Author: Ophelia Benson

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.’