North West Frontier Province – what a fun place that must be.

Hundreds of thousands of women in various NWFP union councils (UCs) will be stopped from voting in the upcoming local council elections despite pressure by the Election Commission and government on jirgas to allow women to participate in the polls, Geo news channel reported on Tuesday. Tribal elder Haji Rahat Hussain said agreements to bar women from contesting and voting in the local council elections were signed by male candidates including nazims and naib nazims with a view to maintain law and order, the channel reported. “Traditionally, our women have always stayed away from elections and they are not even ready to step out of their homes,” he told Geo.

Isn’t that just a pip? Agreements to bar women were signed by male candidates – oh well that’s all right then. As long as the people not disenfranchised by this high-handed decision signed an agreement then everything is on the up and up – all legal and aboveboard. Swell. In the same manner, perhaps, the white candidates in elections in the Mississippi Delta in the early ’60s could have ‘signed agreements’ to bar blacks from voting, and then all that fuss and ruckus, and all those tiresome murders, wouldn’t have happened. And the reason of course would have been exactly the same (it always is) – a view to maintain law and order. You betcha.

And the loving concern is so touching, too. ‘Our women’ (as one might say our dogs or our sheep) ‘have always stayed away from elections’ – well yes I daresay they have, because you have always seen to it. Naturally they have. And ‘they are not even ready to step out of their homes’ – there again: yes, no doubt, because you have seen to it that they wouldn’t be. Keep people confined and locked up, uneducated and inexperienced, and what do you know, you end up with people who are a little shaky on their pins and a bit bashful around strangers. Therefore it follows that they must always stay that way. Of course.

The BBC has more.

The Chief Minister of North West Frontier (NWFP) Province, Akram Durrani, denied that tribal elders had prevented women from voting in some parts of the province. Tribal elders had banned women from voting in three councils in the province, but the government had persuaded local jirgas – or tribal councils – to lift the ban late on Wednesday. Nonetheless, reports from the area suggested that women were not turning out to vote in large numbers. In one women’s polling station in a suburb of Peshawar, capital of NWFP, not a single vote was cast in the first five hours of polling, the BBC’s Haroon Rashid in Peshawar says. Human rights activists are demanding the cancellation of election results in such districts.

Adam Tjaavk tells me the World Service reported that ‘women in NWFP had been asked (by men) not to vote as the weather is too warm for them – standing a long time in long queues would cause them to remove clothing that would cause a public disturbance!’ Right – so they’ll have to hope for cooler weather some other year then. But not too cool, or they might shiver, which would cause minor riots. And not raining, or their clothes would get wet, and you know what ah ah ah ah pant pant pant. And not too dark because in the dark women ah ah ah ah puff puff puff sweat.

There’s a bit in Persepolis 2 like that. (No doubt there were some four million bits in Marjane Satrapie’s life in Iran that were like that.) Marjane is running to catch a bus one afternoon and some uniformed berk shouts at her to stop running. She doesn’t even pay attention at first, because why would he be shouting at her. After the third or fourth time, she stops, bewildered – and he earnestly explains that she must not run because when she runs – and he gestures helpfully with both hands, to illustrate the way her bum moves. ‘Well don’t look at me then!!’ she shouts in his face, enraged.

Same for those lines outside the polling places. Look away, take a cold shower, get a nice hobby; whatever; but leave the damn women alone.

Not again.

Atheism, like religion, is an act of faith: evidence for the existence of God may be entirely anecdotal, but evidence for His absence is even more tenuous.

Oy, oy, oy – will that stupid trope never die? It ought to – it is so lame. Yeah right, atheism is an act of faith, and not collecting stamps is a hobby, and not playing squash is a sport, and not eating lentils is vegetarianism, and not taking a train is travel.

I don’t know if you listed to that Radio One series of philosophical chats, but one of the funnier moments was on the last one, when a Christian philosopher – a philosopher who is also a Christian, not a philosopher of Christianity – said just that – ‘atheism is a religion’ – and Stephen Law gave a protracted whine of indignation. I’m laughing again thinking of it. “I hate it when people say that,” he said tearfully.

But really – why do people keep saying that? Why don’t they realize how absurd it is, and stop? They don’t consider themselves believers in the ‘religion’ of atheism for not believing in Poseidon, or Loki, or the angel Moroni. So why do they say it of people who don’t subscribe to their own particular religion? Especially grown-up people, philosophers, people who write articles in the Guardian. Because they get away with it, no doubt, but that’s a crap reason. As the guy said, ‘Have you no shame?’

Norm makes a good point, one that I’ve been vaguely wanting to make for awhile. He’s commenting on Michael Howard’s piece in the Guardian yesterday. Howard:

What do I mean by being proud to be British? At its core is a profound respect for, and allegiance to, the institutions that make Britain what it is, and the values that underpin those institutions.

Norm:

The point I want to make is simply that it’s not because the values Howard mentions are British values that we owe them allegiance, but because they’re good ones – democratic, liberal, universally defensible. They are superior to those values which, for example, countenance the treatment of some people as inferior to others, or the silencing of dissenting voices, or the murder of the innocent. No one, however, need be loyal to such British values or traditions as cannot be upheld on a morally principled basis. The idea that something is to be supported just because it is British is defenceless in face of the counter-suggestion that other values and traditions are… whatever in fact they are, but in any case not British and preferred by the person who is asserting them. There’s no avoiding the discussion of the merits and demerits of the values or traditions themselves.

Exactly. Obviously, and exactly. That’s why I’ve been wanting to make the point for awhile: because there has been a lot of what seemed to me fairly muddled talk along those lines – talk about Britishness, and allegiance to Britishness, and allegiance to British values, as if they were all the same idea. But it doesn’t matter whether those values are British or not. That’s not the point. The point is whether they’re any good or not, not what nationality they are. If they’re crap values, then allegiance to them is a bad thing, not a good thing, and the fact that they’re British, or Samoan, or Peruvian, is irrelevant.

People need to pay more attention to what’s irrelevant and what isn’t, when they talk – and when they think. It’s clear enough that Howard’s real subject in that piece is – as it should be – the values in question, not their provenance. What he says would make more sense and might well be more persuasive if he kept that in mind.

This is exactly the same point I’ve been making about the stipulation – that women’s rights are okay and acceptable and permissible and a good thing – as long as they don’t contradict Islam. As long as they are on the right side of the divide between what (according to someone or other) pleases Allah and what angers Allah. Or God, or Jesus, or Athena – it doesn’t matter. The problem is the same. That’s beside the point. It’s irrelevant. It’s extraneous – utterly and completely extraneous. It’s the wrong question, the wrong criterion, the wrong standard. It’s like saying ‘You mustn’t put garlic in the gazpacho because the bishop can only move diagonally.’

It’s just a really really bad idea to try to talk about centrally basically important human subjects like values – like how we are going to treat each other and be treated – on the basis of criteria that have nothing whatever to do with the merits of the values themselves. You know? It’s just stupid. It may well be that the intelligent beings who live on a planet that orbits Alpha Centauri would consider our values – justice, equality, freedom, peace, prosperity – to be terrible, contemptible, evil, rebarbative values. But so what? We’re the ones who have to live with and according to them. Not people from Remulac, not Allah, not Jesus, not anyone who doesn’t live on planet earth – just us. We have to live here, and we have to do our best to do it in ways that minimize suffering and misery and horror instead of maximising it. We don’t accomplish that by blowing people to bits on tubes and buses, or by leaving small bombs all over Bangladesh, or by torturing children who are accused of witchcraft, even if (some people think) a deity thinks we do. If the deity thinks we do, the deity is wrong, and that’s that. So all those irrelevant adjectives need to be thrown out. British, Islamic, Christian, whatever – they add nothing to the equation. There’s no avoiding the discussion of the merits and demerits of the values or traditions themselves.

Some more on this stipulation problem. On why ‘this pleases Allah’ and ‘this angers Allah’ are not the best criteria for what should go in a constitution – any more than ‘what would Jesus do’ is the best question for a 21st century polititian to ask himself.

Because it all depends on one’s conception of Allah or Jesus, for one thing. And guess what – people (my, what a suprise) have a tendency to conceptualize Jesus and Allah according to their own existing wants and opinions and deficits. If they don’t score all that well on the altruism or fairness or humility scale, well, their god is going to have a tendency to arrange things so that they get what they want and people who are in their power get screwed – and then they will call that outcome ‘what pleases Allah’ thus making it not just the way powerful men have arranged things to their own advantage, but Holy and Sacred and Right – so that not only will it never change, but everyone will respect it and worship it and revile anyone who criticizes or questions it. Quite a nice little racket.

And there’s no appeal, which is another reason those are not the best criteria, and why religion should be kept firmly out of government and politics. Because there is no one to file a grievance with and no way to second-guess the results. That’s how it works when you have a Book written 1500 years ago and a god who is never around to ask for updates. Very damn convenient, isn’t it!

‘Sorry – we’d love to let you have basic rights, like being allowed to walk around in the world without asking anyone’s permission, but it would anger Allah, so it’s out.’ ‘Oh yeah? You sure that’s not just your idea? Let’s ask Allah.’ ‘No can do. He’s not here. We can ask the imam.’ ‘I don’t care what the imam says, the imam will just say what you said, you probably asked the imam before you said it – you guys are all in this together. I want to take it to the top!’ ‘Not possible. Unless you want to get yourself one of those rucksacks, of course…’

Very very convenient. He makes the rules, according to what pleases him or pisses him off – but he’s never around to corroborate. There really is a serious design flaw with this whole arrangement. It’s just not the way to do things. You don’t set up a rule-system with a yes-no, on-off mechanism involving one guy when the one guy in question is someone who is never available for consultation – do you! Not in the real world you don’t. Dickens novels sometimes work that way, but other than that, it doesn’t fly.

That’s the problem with the whole supernatural thing. It’s such a perfect alibi, such an excuse, such a cop-out. Imagine other people trying that. The boss, the landlord, the merchant. ‘Hey! Where’s my paycheck? My roof just collapsed! Where’s that shipment of éclairs?’ Silence. ‘Hey!! Where do we go to file a grievance? How do we re-negotiate the contract?’ Some guy in a mitre strolls up. ‘You don’t, of course. The CEO is transcendent, the CEO is supernatural, the CEO is ineffable, and dwells in a region apart. Obviously you can’t re-negotiate anything. Have a nice day.’ Guy in mitre strolls away again. You’re screwed.

And people sign up to this arrangement voluntarily. It’s staggering. ‘Yes, please be the boss of me and tell me what to do based on outdated oppressive rules and hierarchies and never let me think rationally about any of it because that would be Displeasing to The Great Absent One. Thank you so much, now would you please kick me as hard as possible? Thank you and come back soon.’

Transcendence is a beautiful thing.

So ‘Iraqis back women’s rights’ – with a stipulation. A stipulation that renders the whole idea pretty much worthless.

A survey conducted by Iraq’s constitution drafting committee showed that 69 per cent of respondents support full rights for women – as long as the freedoms don’t contradict Islam…

The survey I think is not all that reliable because of the methodology, but never mind, because what I want to look at, and poke with a stick, is the basic idea: that women’s rights are okay as long as they [why does the article shift without notice from rights to freedoms? they’re not interchangeable] don’t contradict Islam.

That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. Imagine if you were told – ‘Yes you are entitled to human rights – provided they don’t contradict Christianity/Taoism/Wicca.’ You’d feel pretty anxious and worried about what does and what does not contradict whichever religion was in question, wouldn’t you. Does your allotment of rights include the right not to be sacrificed to the gods without written consent of the sacrificee, or not?

That’s why it’s a problem when religion is allowed to trump ‘rights’ – because you just can’t trust religions to come up with rights-compatible systems, or Books. Especially not religions that were started a good few years ago, before notions like women’s rights had gotten much of a foothold. It’s really not such a great idea to tie modern legislation and constitutional protections to a set of ideas worked up two or three or five thousand years ago.

You can get an idea of the kind of thing from the Hizb ut-Tahrir site.

The work of Hizb ut-Tahrir is to carry the Islamic da’wah in order to change the situation of the corrupt society so that it is transformed into an Islamic society. It aims to do this by firstly changing the society’s existing thoughts to Islamic thoughts so that such thoughts become the public opinion among the people, who are then driven to implement and act upon them. Secondly the Party works to change the emotions in the society until they become Islamic emotions that accept only that which pleases Allah (swt) and rebel against and detest anything which angers Allah (swt).

That’s the basic framework – what pleases Allah is good and acceptable, what angers Allah is bad and detestable. Only – how do you know? Or how do they – the people in charge – know? By consulting the Book. But – sometimes there are conflicting interpretations. What do you do then? Oh – whatever. You ask the approved ‘scholars’. But then how can you be sure the scholars are right? How can you be sure you actually know what does please or anger Allah? Doesn’t it look as if there’s room for error or trickery or both here? How can you tell that someone somewhere along the line has not simply written down what he wants and called it the word of Allah? Put it this way – if someone had done that – how would you know? What would you accept as evidence that someone had in fact done that? Anything?

Well, we know the answer to that question, which is the point Irshad Manji has been making. Let’s hope she makes headway. But meanwhile, women’s rights in Iraq look to be headed for the memory hole.

Look, if you’re going to talk about bullshit, you should at least be thorough about it, am I right?

In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri—“Marxism without the shit of the bull.”

I do so sympathize. I’ve read a good many defiantly obscure texts myself, and it can indeed be traumatizing. It’s kind of like getting on the slow train from Bangor to Ketchikan via Amarillo and discovering that your assigned seat mate (No Exchanges, No Refunds, No Alterations, No Seat Re-assignments) is a talkative semi-deaf Baptist with 427 great-grandchildren and a wealth of anecdotes. That of course is why the Dictionary was written – to get revenge on all those talkative anecdotal Baptists. So I do sympathize with G. A. Cohen. There’s even a poltergeist who haunts the corridors of B&W topping up our supply of defiantly obscure texts by depositing turgidly opaque comments back here at odd intervals, apparently worried that we might run short. So I do sympathize.

Simon Blackburn’s Truth is one of the books reviewed in this article. It’s about relativism, among other things.

In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won’t let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser’s gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it’s completely useless.”)

Blackburn put the joke a little differently.

Rorty…has a robust debunking attitude to the norms of truth and reason. Indeed, he once wrote that ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’. That is a shocking thing to say, outlandish even by philosophers’ standards. In fact, it is shocking enough to be something Rorty’s contemporaries wouldn’t let him get away with (and unsurprisingly, they didn’t). So again, if it is true then it is false – by its own lights it is false.

That made me laugh when I read it this morning.

Let’s everybody say this kind of thing more and more often, okay? More and more and more and more. Because there’s so much of the other kind of thing. And the more there is of the other kind of thing, and the less there is of this kind of thing, the more the other kind thinks it’s right, it’s the mainstream, it’s common knowledge, it’s conventional wisdom, it’s obvious, it’s the default position. The only way to resist is by resisting.

It’s time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense…[W]hat I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and responds to our plight…The hypocritical respect now being accorded to Muslim “scholars”, people who believe that the Qur’an was dictated word for word by God, is just one example of the mess we have got ourselves into by pretending to take religion seriously. Disagreements about society can only be resolved in the here and now on liberal principles of discussion and compromise. You cannot have a sensible discussion with fundamentalists, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, because they start from a different point.

They start from a different point, and they also stay there, no matter what, no matter what the evidence or what the argument – in fact that is the different point they start from: that evidence and argument are entirely irrelevant. That is not a good point from which to start a sensible discussion.

By pandering to the credulous while cracking down on “extremists”, we are trying to maintain the fiction that we are semi-religious in a harmless, Hobbity sort of fashion…We should make it absolutely clear that there are no special political or religious crimes, and we should make it clear that we do not tacitly promote religion in government or in schools. What we have to promote above all else is the liberal society, and this is best done by observing scrupulously the principles of that society. And that demands that we acknowledge that religion is, at base, nonsense. The sooner we eliminate the idea that life has “some cosmic, all-embracing libretto”, the better.

Second.

Well it’s about time. Hooray for the Observer. It is about damn time.

The Muslim Council of Britain is officially the moderate face of Islam. Its pronouncements condemning the London bombings have been welcomed by the government as a model response for mainstream Muslims. The MCB’s secretary general, Iqbal Sacranie, has recently been knighted and senior figures within the organisation have the ear of ministers. But an Observer investigation can reveal that, far from being moderate, the Muslim Council of Britain has its origins in the extreme orthodox politics in Pakistan.

Oh yes? Tell us more.

Far from representing the more progressive or spiritual traditions within Islam, the leadership of the Muslim Council of Britain and some of its affiliates sympathise with and have links to conservative Islamist movements in the Muslim world and in particular Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, a radical party committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan ruled by sharia law…The organisation’s founder, Maulana Maududi, was a fierce opponent of feminism who believed that women should be kept in purdah – seclusion from male company. Although the MCB’s leadership distances itself from some of these teachings, it has been criticised for having no women prominently involved in the organisation.

One of the things it’s about time for is the realization and articulation of the possibility that opposition to terrorism is not the only issue, and not the best possible dividing line. It’s the same thing with Hizb ut-Tahrir – we keep being told that it’s non-violent, as if that’s all that needs to be said. Well non-violent is better than violent, to be sure, but there is a lot more to the subject than that. (And then, given the very real coerciveness of Islamism when it has power, coerciveness that involves beatings, acid attacks, and executions, it is not really all that non-violent anyway.) There are issues about attitudes to human rights, women’s rights, ‘apostasy’ and the like.

Last week, Salman Rushdie warned in an article in the Times that Sacranie had been a prominent critic during the Satanic Verses affair and advised that the MCB leader should not be viewed as a moderate. In 1989, Sacranie said ‘death was perhaps too easy’ for the writer. Rushdie also criticised Sacranie for boycotting January’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. ‘If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem,’ said Rushdie. A Panorama documentary to be screened next Sunday will also be highly critical.

Yeah! Take that, World Service and Jane Little! Strident yourself. ‘Hardly a respected figure’ yourself. Yaboosucks.

The origins of the Muslim Council of Britain can be traced to the storm around the publication of the Satanic Verses in 1988. India was the first country to ban the book and many Muslim countries followed suit. Opposition to the book in Britain united people committed to a traditionalist view of Islam, of which the founders of the Muslim Council of Britain was a part.

A worthy origin.

The MCB was officially founded in November 1997, shortly after Tony Blair came to power, and has had a close relationship with the Labour government ever since…It remains particularly influential within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has a little-known outreach department which works with Britain’s Muslims. The FCO pamphlet Muslims in Britain is essentially an MCB publication and the official ministerial celebration of the Muslim festival of Eid is organised jointly with the MCB.

As Rushdie said – we have a problem.

There is no suggestion that Sacranie and other prominent figures in the Muslim Council of Britain are anything but genuine in their condemnation of the terrorist bombings of the 7 July. But their claims to represent a moderate or progressive tendency in Islam are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Exactly. That’s just it. Merely condemning terrorist bombings is hardly enough to qualify an organization as progressive. Well done, Observer; well done, Panorama. It’s about time.

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.

A reader sent me this infuriating item. It’s all too familiar, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

But now scientists want to step around the mythology and tell a different story, using the DNA of Maori and other indigenous people to work out how prehistoric humans spread around the world from the “true” home of Homo sapiens, Africa. Many Maori do not want to hear that story…As soon as the scheme was announced in April, indigenous groups began objecting, and none more loudly than Maori. We already know where we came from, thanks very much, they said, and what’s in it for indigenous people? What is the point of challenging generations of oral history and spiritual belief?

What is the point? Finding out what really happened as opposed to the story. It’s not written in stone anywhere that a story is invariably or necessarily preferable to a more accurate account.

Indigenous people already have their own answers, says Tongan educator Dr Linita Manu’atu, a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology.
“Stop dominating us. If they flip over to this side of the world, [they will see] we have our own ways of understanding the world. We can do our research in our own ways, and contribute that knowledge to the world,” Manu’atu says. “For Tongans, we were created in Tonga. We have gods, our own gods, which we created the same as the people of Israel. We have our own stories, but we are being told they’re not good enough.”

Says Tongan educator? She has a funny idea of education. Yeah, I know how I got where I am, too: Daffy Duck bought me at Reasonably Honest Dave’s for five cents and a plug of tobacco. That’s my story and better nobody tell me it’s not good enough, especially not some jumped-up geneticist. See? I’m an educator.

Australian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell agrees. “We didn’t come from anywhere. We know that our Dreamtime stories tell us we were always here, in Australia. Can this be twisted to say we came from Africa and therefore we have fewer rights to our country than white people?”

No, it can only be twisted to say you came from Africa and therefore you have more rights to your country than white people. That makes just as much sense.

Marae worker and caregiver Mere Kepa, also a researcher at Auckland University, doesn’t buy Genographic’s stated hope of improving global understanding of indigenous concerns. “Just because you know you’re related to each other, is that going to stop the Queensland police belting the shit out of Aborigines?” Kepa asks. “This is scientific imperialism. As an academic I’m not opposed to learning, but I’m tired and exhausted of learning from Western scientists that I’m sad, bad and mad and so are all my whanau and hapu and iwi.”

As an academic Kepa is not opposed to learning?? Well you could have fooled me! That sure looks like opposition to learning to me. Blind, stubborn, stupid, ill-informed, catch-phrasey, trendy, dopy, grab-any-complaint-that-comes-to-mindy, head-in-the-sand opposition to learning.

But they’re not all absurd, I’m happy to say. (Postmodernism is everywhere – it’s like mildew. It just creeps in.

Maori Aucklander Mike Stevens, an anthropologist and iwi consultant who is on the board of Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, is happy to volunteer for the project and says many Maori do not accept all oral traditions as literal truth anyway…”But I think it is something that can advance our knowledge. It needn’t destroy our faith.”…More knowledge is always empowering, says Manuka Henare, associate dean of Maori and Pacific Development at Auckland University’s business school…”If you give people the knowledge and understanding, you will find Maori people are as open-minded about these things as any others.”

Good, let’s hope someone gets busy doing that, so that the cries of scientific imperialism can fade away.

Ayaan Hrsi Ali to speak at Toronto Sharia law conference, August 12th

Press conference begins at 6:30pm.

Together with Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hrsi Ali made the 2004 film ‘Submission’ about the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. Dutch Muslims criticized the film for being disgraceful and blasphemous. Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri on November, 2nd, 2004. Ayaan now lives under police protection in a safe house in the Netherlands. Time Magazine named Ayaan one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005. Ayaan has been a Member of Parliament in the Dutch (Liberal) VVD party in the Tweede Kamer (Lower House) since January 30th 2003.

Irshad Manji and Homa Arjomand will also speak.

Irshad Manji author of the #1-bestseller, ‘The Trouble with Islam’, is based in Toronto and hosts TVOntario’s “Big Ideas.” Oprah Winfrey honored her with the first annual Chutzpah Award. Ms. magazine named her a Feminist for the 21st Century.

Homa Arjomand is the Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada. She started her campaign at Toronto in October 2003 with a handful of supporters, and today it has grown to a coalition of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists. Homa is a Toronto based transitional counselor and was a human rights activist in Iran until she was forced to flee in 1989.

About the Conference:

The Toronto Conference on ‘Sharia Law and the Globalization of Political Islam’ will be held August 12, 2005 at 7:30 pm. in the Earth Sciences Centre, University of Toronto, 1050-5 Bancroft Ave. The ten-minute film ‘Submission’ will be shown and a 30-minute question period will follow the speakers.

Tickets may be ordered by calling 416-737-9500 or by email homawpi@rogers.com. Tickets are $20, seniors and students $12. The conference is produced and sponsored by the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.

A little more on that thought. The thought that it’s not very helpful to say that difference always deserves respect, without defining what kind of difference is meant. Evasive language that leaves out the very point that is at issue, is not helpful and is not honest.

There was some of that on the Talking Politics I mentioned. I’ve been meaning to transcribe the comments I had in mind, and I finally got around to it. So – Ann McElvoy. First, on why France is not to be admired on questions of multiculturalism.

The state appropriates to itself, I think entirely wrongly, the right to tell Muslim girls that they may or may not even wear a scarf, let alone the veil on their heads, and that to me is exactly where we wouldn’t want to go.’

Left something rather large out there – making her point seem a lot stronger than it in fact is. The state tells girls they may or may not wear a scarf at state schools – and nowhere else. She neglects to mention that.

Next.

What worries me is the more difficult decisions, what do you do about people who want to live separately – I don’t think you can force them, just like pledges of allegiance, to do things they really don’t believe in, if they’re not doing you any harm, and I think that is the very difficult question that we will be faced with, it comes up again with things like the burqa – just because white Britain feels a bit uncomfortable about the burqa is that a reason to ban it.

That one’s a double prize, because there are two large omissions. ‘If they’re not doing you any harm’ – but doing me harm is not the issue. What if they are doing other people harm? What if they are doing harm to their daughters for instance? And ‘just because white Britain feels a bit uncomfortable about the burqa’ – but feeling uncomfortable about the burqa is not the issue – the issue is what harm is the burqa (arguably) doing to other people? Or to put it another way, why would anyone feel ‘a bit uncomfortable about the burqa’? If it were just a difference in dress – some embroidery, or puffy sleeves, or morris bells – would anyone feel uncomfortable? I hardly think so. No, people are ‘uncomfortable’ about the burqa for a reason, and as a matter of fact it’s a good reason, not a bad or stupid one. The damn thing stands for subordination and inferiority, therefore it makes people uncomfortable. Of course it can still be argued that it should nevertheless not be interfered with or even criticised – but it’s cheating to try to do that by ignoring crucial aspects.

Remember that old labor song – ‘Which Side Are You On’? Pete Seeger sang it – that’s the version I know. It’s a strike song, a union song, a solidarity song. Well – get out the banjo and let’s sing a few bars. Which side are we on.

Not this one.

…in northern Afghanistan in May, three women workers at a microcredit organisation (which gives loans to women to start up small businesses) were stoned to death by warlords; in India, a woman social worker in Madhya Pradesh state had her hands chopped off by a man furious because she was counselling villagers against child marriage. In Pakistan, the head of the Human Rights Commission was stripped and beaten in public after she organised a series of sporting marathons in which women could compete. (One marathon was attacked by 900 men from the Islamist alliance, armed with batons and petrol bombs.)…In Iraq, a wave of attacks on women has been carried out by the new insurgent groups. Said a 23-year-old university student: “They dropped acid in my face and on my legs. They cut all my hair off while hitting me in the face many times, telling me it’s the price for not obeying God’s wish in using the veil.”

Nothing new there. In Marjane Satrapie’s Persepolis, Marjane’s mother encounters ‘Two guys…two bearded guys…two fundamentalist bastards…the bastards, the bastards…They said that women like me should be pushed up against a wall and fucked, and then thrown in the garbage…And that if I didn’t want that to happen, I should wear the veil…’ ‘That incident,’ Satrapie comments in the next panel, ‘made my mother sick for several days.’

That was twenty-five years ago. Yet we still hear imbeciles burbling about the veil as a ‘choice.’

Which side are we on? Not this one.

Such meetings have increased as secular women lobby hard to prevent religious Shiite conservatives – the parliament’s majority – from mentioning Islam as the “primary source” of legislation in Iraq’s new constitution…Mona Noor Zazala, a Shia member of the National Assembly at the event who favors the wording, insists there is nothing to fear…Mentioning Islam in the country’s constitution is important because Islam, which most Iraqis follow, emphasizes “motherhood and obliges men to spend money on their families,” she said.

Uh huh. But the secular women weren’t buying it.

In the current social climate, where some of the women at the event had received death threats for their activism, “we are afraid to say what we think,” said the woman, who declined to give her name out of fear of retaliation. “We must fight for our rights now – in the future we might not be able to fight at all,” she said.

Even well-meaning ‘tolerance’ is not always the right side to be on.

It is not the language or aspiration of multiculturalism but of tolerance – a concept much advanced in the past few weeks – which needs to be examined. For to tolerate too often means merely to put up with. This does little justice to the task which faces Britons of every class and creed: a task, confirmed since the events of July 7 by the alarming rise of race- and faith-hatred crimes. 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.

That’s a Canon – Canon Chris Chivers of Blackburn cathedral. Well – genuine acceptance, understanding and respect of what? What kind of difference? Is it true that difference always deserves dignity? No – of course it’s not. As, surely, the Canon himself would agree as soon as anyone asked him about some blindingly obvious examples of difference. So why do people keep on endlessly recycling unhelpful bromides like that? Because they’re worried about hate-crimes, and they’re right to be worried; but surely evasion of the real difficulties doesn’t help.

There are some differences being argued over here – ‘here’ meaning all over the world, ‘here’ meaning related to this subject of the religious oppression of women and other subordinate groups (dalits for example) – that should not be tolerated, and that’s that. So it’s no good just arm-waving and saying ‘difference’ and ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’ over and over again and thinking that settles the matter – it doesn’t. Unfortunately, there are sides here, and we have to choose one.

Then there was that Nick Cohen piece answering that excommunication by Peter Wilby that I commented on last week. He criticises the same thing I did.

The least attractive characteristic of the middle-class left – one shared with the Thatcherites – is its refusal to accept that its opponents are sincere. The legacy of Marx and Freud allows it to dismiss criticisms as masks which hide corruption, class interests, racism, sexism – any motive can be implied except fundamental differences of principle. Wilby went through a long list of what could have motivated mine and similar ‘betrayals’. Perhaps we became right wing as we got older. Perhaps we wanted to stick our snouts into the deep troughs of the Tory press. Perhaps taking out a mortgage committed us to the capitalist system or having children encouraged petit bourgeois individualism of the most anti-social kind. Generously in light of the above charge sheet, he plumped for the conclusion that our restless minds just got bored with the ‘straitjacket’ of left-wing thought. We left the slog of building a better world to the decent plodders.

And not only that its opponents are sincere, but also that its opponents are in fact motivated by what they say they are motivated by: ideas, facts, thoughts, evidence, reasons. That the motivation is in fact cognitive rather than fiscal or procreative or some other stupid venal trivial factor. That’s the part that irritates me. It’s not just the smug ‘I know why you’re doing what you’re doing even if you won’t admit it so ha’ trope – although that is plenty irritating all on its own – it’s also the underlying assumption that ideas aren’t strong enough to motivate anyone. Well why wouldn’t they be? Why? Because we’re all dime-store Freuds and think every rational explanation is necessarily a mask for a desire to have sex with the dog or to eat our best friend for lunch? Let’s hope not, because surely dime-store Freudianism (and the upmarket kind too) has been well and truly discredited for some time now. Sometimes a cigar is indeed just a cigar, and a rational reason really is just a rational reason.

…when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism – Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar – and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture…Who is going to help the victims of religious intolerance in Britain’s immigrant communities? Not the Liberal Democrats, who have never once offered support to liberal and democrats in Iraq. Nor an anti-war left which prefers to embrace a Muslim Association of Britain and Yusuf al-Qaradawi who believe that Muslims who freely decide to change their religion or renounce religion should be executed.

That’s a very genuine reason to say ‘No thanks.’ A more convincing explanation is surplus to requirements.

Johann Hari had a good column the other day.

But in among the bad reasons for opposing multiculturalism – hinted at by Davis – there are some good reasons, and it is time we overcame our nervousness and heard them. I am the child of an immigrant myself, and I believe we should take more immigrants and refugees into Britain, not fewer. But it is increasingly clear that, forged with the best of intentions, multiculturalism has become a counter-productive way of welcoming people to our country. It promotes not a melting pot where we all mix together but a segregated society of sealed-off cultures, each sticking to its own.

Which used to sound good, or at least okay. Vibrant, colourful, pluralistic, all that (despite the lack of mixing, which is a contradiction that should have been glaring but mostly apparently wasn’t). Now it doesn’t sound so okay any more.

…funding for local projects – from community centres to schools – was invariably conducted on ethnic lines: a “Muslim” school there, a “white” community centre here. Nobody could bid for cash unless they were appealing to a particular “community” – rather than the community as a whole. Faith schools made the problem even worse. Places where different ethnic groups could meet and become friends, develop sexual relationships or have rows, simply did not exist. Since it was official multicultural policy that different cultures should be preserved rather than blended, spliced and interwoven, this all seemed rational. But there is another dysfunctional aspect to multiculturalism. In practice, it acts as though immigrant cultures are unchanging and should be preserved in aspic. This forces multiculturalists into alliance with the most conservative and unpleasant parts of immigrant communities.

Just so. What I’ve been saying here like a broken record. And not only as though immigrant cultures are unchanging, but also as if they are monolithic, as if every individual within each culture has exactly the same interests, needs and desires as every other. So convenient – the man wants to tell the woman and girls what to do, the woman and girls want to be told what to do. The man wants to subordinate, the woman and girls want to be subordinated. So convenient, and so very unlikely. Yet it is such an entrenched assumption. I heard it yet again – from a woman – on Talking Politics on Radio 4 on Saturday – ‘some families prefer the women not to work,’ she said. That’s a stupid way of putting it – as if families automatically spoke with one voice and wanted the same thing. Maybe everyone in a given family wants that, but you can’t just assume it – obviously. Sometimes – often – it’s simply a case of the man not allowing it. Other times it’s a case of the woman not being equipped to work because of not speaking English, not being trained, and the like, and the man keeping it that way. It’s simple-minded, blind, and sentimental to assume that locked-up women are in that situation because they want to be.

All this time, we could have been helping women and gay people from immigrant communities to enjoy the fruits of a free society. This would have created interesting and more progressive versions of Islam that would fight back against jihadism far more effectively than a thousand government initiatives or police raids. Instead, we have been inadvertently helping the conservative men who want to keep these groups in a subordinate position. We have been acting as though there is one thing called “Muslim culture”, and elderly imams or enraged, misogynistic young men are its only voice.

Bingo. Well, I do my best. I publish Maryam and Azam and Homa and Azar, and hope the major media will someday start asking them to talk on Radio 4 and write for the Guardian and the Independent. (The m.m. do at least talk to Irshad Manji a lot these days, which is definitely a start.)

A few weeks ago, it was driven home to me how wrong this is. I wrote about how the best way to defeat jihadists was to empower Muslim women, and I was inundated with e-mails from Muslim women, many explaining how the logic of multiculturalism weakened their hand.

That was this one.

The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force. In Iraq, mass protests by women stopped the governing council from introducing sharia law in 2003. In Europe and America, from Irshad Manji to my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim women are offering the most effective critiques of Islamism. The jihadists themselves know that Islamic feminism is the greatest threat to their future…

And it doesn’t help, to have multiculturalists cheering victories for the subordination of women. As one of the emails Hari got shows…

My younger sisters go to Denbigh High School [in Luton] which was famous in the headlines last year because a girl pupil went to the High Court for her right to wear the jilbab [a long body-length shroud]. Shabinah [the girl who took the case] saw it as a great victory for Muslim women … but what happened next shows this is not a victory for us. My sisters, and me when I was younger, could always tell our dad and uncles that we weren’t allowed to wear the jilbab. Once the rules were changed, that excuse was not possible any more so my sisters have now been terrified into wearing this cumbersome and dehumanising garment all day against their wishes. Now most girls in the school do the same. They don’t want to, but now they cannot resist community pressure … I am frightened somebody is going to fight for the right to wear a burqa next and then my sisters will not even be able to show their faces.

Many on the left hailed Shabinah Begum’s victory as a victory for religious freedom. I disagreed at the time, and that email makes it appear that I was more right than I wanted to be. (I don’t think it was widely known at the time that Hizb ut-Tahrir was behind the Begum case.) Sometimes ‘religious freedom’ equates to the coercion of others – so is it still freedom then? I would say no.

The Guardian on Dilpazier Aslam and his critics, part 2. Scott Burgess pointed out this article by Shiv Malik in the New Statesman.

What readers of the Guardian were not told was that Aslam is a member of the extreme Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir. Though it publicly dissociates itself from violence, Hizb ut-Tahrir is shunned by most British Muslims and banned from many mosques…My strongly held view is that members of such a group should not be allowed to write on this subject in the national press (just as the British National Party, which also claims to be non-violent, is very rarely given space), but if they do their connection should be made clear, preferably at the beginning of the article.

Seems reasonable. Let’s not ask the BNP to write think pieces, and let’s not ask Hizb ut-Tahrir either – and if we do ask them, let’s sure as hell make sure we say what their affiliation is, as opposed to keeping it a secret from the readers. But apparently the Guardian didn’t think it seemed reasonable at all at all.

How had it come about that this Guardian journalist was reporting and commenting on such events without his background being made known to readers? When I raised this with the paper, it confirmed that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir but would only say the matter was “under review”…When I approached the Guardian again, it accused me of being “irresponsible in the extreme” and said it had complained to the editor of the Independent on Sunday. As for the key questions, it said only: “This is an internal matter which is currently under review and we have nothing further to add.”

The Guardian accused Malik of being irresponsible. That’s rich.

Just last Monday the responsible Guardian reported on a Hizb ut-Tahrir conference. It did a remarkable job of it.

Tony Blair is fomenting anger and frustration in the Muslim communities by branding widely held Islamic ideas as extremist, a conference was told yesterday…”After the bombs on July 7, before the dust had settled, before the dead were removed, before any investigation, the British prime minister was pointing an accusing finger at the Muslim community.”

Yeah right. I remember that – there was Blair at Gleneagles, pointing his finger, saying ‘The Muslim community did this.’ Uh huh.

“But, regardless of the amount of provocation, we need to stand firm with our Islamic principles. The problem is more than violence. The problem is an idea that you and I carry.” Those ideas, he said, included living under sharia law within a caliphate of Islamic countries, opposing the “corrupt and dictatorial” regimes in the Middle East and central Asia and resisting occupation of Muslim lands. “According to the logic of Blair and Bush, this is terrorism.” Hizb ut-Tahrir, he said, had been banned across the Muslim world for its political radicalism.

Note the ‘living under sharia law within a caliphate of Islamic countries’ bit – what that means, of course, is not just ‘living’ under sharia law, but imposing it on everyone with the misfortune to be living within the borders of that caliphate. Just imagine how pleased and excited we would all be if the House of Commons or Congress suddenly up and established sharia as the law of the land. Well, guess what, people living in Nigeria or Pakistan or Indonesia or the Philippines or Iran or Egypt don’t all automatically want to live under sharia just by an accident of geography. As a matter of fact a lot of people in those places loathe and detest the very idea. They prefer basic human rights and secular law, oddly enough.

So that article looks depressingly peculiar and sinister in the Guardian. Would it report on a BNP conference in the same bland, neutral, anodyne tone? Have they ever reported on the BNP in such a tone?

Allen Esterson gave a link in comments to this article by Dilpazier Aslam from last January on ‘a Muslim school.’

This is Manchester Islamic high school for girls, one of the 107 independent Muslim schools criticised last week by the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, for educating pupils “with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society”…Next it is year 10 biology with Saduf Chaudhri, and the lesson is about drugs…”Why can’t you take drugs? From your own point of view, because, remember, you are Muslim,” says Chaudhri.

How’s that again? From your own point of view because you are a Muslim? That’s a contradiction, isn’t it? ‘Because you are a Muslim’ means something like ‘what is the rule on this for Muslims’ or ‘what does the Koran say on this’ – which is hardly the same thing as ‘from your own point of view.’

“Because you’re not meant to do anything that harms your body, because it’s not our body,” says one of the girls. Chaudhri flicks the overhead projection on; it’s a list of verses from the Qur’an. She reads aloud. “O you who believe. Intoxicants and gambling, [dedication of] stones, and [divination by] arrows, are an abomination – of Satan’s handwork: reject such [abomination], that you may prosper.” The girls are reminded that, not only are drugs bad for your health, they’re also bad for the next life.

Ah – bad for the next life. In other words the girls are reminded of something that is not true. They think their bodies are not their bodies, and that there is a next life which things can be bad for, and that there’s someone called Satan. Yeah, that’s what happens in religious schools, I realize that. But I don’t think it should be treated as just ordinary and acceptable and reasonable. Fairy tales are fairy tales, and they shouldn’t be taught to students as if they were true.

Remember that peculiar article in the Guardian after it fired Dilpazier Aslam? It was two weeks ago now, but I want to mumble a few belated words.

Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.

That’s peculiar stuff. There were leftwing bloggers not from the US who criticized Aslam. And why call it ‘targeting’? (To make it sound illegitimate, that’s why.) And ‘did not care for’ is a silly way to characterize the issue. And what is this ‘obsessively personalised attacks’ business? It was disagreement and criticism; it was neither obsessive, nor any more personalised than any other disagreement with and criticism of a particular commenter is, and it was not an attack. So what’s up with all the rhetoric?

These ravings were posted alongside more legitimate questions as to whether a newspaper should employ a reporter who belongs to a controversial political group linked to the promotion of anti-semitic views. Aslam’s comment piece…did not mention that the author was a member of the radical but non-violent Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, proscribed in Germany and Holland as anti-semitic.

There it is again – that word ‘radical’. Along with ‘controversial,’ which is an anodyne way of describing Hizb ut-Tahrir. That’s one reason I want to mumble a few words. I think the Guardian has that problem I mentioned the other day, about getting all confused when the word ‘radical’ turns up. Yeah, Hizb ut-Tahrir is radical, but not in the way Greens or socialists are radical. It looks to me as if the Guardian kind of thought they were. You know – angry, militant, activist, radical, sassy, boat-rocking – it’s all kind of the same thing. Well – no.

Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian…

Spends his time indoors?? Oh, come on…

Indoors-staying Burgess quotes from Private Eye’s take on the Guardian’s silly-looking hissy fit.

Nothing in the brief Guardian career of Dilpazier Aslam – even the “exclusive interview” he conducted back in March with Shabina Begum, the girl whose legal fight to wear the jilbab was backed by Hizb-ut-Tahir, the same radical group of which he himself was a member – became him like the leaving of it. When the paper belatedly decided on 22 July that his ‘continuing membership of the organisation was incompatible with his continued employment by the company’, it was not without a last shriek of defiance on its website. A lengthy rant claimed that ‘right-wing bloggers in the US were behind the targeting’ of Mr Aslam, pointing out that ‘the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed’, before mounting one of its own, on ‘Scott Burgess, a blogger who spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian’. And who was the author of this piece which sneered at bloggers for their anonymity and the speed at which they rushed to judgement on the net? ‘A staff reporter’.

The thing that Scott Burgess reports that I didn’t know, however, is that the ‘staff reporter’ byline is unusual – very unusual. I wondered about it – I certainly noticed it, because as soon as I started reading that truly ridiculous article, I wanted to know what buffoon had perpetrated it, and was a bit staggered to be unable to – but I didn’t realize how unusual it was.

In fact, a search of the Guardian archives indicates that, within the last 3 years, a total of only three stories have been published completely without attribution. Two of these involved memorial services for individuals associated with the newspaper, and one was filed from Zimbabwe by a reporter with very good reasons for anonymity.

Not the Guardian’s finest hour.

Disability studies has hit town. Actually it did that a longish time ago – this reporter may be a little behind the times. I noticed a new ‘Disability studies’ section in the University bookstore several years ago, and there are jokes about the subject in the Dictionary, which we started writing three years ago.

Now disabled people have gotten into the business of problematizing: Disability studies has arrived in academia. Of course, the medical study of disability is long-standing, but the new approach establishes an interdisciplinary field on the model of women’s, queer, and ethnic studies…”Disability studies is us looking out at the world and seeing how that looks to us.” It also critiques “how disability is represented in all kinds of texts—in literature, film, the annals of history.”

Should I be polite and serious and respectful and say I think that sounds like a good idea? But I don’t. I think it’s boring and scab-picky and whiney and trendy and tiresome.

For the past two years, Columbia has hosted a monthly seminar for area faculty and grad students. Organized by Linton and colleagues, its topics range from disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies. Just last May, the field was officially recognized as a division by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

That’s quite a range! From disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies – it’s breathtaking in its scope. And the MLA has recognized it as a division – well no wonder I don’t feel polite and respectful. If it were sociology or history, I might be, but just yet another branch of literary Theory? Er – no thanks.

Disability scholars aim to revolutionize the way disability is imagined in our culture. Rather than pathologizing individuals, they ask how society accommodates different bodies (or doesn’t). Disability, they point out, highlights the dynamic nature of identity itself: Entry into the disabled community could be a matter of an overlooked stop sign or the emergence of a lurking gene.

Cackle! Yeah, I suppose it could. Kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone – you overlook a stop sign and – run over three pedestrians, and the next thing you know, You Have Entered The Disabled Community.

The what? What community? Why is that a ‘community’? Well we know why – the MLA has just said – because there are studies programs, that’s why. If there are studies, there’s a community. Don’t fret that it seems kind of insulting and stupid and oversimplifying to assume that everyone who has some sort of ‘disability’ therefore belongs to a ‘community’ of people with some sort of disability – it may seem that way but really it’s a Liberation Movement. Or something.

Anyone who’s taken a women’s studies class or read Edward Said will be familiar with the terms of the field. The study of disability, like that of gender, race, and sexual orientation, is rooted in bodies perceived as “other.” All of these disciplines use the language of critical theory—Foucault, with his interrogations of power, the body, and pathology, is big in disability studies. And these related fields can cross-pollinate. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who teaches in the women’s studies department at Emory University, promotes the integration of feminist and disability studies.

Doesn’t that sound exciting! Doesn’t that just sound like a stimulating cross-pollinated field? I’m tempted to enroll at Emory right now, so that I can learn why feminists are disabled and disabled people are feminists and all of them will be saved by the language of critical theory.

Although disability has fruitfully integrated with other identity studies, the field has not always received a warm welcome. Alison Kafer, who teaches feminist and disability studies at Southwestern University, attributes resistance in part to funding, but on a deeper level, she notes that “women and queers and people of color have often been cast as sick. That’s how discrimination was justified.” Now those minorities are saying, “You know what—we’re not sick,” and they shun association with people still seen as defective. The ambivalence is mutual; some disability scholars want to jump from what they see as the sinking ship of identity studies. As University of Illinois at Chicago’s Lennard J. Davis pointed out in a 2004 conference paper, “We are in a twilight of the gods of identity politics, and there is no Richard Wagner to make that crepuscular moment seem nostalgic and tragic.” So disability studies has arrived, but is it too late?

Oh, I do so hope so. I do so hope identity politics and especially identity studies are on a sinking ship. I do so hope scab-picking will at last go out of fashion and people can go on to something better.

But institutionalization may not be the primary goal. As Garland-Thomson says, “We don’t necessarily need people majoring or minoring in disability studies. We need to create a system in which educated people have it as a category of understanding.” She observes that many canonical literary works have a neglected disability aspect: Ahab in Moby Dick is an amputee, Shakespeare’s Richard III is a hunchback…In studying literature—or any subject—disability is simply an additional lens at our disposal.

Yes but – so what? So the hell what? Many ‘canonical’ literary works have people with hair, too; many have people who walk around; many have food; many have travel; many have characters wearing clothes. So what? Does that mean there have to be hair and walking around and food and travel and clothes studies? What do people see through the ‘additional lens’ of disability? Especially, what do they see that requires a new division in the MLA, or section in the bookstore?

Exciting scholarship is being generated. Last March’s issue of the PMLA (the MLA’s publication) featured papers from a recent MLA conference, including “Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography” and “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies.”

Exciting? Exciting? Hoo-boy.Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow needs to get out more, or do I mean less.