no reason why we should not care about ours.” His logic was irrefutable.

His what? His what was irrefutable? His logic was what?

Anyway – that was no ‘row’ – that was a very literal, serious, intended death threat. For writing a novel. Gore Vidal wrote a novel about Jesus – should passionate Christians (and there are some) be approved if they (caring about their religion as they do) put out a fatwa of their own?

The sensible alternative to that take-it-or-leave-it nonsense is acceptance that most Muslims will live Islamic lives and still accept the laws and conventions that hold Britain together…They were taught at school that free men and women are entitled to live as they choose as long as their habits do not imperil the tranquillity of the nation.

As long as their ‘habits’ do not imperil the tranquillity of the nation. Well what if their habits do imperil the flourishing of the girls and women among them? What if the phrase ‘free women’ has a slightly ironic ring in light of some of those ‘habits’? Or to put it another way, once the fine-sounding empty phrases are set aside, what exactly does Hattersley mean? Which differences and conventions and habits and practices are we talking about, exactly?

Well, we’re doomed anyway. There are Pakistan’s nukes, and Iran’s potential nukes, and, Karl tells me, Saudi Arabia’s potential nukes – my head hurts. And that’s not to mention North Korea whose nukes are probably pointed directly at my desk. And never even mind all that because with that Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined melting and releasing billions of tons of methane – warming will be drastically speeded up and there is nothing we can do about it. Floods, droughts, crop failures, famines, migrations of peoples, food wars…(And there’s that pandemic lurking, don’t forget that.)

So maybe it would make sense to just shrug and start eating a lot of ice cream while awaiting the end. Maybe it would. But – but who knows, maybe there will be a Miracle and the human species will turn some sort of corner and start acting as if it has a shred of sense. So maybe it’s worthwhile to keep trying to help direct traffic. Anyway it’s less boring than waiting.

Right, so what’s the first thing I heard when I turned on the radio this morning? (I wonder if I’m always going to wake up at 4 a.m. on Thursdays now. I happened to do that five weeks ago, and got such a shock when I turned on the radio that it probably imprinted a little atomic clock in my brain.) I’ll tell you what it was – a piece on the World Service about Salman Rushdie’s article in the Times about the need for a reform movement in Islam. The religion correspondent Jane Little called it ‘strident’ and then without pausing to draw breath, rushed to say ‘But we have to put it in context’ and then rushed on to explain what she meant by ‘in context’: Rushdie is ‘hardly a respected figure in the Muslim world,’ so Muslims won’t be much impressed by what he has to say, they’ll just say he’s just showing his liberal secular values.

In other words, it was disgusting, contemptible, anti-rational, hostile, slavish garbage. What does she mean ‘strident’? Read the article – what’s ‘strident’ about it? Unless you just start from the default position that religious fundamentalism is a fine thing and any kind of rational questioning of it is bad and ‘strident.’ But what is a BBC journalist doing starting from a default position like that?

And then there was the edge of contempt in her voice and choice of words – ‘Rushdie is hardly a respected figure in the Muslim world’. Meaning – what? Therefore he should shut up about ‘the Muslim world’? Because – ? Because one branch of it wants to kill him? Therefore he has no business voicing criticism of it? It’s hard not to think that’s what she’s saying. But that’s imbecilic – and submissive. Rushdie is more entitled and qualified than most people to criticise Islam, precisely because one branch of it wants to kill him – wants to (and does) shut up people who criticise it. That’s a dead giveaway that there is something badly wrong with it, and that it needs all the criticism it can get, all the more so from people with direct knowledge of its intimidation techniques. Yet Jane Little’s tone and choice of words conveyed the exact opposite. And then note the assumption that the entire ‘Muslim world’ is as obscurantist as the pro-fatwa crowd – which is pretty insulting.

Strident. Let’s hear some stridency.

However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that “Death is perhaps too easy” for the author of “The Satanic Verses.” Tony Blair’s decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of “moderate,” “traditional” Islam is either a sign of his government’s penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair’s options really are…Two weeks later his organization boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.

So has Jane Little called Sacranie strident, I wonder? If not, why not? Which of the two is actually strident?

The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Blair government’s strategy of relying on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many whose views on women’s rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views and who, in the case of the Muslim diaspora, are — it has to be said — in many ways at odds with the Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they live…What is needed is a move beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air…It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.

No no. Naughty. That’s strident. Saying the revelation of their religion is supernaturally above it is just perfectly normal, average, steady-state, but saying it isn’t – that’s strident.

However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible.

That’s exactly what Irshad Manji argues, and has been saying on the BBC among other places lately. Is she strident? If she is, why does Radio 4 keep phoning her up and asking her opinion? If she’s not, why is Rushdie?

The traditionalists’ refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages…Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernized? That would make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they’re just the “traditional” part of the problem.

Strident, nothing. Jane Little and the World Service could do with some modernization themselves.