Priyamvada Gopal's Double Bind

Gender Segregation and the Postmodern Politics of Despair

[M]y concern here is less with postmodernism as a slippery epistemological stance and more with its effect on our political climate and mood - its well-advertised but fictitious radicalism (which rapidly dissolves into a celebration of cultural difference), its privileging of the "local" (as against "master narratives" emphasising universal rights) and, consequently, its curious affinity with the most reactionary ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. For the two share a common ground - an unremitting hostility to the social cultural and political processes of change and knowledge and rationality, originating in the West, known as modernity. 

Haideh Moghissi quoted by Meredith Tax in her pamphlet Double Bind

 *    *    *

In August 2010, Time magazine responded to the leaking of classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan with a gruesome cover story reminding its readers of the misogyny and sadism of the Taliban. It featured the face of a young Afghan girl whose nose and ears had been cut off after she fled abusive in-laws. The caption read: "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan".

In the Guardian, a Cambridge-based academic named Priyamvada Gopal declared herself scandalised. "Misogynist violence is unacceptable," she allowed, "but...."

...we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories. Consultation with child psychologists apparently preceded Time's decision to run the image, but the magazine decided that in the end it was more important for children (and us) to understand that "bad things do happen to people" and we must feel sorry for them.

Gopal, it seems, felt emotionally blackmailed by Time's stark representation of one of Afghanistan's most terrible realities. I feel I ought to assume that some part of her understands that pre-medieval religious codes mandating the mutilation of 18-year olds are completely deplorable. But nowhere in her article could she bring herself to actually say this. For to have done so, in Gopal's mind, would have been to endorse a neo-colonialist narrative which invokes women's rights only to denigrate the "other" and to drum up support for Imperialist wars of aggression.

So, instead, she buried her concerns about the spiteful disfigurement of Afghan girls and women, and instead mounted a furious defence of Afghan culture and an equally furious denunciation of the West's alleged hypocrisy. Time's use of such an emotive image, she argued, was simply another instance of the West egregiously misrepresenting the Global South as inferior and backward:

Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burqa-clad "child-women" who are broken in body and spirit or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative.

Apparently by now oblivious to the fact that the young girl in question was - and still is - a survivor of real and horrific male violence, Gopal dismissed her image with this:

The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change.

...before concluding:

[The affluent West's] bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

And there it is. Free societies are reduced to bikini lines and talk shows even as theocratic barbarism is defended with accusations of intolerance and demands for context and nuance. Meanwhile, what this proposed "radical people's modernity" consists of or how Gopal's "ideas for real change" were to be attained remains a mystery...

Three years later, we find Gopal on the Rationalist Association website (of all places) fretting about the controversy surrounding gender segregation of public meetings organised by Islamists.

To recap: a body known as Universities UK had issued guidance recommending campuses segregate audiences by gender at the request of religious speakers. The rationale for this was that a failure to do so would preclude the speaker from appearing and would therefore violate his right to free speech. UUK were evidently concerned that defending the neutrality of public space, the equality of men and women, and the freedom to sit where one likes, might be perceived as the intolerant imposition of Western norms. The satirist behind the Jesus and Mo cartoons had his protagonists explain the Möbius-strip logic of UUK's advice like this:

So, naturally, Gopal's article begins with a long attack - not on the religiously-mandated subordination of women, but on its opponents. These awful people, we are given to understand, are the chauvinistic defenders of fraudulent and oppressive 'Western values', or what Gopal describes as "an intolerant Western 'liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou".

Singled out for particular abuse is a counter-extremism organisation called Student Rights, whose alleged double-standards (it is strongly implied but not quite stated) betray racist motives. (The Rationalist Association afforded Student Rights a right of reply, and their spokesman Rupert Sutton's patient response to Gopal's litany of insinuations and accusations can be read here).

Beyond a glancing, scornful reference to 'decent nice liberal men', principled left-wing opposition to University UK's dismal guidance is omitted, as is the involvement of what Gopal would call 'people of colour'. All the better to paint the opposition as cynical, reactionary and opportunistic, which is precisely what Gopal spends the first half of her article doing:

The battle lines were drawn once again between so-called ‘muscular liberals’ (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best) and defenders of the rights of minorities to their own customary or traditional practices.

Gopal immediately declares herself tired of this "exhausted binary" but the language with which she describes it makes it clear where her sympathies ultimately lie, and it is not with ghastly, bullying Western secularists and egalitarians.

Nonetheless, something does appear to have changed in the three years since Gopal directed her splenetic diatribe at Time magazine. Her bug-eyed loathing of the West remains undiminished, but her discomfort with the treatment of women within some 'subaltern' groups and sects seems to have increased.

Of course, once she finally gets around to tackling the issue, the tone of Gopal's article changes completely. Gone is the invective, the derision and the venom with which she attacks the campaign against UUK's advice. In its place is an almost deferential tact with which Gopal now gingerly approaches the messy business of criticising the cultural practices of the already 'marginalised' and 'othered':

I grew up in a context where gender segregation in many public spaces is common and ostensibly voluntary but far from making me comfortable with custom, it caused me and others concern [...] Are such arrangements always just ‘harmless symbols’ of community identity? Selective attacks on our communities make the job of self-analysis more difficult but we should not let our thoughts and actions be entirely determined by those we oppose.

In seeking to adopt a more critical stance without renouncing her postmodern dogma, Gopal has entangled herself in a double-bind. Her support for the underdog requires her respectfully to suspend criticism of communities she perceives as persecuted. But this seems to be colliding with a nagging suspicion that segregation by gender on the basis of patriarchal religious codes is objectively demeaning to women. And so she furrows her brows and she wrings her hands:

The fact is that challenging traditions and questioning authority are practices common to all societies; changing in response to circumstances is a human capacity and not one limited to a particular culture. It is at our peril that we, particularly women who come from non-European communities, cede or suppress that capacity in the cause of anti-racism, vital though the latter is.

This is in fact remarkably similar to the conclusion reached by a pamphlet on this very subject released by Gita Sahgal's think tank The Centre for Secular Space. The pamphlet, written by leftist American academic Meredith Tax, is entitled Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights. In its pages, Tax sets out to explore why the soi dissant anti-imperialist Western Left are prepared to find common cause with the Islamic far-right, when it is perfectly possible to oppose racism whilst also opposing regressive cultural and religious traditionalism within minority communities.

The big difference is that, having argued this, Tax goes on to put it into practice, condemning those NGOs and leftists willing to align themselves with the Islamists. Gopal, on the other hand, never gets around to actually condemning gender apartheid. How can she? Meredith Tax, Gita Sahgal and the Centre for Secular Space believe in the universality and indivisibility of human rights. Gopal appears to believe that morality and rights are culturally-specific and therefore relative. So to unequivocally condemn Islamist gender segregation requires a moral judgement she does not feel herself authorised to make. To do so is to risk promoting exactly the kind of Western cultural supremacism she most abhors.

If she starts to embrace moral objectivity and universalism, her cultural relativism will simply fall apart, and she will be forced to confront the unhappy fact that the West's democracies, while imperfect, have a lot to recommend them in terms of the liberties, rights and protections they afford their citizens. On the other hand, now that Gopal has voiced her concerns about religiously-mandated gender apartheid - weak and tentative though they may have been - she can't easily return to a relativist free-for-all in which respect for cultural difference is absolute. On the contrary, her doubts about the beliefs and practices of the Islamic far-right may multiply. So she is trapped. And the predictable upshot is dissonance and paralysis.

For all its fulminating, Gopal's article adds up to nothing more radical than a polite request that she be allowed to raise her concerns, providing they are carefully weighed and that she first reaffirm her own anti-racist credentials with a bitter tirade against the alleged agenda of The Right. Like all big political postmodern ideas, when you strip this one down it's just another prescription for agnosticism and inaction. If Gopal can't decide whether or not gender apartheid ought to be defended or condemned, then the chances of her actually doing anything about it one way or the other are nil.

The double-bind can only be resolved by agreeing to the universality of individual human rights, the axiomatic worth of liberal, democratic values and the consequent need to defend them where they exist and to support those fighting for them where they do not. This requires discarding the following faulty assumptions governing much of Western postmodern and anti-imperialist thought:

• The Muslim Right is anti-Imperialist
• "The Defence of Muslim Lands" is comparable to National Liberation struggles
• The problem is "Islamophobia"
• Terrorism is justified by revolutionary necessity
• Any feminist who criticises the Muslim Right is an Orientalist and ally of US Imperialism

"Solidarity" concludes Tax, "is the only way to cut through the double bind."

Gopal, however, will have none of this. She prefers the late Edward Said's advice: "Never solidarity before criticism". Theoretically, this is good advice, and informs Tax and Sahgal's criticisms of Amnesty's alliance with Cage Prisoners, for instance. Alas, no doubt following Said's own example, Gopal's 'criticism' amounts to accusing anyone disinclined to share her nuanced view of Islamist dogma of bad faith and racism.

On twitter, she dismissed the leftist journalist Nick Cohen's passionate and principled opposition to UUK's advice (here and here), by declaring: "I would fervently hope that nothing I say is as crude or bigoted as Nick Cohen". When asked by Cohen to elaborate she replied:

Yes, didn't think you understand. My critique comes from a very different place from yrs...Mine is not white boy muscular liberalism--zero time [for] it, makes our lives harder.

And when the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain asked if they could expect her support in future, she retorted:

When you do something for the right reason and in the right company, certainly. Not impressed with some of your current allies.

She rejects Cohen's support because he is white and male. She refuses CEMB's support because they accept Cohen's. She ignores completely the contribution of principled female activists 'of colour' like like Yasmin Alibai-Brown, Sara Khan (who received so much abuse for her position, she locked her twitter account), Gita Sahgal, Nahla Mahmoud, Pragna Patel, Marieme Helie Lucas, Yasmin Rehman and countless others - the very voices she find it expedient to claim are being silenced by the xenophobic, racist right.

Given that her exacting standards of what constitutes legitimate criticism or authentic solidarity appear to depend upon the unalterable characteristics of the speaker and not the reasonableness or otherwise of the views they espouse, it's almost comical that Gopal should cry:

Why are some women pilloried as traitors or ‘Useful Idiots’ if they express a dissenting view from that of traditionalists on such matters [as gender-segregated seating]? 

...and then immediately follow that with this:

There is no doubt that both racism and xenophobia is on the rise, with Muslims and Islam singled out for attack. It is essential to fight back.

If you aggressively peddle persecution narratives and identity politics and encourage a siege mentality, then this is what happens. Dissent will be treated with suspicion and free thought as betrayal. Open debate will, inevitably, be replaced by fearful conformity. Dissidents in migrant communities - especially women - already face considerable obstacles when it comes to speaking out, from the rigid, patriarchal values they oppose. The kind of divisive tribal narrative Gopal is selling only poisons the environment further. As Tax explains:

Any feminist in the UK or North America who raises issues of gender politics in Muslim majority countries is likely to be called an Orientalist [...] If she is white, she will be told she is colonialist; if she is a woman of colour or feminist from the Global South, she will be considered to lack authenticity. She will be accused of "essentialising" political Islam and ignoring differences within it; of lacking nuance and failing to contextualise; of having internalised ideas of Western superiority; of perpetuating binaries as progressive vs. reactionary, liberal vs conservative, secular vs fundamentalist; of being a traitor to her community and culture. 

It never seems to occur to Gopal that it is her strongly-implied argument that gender equality is peculiar to the West that best reflects the paternalistic chauvinism of Imperialism. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once argued:

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go. Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the "calamities" of progress.

There was, in fact, nothing remotely sinister about the ad hoc coalition formed to protest the UUK guidance. It was a loosely knit group of activists, writers, bloggers and secularist campaigners, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, brown and white, from both the left and the right, all of whom had decided that the principle of gender equality was worth defending for all men and women.

And with some success! As a result of the controversy and powerful writing on the subject in the Spectator and the Times, politicians from all three main political parties denounced UUK's guidance and it was hastily withdrawn.

I can only assume Priyamvada Gopal is dismayed by this development. Or at best conflicted. After all, while segregating people by gender may or may not be "problematic", UUK's retreat was a small but important victory for the 'muscular liberalism' she spent so much of her article denigrating. Gopal, incapacitated by indecision and ensnared in a postmodern double-bind of her own creation, made herself irrelevant to the discussion she claimed she wanted to have. For all I know, she may sincerely believe that her childish hostility to Western modernity and her embrace of the counter-Enlightenment are the stuff of fearless radicalism, but her views could hardly be more reactionary. As Tax remarks:

Academic postmodernism reached its zenith as part of the rightward political turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when globalised capital appeared triumphant and all hope of radical, positive change faded; it is, in short, the politics of despair.  

Wave a White Flag

Rachel Shabi and the Return of the Paul Fauristes

What, it should be govt policy to defeat 'Islamism'? Why? #bbcqt
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 23, 2013

It's somewhat alarming that anyone should still be asking entry-level questions at this late date, let alone an experienced broadsheet journalist who specialises in Middle East commentary, but there it is. More alarming still, Shabi's perplexed tweet was sent during a discussion on BBC Question Time about the implications of Lee Rigby's horrifying murder the previous day, apparently at the hands of Islamist assassins.

On the afternoon of 22 May, Rigby, a 25 year old drummer in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, had been knocked down by a car in broad daylight, stabbed with knives and hacked with a meat cleaver. An attempt was then made to decapitate his corpse before it was dragged into the middle of the road and displayed for all to see. His alleged killers, whose hands were still wet with their victim's blood, then remained at the scene until they were finally shot and taken into custody by the police.

The day after the Question Time broadcast, Shabi trailed her own appearance on Sky News to discuss the Woolwich atrocity with a series of tweets, including this one:

Told Sky: if woman in #Woolwich brave enough to ask armed killer why he did it; we need to be brave enough to hear reply
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

For reasons I'll come back to, I find Shabi's comparison to be fantastically ill-judged. But I happen to agree that we ought to listen to the alleged perpetrators in a crime of this kind. Not least because it will help to determine whether this is a simply a meaningless if spectacularly savage act of random violence, or whether there is an ideology underpinning it which means it qualifies as a political act. Because if it's the latter, a strategy needs to be formulated aimed at defeating such a toxic ideology and protecting society from the barbarous fanaticism of its adherents.

The brave woman to whom Shabi refers is Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, a passer-by who confronted one of the men and was allegedly informed that Rigby had been killed because, as a British soldier, he had killed Muslims. Further rambling testimony was delivered into the cameraphone of another bystander by his alleged co-conspirator:

… Sura at-Taubah — many, many ayat [Qur'anic verses] throughout the Qur'an that, we must fight them as they fight us, an eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth. We, I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our lands, our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.

Over at zenpundit.com, commentary on Sura at-Taubah or Sura 9 is cited as follows:

It should also be mentioned that this surah does not start with ‘Bismillah’ as do all other surahs in the Qur’an, because ‘Bismillah’ is an assurance of protection and mercy and as per report of Ali (RAA) this surah was revealed with a sword in its hand, and thus could not have the assurance of peace and mercy for the disbelievers.

The author also points out that Sura 9 contains the notorious so-called "verse of the sword" or Sura 9.5 which instructs the faithful to:

...fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).

Relevant, I would have thought, all things considered. But Shabi seemed curiously reluctant to acknowledge any of the above during her Sky News interview. Instead, she strongly implied that the real victim of this attack was not a young father and his surviving family, but rather Britain's Muslim Community. Nor were the true aggressors the agents of a radical religio-political ideology as conventional wisdom supposed; if we look deeper, Shabi pressed, we will discover as she had that responsibility for the carnage in Woolwich actually lay with the foreign and domestic policies of Western democracies.

She didn't allow herself to be detained by condemnation of the bloodstained suspects even as they threatened her own life and safety and demanded the removal of her democratically-elected government. Presumably she felt that, as members of an embattled minority, they had enough on their plates. Indeed, Shabi had even gone so far as to publicly chastise others on the day of the Rigby murder for expressing condemnation of their own. She could do this because she had grasped something that others apparently had not: context.

What was of paramount importance, she explained, was that we do not use this incident to misrepresent Islam by conflating "terms such as Islam, Islamist, Islamism and terrorism so they all come to mean the same thing". This, she declared, as her sense of perspective deserted her, would be not only "nonsensical" but "offensive"and contribute to rising levels of anti-Muslim bigotry.

Shabi was then shown a picture of the victim and his young son and was invited to share in the revulsion that the anchor suggested was uniting others. But Shabi appeared unmoved. Instead she made some perfunctory remarks of the "yes, yes, of course but..." variety, before continuing:

I think we need to be really careful not to single out or make the Muslim community in Britain responsible or somehow accountable; put the onus on them and kind of "You sort it out" because, y'know, this is a collective problem and we need to have a collective shared approach. And one of the things we can do in this shared approach is actually to own up to the obvious correlation between British foreign policy and the violence that we've seen on our streets in the last few days. And British security officials have been for some time warning about the consequences of British foreign policy in the Middle East and the kind of repercussions it would have on British soil. And I think it's really important that we have this conversation openly and honestly because if we don't then that conversation will go elsewhere and it will be used as fuel by extremists.

"But," protested the anchor, "Is now the time to have this conversation? The government has made it very clear that nothing justifies an attack like this." Unfazed, Shabi replied:

Well, there's a very big difference between justification and understanding. There is of course no justification for any sort of act of terror, but, y'know, we do need to listen to the justifications. And if a woman in Woolwich is brave enough to stand and talk to an armed killer and ask him why he did it, then we need to be brave enough right now to listen to what his answer is.

The difference between "justification" and "understanding" is indeed big. Or can be. That is, until or unless one realises that the understanding Shabi urges in this case refers not to the murderous ideology the alleged criminals voluntarily espouse, but to their ostensible grievances. Grievances with which, as it so happens, Shabi has considerable sympathy.

I say "ostensible grievances", because Islamism's intellectual founding fathers Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Abul A'la Maududi made it quite clear that their aggressively politicised brand of Islam was not a liberation theology in any progressive sense, but a deeply reactionary, supremacist theocratic imperialism which sought to establish the unchallengeable global primacy of Islam and the subordination of men and, especially, women beneath the totalitarian authority of the Sharia. As Ghaffar Hussein of anti-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, reminded us back in 2008:

Grievances are viewed [by Islamists] as opportunities because they can be exploited and manipulated for the sake of furthering the cause. The grievance argument also gives Islamists the chance to cloud their political agenda in public and use it as something to hide behind when they feel the heat. Therefore, to suggest that grievances cause radicalisation plays into Islamist hands and allows them to present a more acceptable version of their position in public discourse.

I have no reason to suspect that Rachel Shabi has any genuine sympathy with totalitarian religious ideologies, or indeed extremism of any kind. And yet the arguments she advanced on Sky News with respect to the role of UK foreign policy in this terrible crime are barely distinguishable from those offered by Anjem Choudary when he had appeared on Newsnight the previous evening. The dissonance produced by the collision of her liberal beliefs with her ad hoc reactionary reasoning had entangled her arguments in an incoherent bind, forcing her to firstly claim there was no justification for Rigby's murder, before immediately claiming there were justifications plural, and that we ought to be listening to them with a view to reassessing our nation's foreign policy. How has an intelligent, liberal person like Shabi managed to talk herself into such a position? And why?

Pondering European hostility to Israel in his 2003 polemic Terror and Liberalism, the American liberal essayist Paul Berman made an interesting and, prima facie, counter-intuitive observation. He noticed that European outrage at the behaviour of Israel tended to rise and fall, not in accordance with the brutality or otherwise of occupation policy and the corresponding level of suffering experienced by Palestinians, but in correlation with incidences of Palestinian terrorism. He theorised the following explanation for this odd phenomenon:

[Palestinian] suicide bombings produced a philosophical crisis among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world - a crisis for everyone whose fundamental beliefs would not be able to acknowledge the existence of pathological mass political movements. The protests against Israel, by putting the onus for suicide terror on Israeli shoulders, served a rather useful purpose from this point of view. The protests explained the unexplainable. [TaL, p. 143]

Six years later, the conservative American journalist Christopher Caldwell reappraised Berman's theory in his own polemic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe and found that he concurred. "Without quite realising what they were doing," Caldwell wrote, "Europeans tended to blame Israel for the terrorist violence committed against it":

Suicide bombing had to be about an unbearable injustice. If it was not, it was a mere homicidal death cult. For a continent scarred by the homicidal cults of the twentieth century that was an unbearable thought. Europeans became more interested in the causes of terror than in terrorism itself. The more Israelis the bombers killed and the more ruthlessly they did it, the more public opinion shifted against Israel....Berman's view sounded eccentric when he advanced it, but he has been vindicated. European hostility towards Israel has diminished since the building of a secure wall between Israel and the West Bank - which has not altered the justice or injustice of Israeli occupation, but which has dramatically reduced the level of suicide bombing. [RotRiE, p. 216]

I would add that it is not just the scars of totalitarianism which make Europeans recoil from the idea of irrationalist ideologies. The idea that such pathological ideas are embedded in the hearts and minds of the wretched of the earth capsizes the entire post-colonial narrative, the desperate defence of which has forced its apologists to take refuge behind increasingly ludicrous arguments from cultural relativism and moral equivalence. It is for this reason that they reserve a particularly vicious hatred for plain-spoken, clear-minded dissidents such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mona Eltahawy and Maryam Namazie who expose their hypocrisy by testifying with passion and clarity to the moral turpitude of many of the so-called resistance movements lionised by the Anglo-American Left.

Shabi believes herself to be a far more honest and courageous speaker of truth to power than any of the above, and it is her nobility and bravery we are enjoined to emulate. It is she who possesses the necessary perspicacity, the developed appreciation of nuance and the empathy for the plight of the dispossessed which she implies is lacking in her chauvinist opponents. But when one strips away the rhetoric, what her arguments actually recommend is the antithesis of courage; it is appeasement. Objectively, Shabi wishes to give anyone with the inclination to use violence to intimidate the West's electorates and their governments the final say when it comes to policymaking.

Berman had some interesting things to say on the subject of appeasement as well, finding a useful parallel between the contemporary anti-war left's refusal to correctly identify pathological Islamic fascism and the corresponding unwillingness of the French Socialists' Paul Faure faction to understand the true character of National Socialism as the Nazi threat gathered.

The Paul Fauristes, Berman reminds us, were no fans of Hitler. They were, after all, at opposite ends of the political spectrum; as far apart one might think as Rachel Shabi and Anjem Choudary. Nevertheless, at the same time they were terrified by the prospect of further European conflict. They concluded, like contemporary Europeans, that they were not prepared to accept the notion that Nazism was a cult of mayhem, and that a rationalisation of Nazi rhetoric and policy - any rationalisation - would have to be constructed to explain what was happening to Europe. And so in Berman's words, the Paul Fauristes "grew thoughtful".

After all, they wondered, was it not unfair and morally reductive to demonise the Nazi party in monochromatic terms? Hadn't Germany been badly treated at Versailles? Weren't the German people suffering? Wasn't it important to locate common ground? Wasn't conciliation a price worth paying to avoid another continent-wide bloodbath? And although this hysterical stuff about the Jews was rather distasteful, was there not a difference between the legitimate criticism of the ways in which some - or even most - Jews behaved and outright anti-Semitism? Weren't some of those who favoured a confrontation with Germany Jewish? And as wealthy financiers, did some of them not stand to benefit from such a conflict? And on and on and on. And yet:

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they took pride in their anti-war instincts. They regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations - the truest danger facing France. This danger did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally. The truest danger came from warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself, as well as from the other great powers. [p. 125]

Mutatis mutandis, when Shabi used the word "lunacy" in connection with Woolwich two days later, it was not to describe those who had pitilessly butchered an innocent man in a crowded London street; she used it instead to describe the opinions of The Observer's Nick Cohen, who had written a hawkish article on the subject to which she took exception.

There is of course no question that the two individuals suspected of Lee Rigby's revolting murder present anything like the threat to Western democracies presented by Nazi Germany. The fact that Salafi Jihadis are reduced to the kind of squalid crime committed in Woolwich is, I suspect, an indication of the parlous state of disrepair into which the campaign for global jihad has latterly fallen. But as the controversies over the Danish cartoons and the Innocence of Muslims showed, it can still be mobilised to inspire fear and cowardice in those, like Shabi, predisposed to submit to its illiberal demands.

Other countries are not so fortunate. As the Middle East and North Africa see their secular despots fall to popular revolutions, Sunni Islamism is rising in its place. Pakistan and Afghanistan are in danger of being torn to pieces by jihadi violence. Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq and other countries across MENA are trying to cope with Islamist insurgencies of varying kinds. It is looking increasingly probable that when the dust finally settles on the Syrian catastrophe, that country will find itself governed by Islamists. And in Iran, a deeply anti-Semitic and oppressive Shia theocracy is defiantly pressing ahead with nuclear enrichment. Even Turkey, previously staunchly secular, is moving in an increasingly conservative direction under Erdoğan's AKP.

So what of the Shia, Ahmadis, Copts, atheists and secularists, and the gays and women who are finding themselves increasingly threatened by theocratic reaction in the Middle East and beyond? What scars have they inflicted upon their Salafist oppressors that explains away their persecution? If the Jews have brought Islamist hatred upon their own heads through the occupation of Palestinian land, then what have, say, Muslim women in Gaza and Iran done to deserve their subordination?

Alas, the ideological pacifism of the Paul Fauristes, so deeply embedded inside the heads and hearts of today's isolationist Anglo-American liberal Left, provides no intelligible answer. Instead, perversely fortified by the gory horrors religious fanaticism and violence have visited upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of their botched liberations, the pacifists declare themselves vindicated. And their demands for appeasement only escalate with every bookstore firebombed, every embassy torched, every innocent victim of fascistic terror and every blood-curdling threat uttered.

Liberals like Rachel Shabi and the new Paul Fauristes are able to advocate surrender to fascism because they refuse to recognise it for what it is. Instead they re-describe it as justice and simply screen out any evidence to the contrary. Having once been unwilling to identify and confront unreconstructed medieval savagery, they are now apparently incapable of doing so, even when it is staring them in the face. "Enough!" they cry. "Let them have what they want!"

*   *   *

PS: As I was putting the finishing touches to the above post, The Guardian published an article by Rachel Shabi in which she attempted to elaborate on the points she made in her Sky interview. I believe  her piece, a laundry list of bitter recriminations about Western foreign policy and deeply disempowering arguments from Muslim victimhood, bears out what I have argued above. I will make just one additional point in response: I find it faintly amusing when journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Shabi use their platforms at a broadsheet paper to argue that their views are being stifled and silenced. This is simply further evidence of the narcissism that paradoxically undergirds their self-hatred. What they mean to say is that their advice is not allowed to inform policymaking. The most plausible reason for this is that their arguments rest on the catastrophic error of judgement I've described above and it is an error that those entrusted with our safety, thankfully, feel disinclined to adopt.

PPS: It's worth noticing that in neither her Sky interview, nor her Op-Ed piece does Shabi attempt to present any evidence for the causal link between Western policy and Islamist terror she alleges, and on which the entire 'blowback' argument depends. It is instead the result of an intuition that insists such a link is self-evident. Even if it did exist, I still don't believe it would justify the kind of capitulation Shabi demands. But as it so happens, there is some fairly persuasive evidence to the contrary. On that score, this closely argued and well-supported post over at the Anonymous Mugwump blog makes for thought-provoking reading.

Blinkered Vision

The Burqa and the Civil Libertarian Left

NOTE: The following essay deals with face-covering - ie: the burqa and the niqab (see below). For the sake of simplicity, use of either term here can be taken to mean both.

BURQA: Covers the entire body and hides the eyes behind a grill.
HIJAB (headscarf): Covers the hair and neck, but not the face.
NIQAB (face veil): Covers the whole head except the eyes. 

*     *     *

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires -- what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These stark reflections on a life behind the veil in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir-cum-polemic Nomad were occasioned, not by a trip to Saudi Arabia or Iran, but by a drive down Whitechapel Road where Britain's largest Muslim community live in the shadow of the notorious East London Mosque. Veiling, and the oppression of women that the practice in its most extreme forms unavoidably entails, is becoming increasingly common amongst Muslim women living in free societies, despite the fact that the progressive struggle for women's rights in such societies has resulted in laws designed to promote and safeguard gender equality.

For the relativist Left this is cause not for outrage but for celebration. They argue that the growing prevalence of veiling, including face- and full body-covering, is evidence not of oppression, but of our society's broad-mindedness and cultural diversity. Since Western laws and culture make no such demand on women, adoption of regressive dress codes can only be a matter of free and individual choice. To circumscribe or even criticise such a choice is not only illiberal, but evidence of cultural imperialism, bigotry, 'Islamophobia' and intolerance. When the French lower house passed its ban on face-covering in 2010, The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting voiced her disgust:

It is not difficult to see the racism which permeates this debate. It is about assertion of identity – under the soubriquet of protecting "our way of life" – and crucial to that is forcing a choice: do you subscribe or don't you? Sign up or get out. But such choices are notoriously slippery. Who gets to decide what our way of life is exactly?

One of the most trenchant critics of this kind of incoherent, woolly thinking has been the progressive writer and journalist Nick Cohen. Some of his most powerful writing has been devoted to attacks on the pieties of multiculturalism and its apologists, who would tolerate intolerance in the narcissistic belief that what mattered most was the ostentatious display of their own open-mindedness. In a particularly scathing article for Standpoint on the subject of liberal attitudes to religious misogyny, he wrote:

People on the receiving end of repression notice the air of moral superiority as soon as Western liberals refuse them their support out of "respect" for the culture which intimidates them. Liberal relativists are in this respect the true successors of their imperialist ancestors. Where once Westerners denied rights to lesser breeds without the law who were racially unsuited to enjoy liberty, now they deny them to diverse breeds without the culture who are unsuited by accidents of history and geography to exercise the freedoms white Westerners take for granted or handle the complex arguments white Westerners take in their stride.

In other words, if the debate over, say, minority women's rights is being permeated by racism, it is the racism of impoverished expectations produced by the cultural relativism of people like Bunting (who, contrary to her declaration, finds this very difficult to see indeed). Cohen argues that these "weird twists in liberal opinion" are the product of fear. Fear, in part, of "provoking accusations of racial or religious prejudice".

The Burqa and the Question of Religious Freedom 

But the peculiar quarrel over whether or not to ban the burqa has produced some weird twists of its own. In the middle of a discussion about the reactions of the political left and right to the spread of political Islam in Europe in his blistering free speech polemic You Can't Read This Book, Cohen suddenly writes the following:

[T]he Sarkozy government banned women from wearing the burqa - a direct assault on freedom of choice and freedom of religion.

I have to confess I was slightly stunned by this declaration. Even allowing for his hostility to State interference in matters of individual freedom, it is not a conclusion I would have expected Cohen to arrive at without difficulty. Not least because in the Standpoint article excerpted above, he had also written this:

For all the qualifications, the stubborn fact remains that mainstream opinion does not consider the oppression of women a pressing concern when it is done in the name of culture or religion, particularly in the name of once-subordinate cultures and religions. The misogyny they generate does not move hearts or stir passions.

Yet his indictment of a ban on the burqa is as definite and unequivocal as it is pithy. The emphatic terseness with which the case is stated and concluded gives the clear impression that the question is a straightforward one undeserving of lengthy consideration. Two pages later, he writes:

Liberal societies treated the Islamist wave with a disastrous mixture of authoritarianism and appeasement. On the one hand, they passed terror laws that conflicted with basic liberties, banned burqas and imposed new immigration controls....

...and, with that, the ban is bundled up with two other highly contentious issues, stamped "right-wing authoritarianism" and simply thrown away. The burqa is not, as I recall, mentioned again. To be fair, it is not central to the thesis of Cohen's book, which is an impassioned monograph about censorship in the internet age. But, having introduced the subject, his casual dismissal of it and his partial defence of the burqa on the grounds of religious freedom took me aback.

To take Cohen's two main objections in reverse order, it is highly dubious whether a burqa ban constitutes an infringement on religious freedom at all, still less a direct assault. Admittedly, the pitiless subjugation of women by Wahhabist doctrine is invariably justified by a medieval theology that demands submission of people to God, and of women to men. But it is in fact a cultural practice from the Byzantine and Persian Empires pre-dating Islam, designed specifically as a mark of ownership at a time when women were considered the private property of men. There is no explicit scriptural justification to be found in either the Qur'an or the Sunna, either for enforcing or 'recommending' the covering of the female face. Nor, for those who care about this sort of thing, is there any agreement on the subject amongst contemporary Islamic scholarship.

But even if there were such a scriptural justification, and even if it were the only verse clear and unequivocal enough for everyone to agree on its meaning and applicability, it should make no difference to the question of its legality in a secular society. Freedom of religious belief and opinion ought to be inviolable - no-one should be persecuted for their theological or metaphysical views, no matter how absurd. But the parameters of what constitutes legal or legitimate freedom of religious practice must be determined on a uniform basis by secular human (and, where applicable, animal) rights law.

Laws already exist proscribing cultural and religious practices such as genital mutilation/cutting of the unconsenting female young, irrespective of how fervently the parents may believe it to be necessary. And polygamy remains illegal, irrespective of its supposed justification or whether or not the adults involved have freely consented. Such restrictions are designed to uphold equality and universal human rights, and Cohen has not to my knowledge described either as a threat to religious freedom. On the contrary, he has expressed his outrage (which I share) that enforcement of the law banning FGM is so lamentably lax, and he has been justifiably caustic in his condemnation of the soft racism lurking behind this failure.

The confinement of the niqab to women - and only women - in austere Salafist sects is persuasive evidence, not of free and independent choice, but of conformity to the untestable demands of misogynistic - and invariably male - religious and cultural authorities. It is on the recommendation of such authorities that Muslim women are persuaded that such an oppressive degree of 'modesty' is required of them by her faith. And it on the advice of such authorities that any suitably pious husband deserving of her 'purity' will grow to expect this requirement of her, in perpetuity.

Given the superstitious hold mosques, churches and synagogues have on their followers and the uniquely coercive power it affords their authority, it must be permissible for the State to limit the sacrifices they require of their adherents, so as to protect the vulnerable from abusive clerical indoctrination. If religious doctrine can persuade adherents to blow themselves to pieces on the London transit system in the hope of finding paradise, then it follows that others are also vulnerable to the idea that passively accepting a life of subjugation and misery will reward them in death. As Saudiwoman reported on her blog:

The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife). These are the women “choosing” to cover, brainwashed into living to die.

The Multicultural Disaster and the Matter of Choice 

The question of whether a ban on the burqa is an unacceptable restriction of individual choice is a more complicated one. For some Muslims, individual choice is already hugely circumscribed by the illiberal cultural and religious demands I've just described. These restrictions on individual liberty are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of multiculturalism.

The British multicultural model was not designed. Rather, it evolved as an ad hoc policy response by local authorities to a knot of unforeseen problems produced by mass migration. The policy was expedient, but its demand that all communities be respectful of one another's cultural peculiarities was - theoretically at least - also well-intentioned.

But by homogenising groups and elevating respect for cultural difference over individual rights, multiculturalism has inadvertently imprisoned many Muslim migrants and their children inside precisely the same regressive value-systems they came to the West to escape - powerfully coercive cultural and religious traditions of honour and shame, the burden of which falls most heavily and disproportionately upon women. For Muslims in this situation, dress codes are not remotely a matter of free choice, but of conditioning and enforcement by families, communities and religious leaders. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali and countless others have discovered, rebellion against kin, clan and culture can exact an intolerable cost, from ostracism and beatings to murder.

The complication is that not everyone who adopts the niqab is a hostage to culture. Increasingly, educated young Muslim women are covering in defiance of their parents' secularism and religious liberalism. If this is an act of masochistic self-abnegation, then it is one undertaken freely.

The reasons why anyone would choose to do such a thing are complex, but a large part of the catalyst for this somewhat sinister phenomenon can be located in a second, no less disastrous, consequence of state-sponsored multiculturalism: that it unintentionally cleared political space for the rise of the Islamic far-right.

In his brilliant 2010 polemic, From Fatwa to Jihad, writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik observes that during the 1970s, young irreligious Asians had aligned themselves with the anti-racist Asian Youth Movements and secular, class-based organisations such as the SWP. But in the 1980s, in response to short-termist policy initiatives designed to diffuse racial tensions, they suddenly found themselves expected and incentivised to organise and self-identify as Muslims. With nimble opportunism, radical Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizb ut-Tahrir stepped into the breach and provided a political framework within which to forge a new identity and sense of belonging.

Like Wahhabists, Islamists are Salafi (or fundamentalist) Muslims, who ostensibly advocate a return to the example set by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. But while Wahhabism represents an austere, literalist interpretation of Islamic faith and culture, Islamism represents its aggressively politicised variant, animated by contemporary goals and grievances. While Wahhabism demands separation and withdrawal from Western society, Islamism demands confrontation and overthrow. To describe Islamism as a far-right ideology is to flirt with euphemism. It is more correctly described as fascistic - totalitarian, supremacist, imperialist, sectarian, misogynistic, gay-hating and pathologically anti-Semitic. In short, it has no redeeming features. At all.

(It is, by the way, a rather marvellous irony that, while Islamist mosques, communities, parties, bookshops and think-tanks are almost exclusively funded by Saudi Arabian petrodollars, much of that money is spent preaching hatred of the equally loathsome Saudi regime for its alliance with America.)

But Islamism has been extremely adept at exploiting liberal freedoms and areas of cultural sensitivity as a means of furthering its agenda. In his short, riveting memoir The Islamist, former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist Ed Husain offers an object example of this process. As a boy, he rejected the secular, spiritual Islam of his parents and fell, almost without realising it, into the arms of the far-right. The Islamists he encountered were not pious men fired by religious fervour, but angry, confused men and women in search of identity. Most of them, he reports, had little or no knowledge of the Qur'an. Others openly took drugs and used pornography (activities to which I have no objection, incidentally, but which are rather at odds with adherents' professed asceticism and piety), and energies were channeled not into theology and scriptural exegeses, but into single-minded grievance-mongering and a fanatical hatred of the West and all its works.

In this environment, Muslim women and converts radicalised by Islamism's ruthlessly efficient recruiting drives on university campuses began to adopt increasingly strict dress codes as a sign, not of religious observance, but of political defiance and cultural hostility. Commenting on his observations of the corresponding spread of face-covering in Canada, Tarek Fatah, author and founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, flatly told the Calgary Herald that:

The burqa and the niqab is the political uniform of the regiments of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a fascist, supremacist organization. You can’t wear a swastika today and not be a Nazi, and the niqab is the swastika of the Muslim Brotherhood. Every woman who wears a burka by choice in the West is a supporter of Islamic fascism, believes in jihad and desires the implementation of sharia law and the destruction of Western civilization. There is not one of these women who will say that they are against sharia and they’re against jihad. So, we’re dealing with a dress code of a fascist organization that has in its gun-sights, the West.

Whenever the subject of the burqa ban is brought up, it is Islamists who are the burqa's noisiest defenders and whose outraged cries of persecution and 'Islamophobia' seem to catch the ear of the relativist Left, postmodern Western feminists and civil libertarians. Islamist niqabis announce that the burqa is not a symbol of their oppression, but a symbol of their empowerment and of a kind of 'feminism' that empties the term of all coherent meaning. They vow to disobey laws proscribing it, and if they are arrested for doing so, they present themselves as martyrs to a liberalism they unapologetically despise and are sworn to overthrow. For good measure, and unencumbered by a sense of irony or humour, they then righteously denounce the West for its racism and intolerance. In the hands of Islamists, face-covering is a crude instrument of cultural warfare to which Muslim women are so much cannon-fodder.

A few - those with the strength of character to repudiate Islamist values as Ed Husain eventually did - may leave without fearing for their lives as those ensnared in monocultural ghettos often must. But Islamist sects, like all cults, maintain their control by fostering dependence through indoctrination and by isolating their adherents from an outside world they demonise. For those women unable to extricate themselves, a glimpse of the grotesque subordination awaiting them once the frisson of youthful rebellion wears off can be found in novelist Hanif Kureishi's account of a visit to the home of Farid Kassim, a co-founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir's UK chapter:

Four women brought in the food. They came into the room backwards, bent over, so we could not see their faces. I have never seen that anywhere else.

The decision to adopt the niqab is not so much a matter of exercising free choice as renouncing it. Just as when an electorate votes for an Islamist government, it is almost certainly the last vote they will ever cast, so a woman adopting a burqa is asked to forswear choice and to exchange a life of independence for one of servility. Inevitably Islamist women find they have become apologists for their own oppression and, disgracefully, for the oppression of other Muslim women denied their freedom to choose.

So the question of choice presents a problem for liberal universalists: does the right to freely adopt the burqa in the first instance trump the need to protect and emancipate - if necessary by recourse to State intervention - those compelled to wear it?

Kenan Malik had a stab at addressing this question when he argued against a State ban on the burqa in the New Humanist. Like Cohen, Malik is no relativist. From Fatwa to Jihad is a lucid and thoughtful examination of the West's response to Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair. But it is also a sturdy defence of Enlightenment universalism from the pincer threat of Western relativism and reactionary Islamism. Malik shares Nick Cohen's dismay at the concessions made by open societies to theocratic fascism in the name of fear and sensitivity. But, unlike Cohen, Malik stutters when it comes to the burqa.

[I]s a ban not necessary to protect women from being forced to wear the burqa? In countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes. In democratic countries, the law already protects citizens from being harmed or coerced by others. It should go no further, especially as evidence suggests that in Europe most women wear the burqa of their own volition.

This pretzel of an argument is completely foreign to the clear-minded reasoning of his book, and in its convoluted logic I detect dissonance. He asks what is to be done about those coerced in free societies. He then shifts the argument to the treatment of women in Gulf theocracies, before returning - not to those forced to wear the burqa whose fate is supposed to be under discussion - but to those he fears may be asked by the State to remove it.

The additional argument that laws already exist in democracies to protect citizens from coercion sidesteps precisely what is at issue: that some Muslim women are being coerced in spite of these laws and in spite of others supposed to guarantee gender equality. Who speaks for them?

Contrast Malik's reasoning to that of American feminist and anti-theist Ophelia Benson, who back in July 2009, told the New Statesman:

One reason I don't flat-out oppose [a ban] is because community pressure can force other women and girls to wear the hijab or the burqa, and from that point of view a ban is like any other law that creates a level playing field. If no one can wear the burqa on the street, then no one will be forced to wear it on the street. This is hard on women and girls who want to wear it but good for women and girls who don't want to. If I have to choose which should be helped, I choose the latter.

Malik's position, conversely, requires him to choose the former and abandon the latter. There is no need to divert the discussion into the Arabian peninsular when debating the human rights of women in European democracies. But having done so, the equivalence he asserts is a false one. A theocratic state imposing a uniform and dehumanising dress code on half of its population in the name of gender segregation and female subjugation is not comparable to a democratic state which proscribes a single item of clothing in the name of gender equality and female emancipation. To suggest that it is paddles into the very relativist swamp Malik's reasoning is intended to avoid.

In fact, his parallel invites a different question: if we deplore the oppression of women by political and religious sects in the Gulf, why should we tolerate the same oppression by those same sects in the democratic West? What does freedom gain exactly by allowing the flourishing of Saudi Arabian and Yemeni microcosms in Amsterdam, Paris and London? 

Infringements upon individual choice in free societies, although thankfully exceptions rather than the rule, are not unheard of, provided a persuasive utilitarian justification can be offered. The ban on the freedom to undress completely is an infringement upon personal liberty but has not resulted in a slippery slope towards State-sponsored sartorial fascism. Nor is it generally regarded as coercive, even though the freedom to be naked in public has been massively curtailed for a minority who like that kind of thing. If an exception can be made at one extreme, then there can be no 'on principle' objection at the other extreme where a mode of dress obliterates the identity of its wearer entirely.

Liberalism and Fascism 

One of the most imposing and eloquent liberal opponents of a ban on the burqa I have come across is academic and blogger Norman Geras, one of the co-architects of the Euston Manifesto. He has written considerably more on the subject than either Malik or Cohen and has adopted a particularly inflexible line on the issue. When a Muslim student in Quebec was faced with exclusion from classes for refusing to reveal her face in accordance with a new provincial law, Geras described the ultimatum as "an act of rank, crass illiberalism".

As far as I know, Geras has not made a standalone case of his own. However, he has been assiduous in quietly patrolling the subject, posting carefully reasoned objections of varying lengths to pro-ban arguments offered by Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Kamm, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mona Eltahawy, who found herself accused of 'Burqa Leninism'. (Given that it was the French ban she was defending, 'Burqa Jacobinism' might have been more apposite.)

He even took issue with blog posts by A. Jay Adler and Alice Thomson, both of whom share his overall view that a State ban on face-covering is undesirable. 

Geras's approach to the subject is coolly rational almost to the point of frigidity, and painstaking in its attention to semantic detail. His objection to Thompson, for instance, is entirely concerned with the question of whether or not she is justified in describing facial expressions as being "crucial" to personal interaction rather than simply "very important" (conclusion: she is not).

Which is not to trivialise or gainsay the importance of this approach. Clarity of language and calm rationality are essential to the constructive discussion of ideas, particularly in a debate as emotive as this one. However, reading his blogs on the subject, I couldn't shake the suspicion that the micro-management of his own position's defences betrayed a disabling myopia.

This suspicion appears to be confirmed by an astonishing remark Geras makes in response to Christopher Hitchens. In his piece for Slate in support of the French ban, Hitchens had written:

Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity. I do not deny the right of the KKK to take this faith-based view, which is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I might even go so far as to say that, at a rally protected by police, they could lawfully hide their nasty faces. But I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into the bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to. 

To which Geras responded:

'What about the Ku Klux Klan?' Christopher asks. What about them? Why are they relevant? OK, they also cover their faces. But, leaving aside the issue of how that should be dealt with in terms of the permissibility or otherwise of public displays, why aren't the differences between the Ku Klux Klan's reasons for covering their faces and the reasons of Muslim women more important than the similarities? In one case, we're talking about a type of political uniform and its use in the spreading of hatred, and in the other case... we aren't.

Hitchens's analogy between Christian neo-Nazism and Islamofascism is drawn with unpardonable sloppiness, but its intention is not obscure. That Geras misses it, or simply disregards it as so much paranoid hysteria, is indicative of the degree to which he is prepared to accept Islamism's preferred narrative - that the debate over the burqa ban is a straightforward quarrel between the State and the freedom-loving individual. It is in fact a quarrel between the secular State and an Islamist ideology that seeks to usurp its authority, and to do so using the mechanisms of free societies and the language of liberty and choice to advance an agenda intended to dominate and enslave.

In Islamism's rejection of integration in favour of belligerent separatism, the burqa is not just a tool and symbol of subjugation and control; it is a crude instrument of gender apartheid and one aspect of a deliberate campaign to create sex-segregated societies within our own, also evidenced by the demand for parallel Sharia jurisdiction and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals; the increase in faith schools; the demand for separate hospitals and beaches and so on. And I do not believe that an Islamist challenged in a moment of candour would disagree.

If there is an assault on individual liberty going on here, it comes from Islamist ideology, and from those who preach and practice it. It is an assault against which the burqa ban is intended as a defence. An assault, first and foremost, on Muslim women; then on Muslims; then on Western society as a whole, the tolerance and pluralism of which Islamism sets out first to exploit, then to disfigure and destroy. Speaking on Canada's Sun News Network, Tarek Fatah could barely contain his exasperation:

[The burqa] is a symbol of Islamofascism which is showing its middle finger to Western society saying: "We are going to use your laws to humiliate you and we don't give a damn as to what you feel about it!"

Tolerance, Silence and Appeasement

In The Flight of the Intellectuals, his 2010 book about the Western Left's respective treatment of Islamist 'scholar' Tariq Ramadan and Somali apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the American liberal essayist Paul Berman catalogues the 2007 controversy over Dutch liberal Ian Buruma's book Murder in Amsterdam.

The row was ignited by an essay by French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, in which he accused Ian Buruma of using cultural relativism to excuse fundamentalism and shamefully denounce a courageous dissident. In a testy response, Buruma denied the charge of relativism and countered that his arguments were the stuff of classical liberalism and tolerance:

Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don't like it, as long as they don't harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.

Buruma continued:

[Pascal] Bruckner mentions the opening of an Islamic hospital in Rotterdam and reserved beaches for Muslim women in Italy. I fail to see why this is so much more terrible than opening kosher restaurants, Catholic hospitals, or reserved beaches for nudists, but to Bruckner these concessions are akin to segregation in the southern states of America, and even Apartheid in South Africa.

Turkish-German feminist and Muslim reformer Necla Kelek, who had been watching this debate from the sidelines, then entered the fray with a furious contribution of her own. She began by pointing out that Buruma's denial that he is a cultural relativist did not in fact preclude him from being one. She went on to say:

I can tell you, Mr. Buruma, why Italian beaches reserved for Muslim women are "so much more terrible." Unlike kosher dining or a case of the flu requiring hospitalisation, the beach is a Muslim attempt to bring about change. Whether it is headscarves or gender-specific separation of public space, political Islam is trying to establish apartheid of the sexes in free European societies. A Muslim hospital is fundamentally different from a Catholic hospital. In a Muslim hospital, patients are separated according to gender. Men may be treated only by men, women only by women. Muslim female nurses, for example, may not wash male patients, they may not even touch them.

I am not privy to the thoughts of Norman Geras on the Murder in Amsterdam controversy. For all I know, he may agree with Ian Buruma and argue that resistance to segregated hospitals and beaches is also evidence of rank intolerance and illiberalism, with the proviso that no-one be compelled to visit them. I can find no reason in his arguments concerning face covering to suspect otherwise.

Kenan Malik may be more sceptical. In From Fatwa to Jihad, he mentions Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam only in passing, but he does so to illustrate the collapse of confidence amongst relativist liberals in the superiority of Enlightenment universalism. And many of Bruckner's arguments about the malign effects multiculturalism has had on individual freedom are echoed in Malik's writing. Furthermore, it is possible to detect clear parallels between Pascal Bruckner's outrage at the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Ian Buruma, and Malik's disquiet at the treatment of Monica Ali by Germaine Greer. Still, his equivocations over the burqa could equally extend to the areas Bruckner raises.

But in You Can't Read This Book, Nick Cohen deals with the Murder in Amsterdam controversy directly, and he is explicit in declaring his sympathy for Pascal Bruckner's position - not just in the narrow matter of whether or not to show solidarity with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but in his opposition to the racism that Bruckner and Kelek detect beneath Ian Buruma's professed defence of individual liberty. Cohen (correctly) describes Pascal Bruckner as "heir to the best traditions of the French Enlightenment" and sub-heads his section on the row "The Racism of the Anti-Racists", directly quoting the title of Pascal Bruckner's essay.

And yet, in a brief paragraph on the subject at The Spectator's blog, Cohen's reasoning becomes almost indistinguishable from Ian Buruma's:

[The unnamed author of a blog at Time magazine] deplores France’s ban on the burqa and says it reflects "very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society". I am not position to judge that, but am sure he is right to say that the state should not tell citizens how to dress. Many people find the burqa "obnoxious and offensive" – myself included. But in a free society all we can do is argue against the misogynists, who promote male ownership of women’s bodies.

Has the thinking of civil libertarians like Cohen, Malik and Geras become infected with the termites that have hollowed out so much of the rest of the Left? I doubt it. Rather, their response to the unique problem posed by the burqa seems to rest on a miscalculation - a wish to split the difference between the cultural relativists and the universalist abolitionists and forge a 'third way'; a compromise that opposes State interference in the lives of individuals, but without suspending moral judgment. The position is untenable.

The closest Geras gets to condemning the burqa is a line in his reply to Mona Eltahawy in which he politely allows that he has "no quarrel with the claim that [Salafi] ideology diminishes women and the interests of women". Reading his blogs I discern a reluctance to ackowledge that the burqa causes anyone any suffering at all, and that what is really at issue for abolitionists is the offence it gives to their Western sensibilities.

Malik opens his piece by stating: "The burqa should have no place in a 21st-century society, either as a piece of clothing or as a symbol of the status of women" but by the conclusion, he has retreated behind the familiar (and, I have to say, somewhat shabby) euphemism that the niqab is simply "a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women"; a matter, in other words, of scant importance. 

In Cohen's 3500 word piece for Standpoint about religious misogyny, the burqa merits only a glancing reference. The only other instances I can find in which he discusses it are mentioned above.

Moral judgment ends up, if not suspended entirely, then reduced to throat-clearing. But the civil libertarian silence is not the result of the cowardice, fear, political correctness and latent racism that Bruckner, Kelek and Berman identify in Ian Buruma's thinking. Instead, it strikes me as a straightforward conflict of interests. It is, after all, difficult to criticise the burqa too vehemently without fortifying the case for the State ban. But the upshot is that, on an issue central to minority women's rights and the war of ideas occasioned by the challenge of Islamic fascism, three of our most brilliant progressive writers and thinkers have rendered themselves almost mute.

*     *     * 

There is a noble exception to this rule. This brings me back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with whose passionate and unequivocal condemnation of Islamic dress codes I chose to open this essay. As it happens, Hirsi Ali also opposes a ban on face-covering, but for reasons unconnected to arguments from individual freedom or cultural indulgence. Hirsi Ali believes that State intervention is impractical, counter-productive and, like the related quarrel over minarets, a superficial distraction from the urgent debate in which societies need to engage about what she terms (after Huntington) "the clash of civilisations".

I agree such a debate is long overdue. I disagree that a State ban on the burqa need be a diversion or that the question should come down to a matter of either/or. The abolition of the burqa by one means or another is a necessary precondition to winning the fight against theocratic and cultural misogyny, but it is by no means a sufficient one. Were the burqa to be proscribed by law, the backward values and attitudes that demand and bodyguard it, on the Islamic far-right and relativist Left respectively, will remain and the universalist counter-assault on these values and attitudes will need to continue. But we cannot wait until that argument is won before admitting that a free society should never have tolerated the totalitarianism, misogyny and intolerance the burqa represents.

I believe that Nick Cohen was absolutely right when he declared that politicians have responded to the Islamist challenge with a mixture of authoritarianism and appeasement. But I think he miscategorises French and Belgian reactions to the effrontery of the burqa. As Pascal Bruckner put it:

Many people scoffed at French authoritarianism when parliament voted to forbid women and young girls from wearing headscarves in school and in government offices...Yet now political leaders in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, shocked by the spread of hijab and burqa, are considering passing laws against them. The facts speak against the appeasers, who enjoin Europe to fit in with Islam rather than vice versa. For the more we give in to the radicalism of the bearded, the more they will harden their tone. Appeasement politics only increase their appetite.

* * *

UPDATE: Norman Geras has responded to this essay and to the criticisms of his position within it at normblog here.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: In the short section dealing with Kenan Malik's post for the New Humanist, I originally quoted Malik as follows: "[I]s a ban not necessary to protect women from being forced to wear the burqa? In countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes". I then commented: "Notice that Malik can’t – or won’t – provide his own question with a straight answer." Malik rightly objected that I had cut his quote short and misrepresented his view. He pointed out that in the very next line he had written: "In democratic countries, the law already protects citizens from being harmed or coerced by others. It should go no further..."

I had taken the two different parts of this paragraph to be two separate arguments, and only addressed the first. However, re-reading it, it is obvious that both points are part of the same argument. Malik still begs the question, in my view, and my argument in reply remains the same (although re-worded). However, my omission of the second part of his quote was careless and needlessly misleading. The post has now been amended to include the full quotation. My apologies to Kenan Malik for the error.