Reactionary Radicals

Owen Jones and the Rainbow Qur'an

In a 2012 article for the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland had defended his friend Mehdi Hasan by convicting Hasan’s critics of a strange form of racism:

[Subtle examples] can be confusing, because they often dress up in progressive, Guardian-friendly garb – slamming Islam as oppressive of gay and women's rights, for example – but the thick layer of bigotry is visible all the same. Call it progressives' prejudice.

An example of the pitfalls into which this kind of thinking can lead the Left was recently provided by a fractious twitter exchange on the subject of gay rights and Islam involving Freedland’s Guardian colleague Owen Jones [storified here].

The US Supreme Court ruling legalising gay marriage had been handed down a few days earlier and the summer’s Pride festivities had just begun. Profile avatars superimposed with solidarity rainbows swept social media in celebration of both; a touching display of the breadth and depth of support the once-lonely campaign for marriage equality has come to enjoy.

A mischievous variation on this theme was an image of the Qur'an, tweeted by the ex-Muslim writer and activist Saif Rahman, which a twitter user calling himself ‘Colt’ then gave a speculative punt in the direction of Owen Jones:

Owen, give this a shove for those LBGT muslims out there @OwenJones84 #solidarity https://t.co/Y6jPmVC3Pg

— Colt (@_coltseavers) July 1, 2015

When Rahman asked why this had not been dignified with a response, Jones answered: "Because I think this is self evidently trying to provoke [rather] than win people over to LGBT rights? Are you LGBT (genuine question)?"

Owen Jones is a notoriously thin-skinned and bad-tempered tweeter, so the petulant tone was hardly a surprise. But I would imagine Jones is also understandably anxious to avoid accusations of bigotry from people like Jonathan Freedland.

The difficulty here is that Islamic homophobia is not a mere calumny or figment of ‘progressive prejudice’. Muslims are not simply the hapless victims of Western prejudice, as Jones and Freedland apparently prefer to believe; they are individuals perfectly capable of holding bigoted views of their own, which it is surely every progressive’s responsibility to oppose.

A 2006 Populus poll conducted for Policy Exchange found that 61% of UK Muslims thought "homosexuality is wrong and should be illegal", a figure consistent across genders and social class. This figure is admittedly nearly 10 years old, but the Populus also reported that younger generations were less tolerant on this issue than their elders, which does nothing to inspire optimism that things have been moving in the right direction.

Nevertheless, their survey did provide a reminder that UK Muslims’ views on homosexuality – whilst profoundly dispiriting – are not uniform. A majority appear to be deplorable and reactionary, but a minority – evidenced by projects like the Inclusive Mosque Initiative – are enlightened and progressive. The aim of gay rights activism, surely, is to stigmatise the former and empower the latter. And on this point, Colt's tweet to Jones was specific.

If Rahman's original image of the Qur'an was intended to mock the incompatibility of modernity and the Qur’an's 7th Century ideas, Colt's additional reference to LGBT Muslims and solidarity invites another interpretation: that LGBT Muslims living in communities and families hostile to the open expression of their sexuality deserve support in their struggle for acceptance under a modernised, gay-friendly Islam.

But, sensing a trap, Jones reflexively counterattacked with a spurious distinction between 'provocation' (bad) and advancing LGBT rights (noble), before accusing Colt and Rahman of the former.

To see a self-professed radical advance an argument of such painful conservatism makes me cringe for Jones. Had his activist forebears afforded reactionary attitudes the respect he demands from contemporary critics of Islam, he would not enjoy the freedoms he takes for granted today.

The overthrow of religious authority in the West – a necessary precondition of sexual liberty – was not achieved simply by the polite suggestion of a rationalist alternative. It also required the unrelenting mockery of its Enlightenment enemies who took great pleasure in making its ideas look ridiculous.

Nor was the later movement for gay liberation and acceptance bashful about provoking its opponents, for whom its mere existence was an affront. Provocation and offence were understood by activists to be engines of change, not its regrettable by-products.

In 1971, for instance, radical Gay Liberation Front activists in drag invaded a meeting of Mary Whitehouse's Christian pressure group, the Nationwide Festival of Light, held at Westminster's Methodist Central Hall, and began kissing one another and unfurling sloganeering banners before shutting off the power. The queer art, literature, music, theatre, and cinema that proliferated with the rise of gay activism likewise revelled in its capacity to generate traditionalist outrage.

Had he been alive, would Owen Jones have pursed his lips in disapproval and defended the sensibilities of offended conservative Christians?

But times have changed, and in the process radical opposition to reactionary inter-cultural ideas seems to have mutated into a perverse solidarity. Multiculturalism's emphasis on the need to show deference to cultural and religious difference, and the concomitant empowerment of all kinds of identity politics, has meant that a declaration of offence taken is no longer presumed to be the start of a discussion but its final word.

"Are you LGBT?" Jones had demanded of Rahman in his first tweet. An irrelevance to the matter at hand, but a question of pressing importance to Jones who - as an openly gay man - reserves for himself the right to decide who may and may not advocate for gay acceptance and under what circumstances.

"If you want to be a straight ally, welcome," Jones instructed Rahman. "But I'm done with people only mentioning LGBT rights when Islam is involved." When an Indian ex-Muslim calling himself ‘Desi Liberal’ pointed out that it was Jones who was proving himself to be a feckless ally by downplaying Islamic homophobia so as to comport with politically correct niceties, Jones retorted: "I'm not going to be lectured on LGBT rights by a straight man. Incredible."

It is undercover of this politics of identity and broad-minded respect for other cultures that, as a non-Muslim, Jones excuses himself from criticising even the most regressive elements of another minority group. In his own mind, it is not his business to do so. 

So, instead, he declares his unconditional and indiscriminate solidarity with all Muslims, irrespective of how hostile a given individual's views and values may be to his own. And, consequently, he finds himself objectively defending the Islamic religious right from the pressures of progress at the expense of those they victimise.

The message for LGBT Muslims may be the unintended consequence of a well-meaning impulse, but it is clear, just the same: gay liberation for me, but not for thee.

Against All Saidists...

. . . and in Defence of the West.

Edward Said (left), author of Orientalism (right)

The ongoing quarrel over what one is and is not permitted to say about Islam erupted again last week when Professor Richard Dawkins tweeted the following:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

Both parts of that statement are demonstrably true. And yet, it was the object of the usual derision and hostility from those who appear to hold that any criticism of 'minority' cultures is racist and prejudiced by definition, irrespective of its accuracy. Especially when said criticism is expressed by a 'privileged' white Western male, who - it is alleged - harbours a racist agenda to embarrass and humiliate the Muslim world.

A good part of the blame for this lamentable state of affairs can be laid at the door of the late Columbia professor of comparative literature, Edward W. Said. The influence of Said's writing is undeniable and incalculable. His key works Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981) and Culture & Imperialism (1993) revolutionised the way in which the Middle East is studied, discussed and perceived in the Occident, and the first of these, Orientalism, is credited with having midwifed the birth of Post-Colonial studies in Western academia.

Today his work is assigned reading across a head-spinning array of disciplines and many of his arguments and premises have acquired the power of cross-cultural memes - that is to say, so entrenched have they have become in contemporary received wisdom, that one does not have to have read a page of Said's writing to believe in the essential truth of his views.

As the neo-Conservative writer Joshua Muravchik allows in an otherwise highly critical piece for World Affairs:

[Said] not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of color” as the redeemers of humankind. During the ten years that have passed since his death there have been no signs that his extraordinary influence is diminishing.

Orientalism is - prima facie - an imposing piece of work. As Muravchik notes, it confronts the reader with a blizzard of assertions, names, quotations and arguments dressed up in the kind of stultifying post-modern jargon often mistaken for scholarly erudition, all of which point to the same damning conclusion: that the West has been engaged in a lengthy, thoroughgoing and systematic attempt to dominate, control and subjugate Islamic society and culture, and that Orientalism, a hitherto respected discipline dedicated to the study of the Near, Mid and Far East, was and is little more than the malevolent handmaiden of Western militarism and Empire. As Said explained in one particularly intemperate passage:

It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. [Pg. 204]

This view, while manifestly absurd, nonetheless chimed with the prevailing view on the Left at the time of Orientalism's publication that Western culture, and caucasians in particular, had very little of which they could be proud and much of which they should be ashamed.

Two wars had devastated the European continent and beyond; technological advances were suddenly in the dock following the summary obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; post-Colonial guilt tormented those horrified by the crimes committed by their forefathers in the name of Empire; the brutal war for independence waged by the people of Algeria had ended in 1962; the bitter struggle for racial equality in the United States had finally been won, but Martin Luther King was dead; and, across the globe, American foreign policy was held in contempt for its military involvement in South-East Asia.

In 1967, Susan Sontag informed the readers of The Partisan Review that:

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

("Only," Tom Wolfe remarked years later, "in the Land of Rococo Marxists.")

French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose attacks on the notion of objective truth had seen a resurgence of moral and cultural relativism in the post-War West, was by no means alone in applauding the overthrow of the US-backed Iranian Shah in 1979 by theocratic fascists on this basis. That perverse mentality survives in academia to this day, as evidenced (to take but one example) by the English historian Mary Beard's blithe pronouncement in the immediate wake of 9/11 that "no matter how tactfully you dress it up, the US had it coming."

But aside from indulging a Western penchant for self-flagellation, Orientalism and its quasi-sequels also had a deleterious (and, I assume, unintended) effect on prospects for progress within the Muslim world. As Ibn Warraq, the ex-Muslim scholar and founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society, commented:

[Orientalism] taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity - "were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more" - encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the work of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labelled "Orientalist". The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called "intellectual terrorism", since it seeks to convince, not by arguments or historical analysis, but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him.

This included Muslims like the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who argued that the gravest problem facing Muslim countries was not their comparatively brief history under European Imperialism or the opinions of nineteenth century Orientalist scholars, but the escalating cruelty of their own autocratic and theocratic rulers in the here and now. For this, Said labelled Makiya a "native informer".

The difficulty for Saidists is not that they cannot tell the difference between rational, legitimate criticism of Islam and the Muslim world on the one hand and triumphalist chauvinism and racism on the other. The difficulty is that they don't believe there to be any difference. Western criticism, study, analysis of the Orient undertaken from a position of Western power and 'privilege' are colonialist by their very nature.

But the Islamic break with scientific progress and the impediments to progress Islam erected long pre-date the British and French colonial projects in the Middle East.

A once intellectually and culturally vibrant part of the world, the region had enjoyed a relationship of productive cultural exchange with Ancient Greece. In the ninth century, the Abassid Caliphs Harun al-Rashid and his son al-Ma'mun moved their capital to Baghdad and there established the House of Wisdom - a vast archive of world knowledge, a translation institute and the most important centre of learning and scientific inquiry of the Islamic Golden Age.

However, by the end of the ninth century, its influence was already in decline, not least because the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil believed Greek thought to be un-Islamic. As the traditionalist Ash'arite school of Islam asserted itself over the rationalist Mutazilites, this decline would accelerate and free thinkers in the Muslim world found themselves subject to vicious persecution. The Orientalist Ernest Renan noted in an 1883 lecture that any progress made in the Muslim world during the second half of the Middle Ages occurred despite Islam, rather than because of it:

To give Islam the credit of Averröes and so many other illustrious [Muslim] thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the inquisition the discoveries of Gallileo, and a whole scientific development it was not able to prevent.

As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg observed in a review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion for the Times Literary Supplement in 2007:

[T]hough there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of Philosophers against the very idea of the laws of nature on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains . . . After al-Ghazzali there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

When the furore over Dawkins's tweet erupted, I happened to be reading Defending the West, a lucid, scholarly and comprehensive demolition of Said's best-known work by Ibn Warraq, upon which I have relied for much of this post. In it, argues that part of what separates Western societies from Islamic ones is the the idea that the pursuit of truth should not be bound by utility, but is an end in itself. This was foundational to Greek thought, exemplified by Aristotle, but has been largely suppressed in Islamic societies since al-Ghazzali. Intellectual curiosity meant the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake; a simple idea but one considered extremely dangerous by religious dogmatists.

So instead Muslim scholars began to distinguish between the Islamic sciences, eg: religion (Koranic exegesis, the science of hadith, jurisprudence, and scholastic theology) and language (grammar, lexicography, rhetoric and literature), and the foreign sciences, eg: mathematics, physics, philosophy, natural history, astronomy and so on. The latter, being universalist, were increasingly neglected from the twelfth century on. And while Western Christianity maintained ties its heritage with Athens and Jerusalem, Islam turned its back on the pre-Islamic of the Middle East. Pre-Islamic civilisations were to be forgotten as periods of base ignorance or Jāhiliyya. 

In the late nineteenth century there was a brief rationalist resurgence, but from 1950 onwards, as Islamism began to cast its shadow across the region, it died and with it went the Muslim world's hopes of making its belated appointment with modernity. As Weinberg notes, even in ostensibly secular Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was calling for a complete end to scientific education by 1981.

The observable results of the stifling of free inquiry, creativity and unfettered scientific investigation are by no means limited to the distribution of Nobel Prizes. In 2002, the UN's Arab Human Development Report noted:

There are no reliable figures on the production of books, but many indicators suggest a severe shortage of writing; a large share of the market consists of religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content. The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.

In a 2007 article for Physics Today, Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, reported:

A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia showed that OIC [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US National Science Foundation records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.

But as Hoodbhoy goes on the observe, these depressing statistics are symptomatic of deeper cultural problems. For instance:

Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent. 

The West, on the other hand, has gained much from the scientific method and a spirit of academic openness. Emancipation from Christian dogma led to giant strides being made in scientific inquiry and technological innovation, whilst the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake excited a curiosity about the world beyond its cultural borders. Meanwhile, a culture of scepticism, self-doubt and self-criticism helped foster the very academic freedom which nurtured and promoted Edward Said and which he spent his life's energies denigrating.

And while Said's work was a convenient cudgel with which to bash the West, it was often misleading and tendentious to the point of outright fraudulence. The Orientalists Said attacks in Orientalism were not the Imperialist stooges of his imagination. They were learned classicists and multi-lingual philologists motivated by a desire to know about and to understand cultures, traditions and peoples unlike their own. Their voluminous research and the translations of Arab texts they undertook have proven invaluable, not only to Western scholars but also - in spite of Said's claims to the contrary - to Middle Eastern scholars, who were grateful for the preservation of their own neglected pre-Islamic history.

Which is not to say the Orientalists were always correct. Contrary to Said's insistence that these were people all working in the service of the same conspiratorial colonial agenda, they often disagreed and sharply criticised one another's work. But this is what happens during the course of open research in any field of exploration and discovery.

Greater freedom of opinion in the West also allowed for the plentiful publication in the West of material sympathetic to Islam and the Arab world, but Said didn't find it necessary to mention these. Nor, as numerous critics have pointed out, did he manage to examine (or even appear to notice) the vast contribution to European understanding of the Orient made by German Orientalists. The obvious reason is that there was no corresponding or subsequent Imperial German project in the Middle East, and this inconvenient fact reduces the central argument Said advanced in Orientalism to powder.

Nor does Said make mention of the Western tradition of self-criticism that naturally sprang from freedom of conscience. Moral and cultural relativism were not new phenomena. An uneasiness with the notion of objectivity and universalism can be traced back to the Greek Sophists who believed only in culturally-informed human convention. Tolerance for, as well as curiosity about, other cultures - with a concomitant reluctance to judge or condemn - has been a constant strain in Western culture to varying degrees. In Michel de Montaigne's celebrated 1580 essay On Cannibals, he wrote:

I do not find that there is anything barbaric or savage about this nation, according to what I've been told, unless we are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. . . I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of [ritual murder and cannibalism], but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own.

Montaigne's essay is at least as mad as Sontag's "white race-as-cancer" remark, but it nonetheless demonstrates that a critical view of the West and a corresponding sympathy, or indulgence even, of other cultures has long been a characteristic of Western thought. This noble tradition of self-criticism is why as long as Western colonialism existed, so did a strain of anti-colonialist thought. It is also why the largest demonstrations following the Sabra and Shatila massacres were in Tel Aviv, and why the largest demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq occurred in the West.

The notion that we ought not to study or criticise cultures other than our own is nonsensical, conservative, censorious and - in so small part due to Edward's Said's pernicious influence - dismayingly popular on the post-modern Left. But cultures are simply the product of man-made ideas. Sometimes people have good ideas; sometimes they have bad ones. The ability to discriminate and to judge the difference between the two - to reject or overthrow the former and to fight for and defend the latter - is an extremely precious faculty and a necessary precondition to progress.

Orientalism, however, is an accusatory and deeply reactionary text, the catastrophic effects of which continue to be felt in both Occident and Orient. Demonstrably ahistorical and flawed though its arguments are, large parts of Western academia (perhaps encouraged by Gulf funding) and Western culture in general have internalised them to such a degree, they are convinced that universalist value judgements about Islamic culture are simply a projection of their own inescapable racism. Consequently, they have fallen silent about human rights abuses committed by anyone but the West (and, naturally, Israel).

Meanwhile, in the Muslim world, religious fundamentalists have been adept at weaponising the bitter mindset of conspiracism, victimhood and vengeful grievance that Said encouraged, and directing it towards the West and the Jewish State. There remains a stubborn tendency to blame European Imperialism, American neo-Imperialism, Western cultural imperialism and 'colonial feminism', 'Orientalism', Zionism and sundry other -isms for the parlous state of their societies, rather than the regressive cultural and religious values that inhibit personal emancipation and retard learning, research and political/economic development.

In his article for Physics Today, Pervez Hoodbhoy argues that simply increasing funding for research and development is not enough. Profound behavioural and attitudinal changes within Islamic societies are needed:

. . . a Weltanschauung that shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and pluralism.

In his famous essay Counter-Enlightenment, Isaiah Berlin wrote:

Voltaire, d'Alembert and Condorcet believed that the development of the arts and the sciences was the most powerful weapon in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression and barbarism, which crippled effort and frustrated men's search for truth and rational self-direction.

They were correct.


UPDATE: In response to this post, Raphael Cormack has posted a blog entry arguing for a more nuanced interpretation of Said's work here.

Day of the Demagogue

The Apocalyptic Fantasies of the Liberal Left and the Far-Right

" Voltaire but he never had the benefit of going to Auschwitz and seeing where unfettered free speech ends up.” http://t.co/NT8mnLHXJ7
— HOPE not hate (@hopenothate) June 26, 2013

This nugget of wisdom from ostensibly liberal, anti-fascist, anti-racist organisation HOPE Not Hate (HNH) was occasioned by the British government's recent decision to deny American anti-Islam activists Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller entry into the UK to address an English Defence League (EDL) rally. HNH were understandably pleased with the Home Secretary's ruling - it was an outcome they had vigorously lobbied and campaigned to achieve.

The words quoted in HNH's tweet are lifted (clumsily) from a longer quotation within the linked Independent article, in which their own spokesperson Matthew Collins expresses his "delight" with the Home Office decision:

There is enough hatred in this country at the moment; it is tense. There is a line in the sand between freedom of speech and the right to use hate speech. Freedom of speech does not guarantee you that right. We live in a democracy and we believe in free speech. People will now quote Voltaire but he never had the benefit of going to the gates of Auschwitz and seeing where unfettered free speech ends up.

The objection Collins anticipates is the absolutist defence of free opinion often (mis)attributed to French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

So, apparently responsibility for the Shoah lies with this most noble defence of liberty and tolerance rather than a fascist regime not noticeably overburdened with a fondness for either. Anyone under the impression that pre-war Nazi Germany suffered from a surfeit of free expression - or a surfeit of freedom of any kind for that matter - would do well to revisit the topic and reacquaint themselves with the facts.

The broader parallel being drawn - that pre-war persecution of European Jewry is somehow analogous to what is called 'Islamophobia' in the West today - is no less stupid.

Under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Jews were systematically stripped of their citizenship, their vote and their political rights. Subsequent laws mandated their complete exclusion from the German economy and institutionalised policies of "Aryanisation' aggressively enforced their segregation and stigmatisation. All of this was backed by an unrelenting flood of State-sanctioned pseudo-scientific anti-Semitic propaganda of the most dehumanising kind.

By contrast, in today's Western democracies, not only are the equal rights of Muslim men and women rightly protected by binding human rights agreements and enshrined in law, but exemptions are not infrequently made to indulge demands for special treatment made on religious and cultural grounds.

In the wake of an Islamist atrocity such as the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, one would expect a genuinely racist and bigoted society to use the opportunity to pass swingeing, collectively punitive laws designed to marginalise Muslims as a group. Instead, as befits a society in which this kind of prejudice is seen as culturally unacceptable, mainstream politicians of all stripes immediately urged restraint and were at pains to reassure Muslims that their faith would remain untainted by those jihadists claiming to act in its name. This did nothing, however, to subdue hysterical accusations of Islamophobia and intolerance.

At a time when Britain ought to have been preoccupied by the question of how better to address, contain and counter Islamist terrorism, Fiyaz Mughal, tin-eared founder and chairperson of the organisation TellMAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) announced that there had been a "massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice". "The scale of the backlash is astounding!" he cried:

A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities . . . I do not see an end to this cycle of violence. There is an underlying Islamophobia in our society and the horrendous events in Woolwich have brought this to the fore.

But, as reported by Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph, this counsel of despair turned out to be fear-mongering without foundation. 57% of the 212 anti-Muslim 'incidents' recorded in the week following Rigby's murder were revealed to have occurred online (some from abroad). Only 17 were said to have involved a physical encounter. No injuries were reported at all.

It would of course be far better if the number of physical encounters were zero, and if people did not call other people names on the internet. However, the idea that this reaction to Islamist terror justifies Mughal's apocalyptic language or HNH's warnings about the "gates of Auschwitz" is simply dishonest.  And yet it seems to meet with very little resistance. We are regularly reminded by liberal Cassandras (for example, here and here) that Britain is confronted by a "tide" or a "scourge" of Islamophobic bigotry and violence. And it doesn't appear to have occurred to the Independent journalist interviewing HNH's Matthew Collins to point out that his Voltaire-to-Auschwitz theory is very silly indeed.

Islamists, needless to say, find all this doomsaying to be highly satisfactory. Islamism is a supremacist ideology which seeks to overthrow democratic governments, either by force or by stealth, and to establish a totalitarian theocratic caliphate under Sharia law. This hasn't prevented Islamists from exploiting Europe's post-war guilt about the Holocaust and post-colonial guilt about the subordination of people of colour to further their own spurious claims to victimhood.

In his response to the 7/7 bombings in 2005 which had just claimed the lives of 52 innocent people, Tony Blair took care to distinguish between ideology and people:

What we are confronting here is an evil ideology. It is not a Clash of Civilisations - all civilised people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. But it is a global struggle and it is a battle of ideas, hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it . . . This is a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam, as far removed from its essential decency and truth as Protestant gunmen who kill Catholics or vice versa, are from Christianity. 

Nonetheless, Mohammed Naseem, Islamist chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque and Home Affairs spokesman for the Islamic Party of Britain, responded to the government's subsequent announcement of new anti-terror legislation by comparing Tony Blair to Adolph Hitler:

[Hitler] was democratically elected and gradually he created a bogey identity, that is, the Jewish people, and posed to the Germans that they were a threat to the country. On that basis, he started a process of elimination of Jewish people. I see the similarities. Everything moves step by step. I am saying these are dangerous times and we must take note of this.

That the immediate aftermath of 7/7 felt like a particularly dangerous time is no excuse for the BBC to be indulging those inclined to delusional prognostication. It's particularly galling to have to read this kind of thing, given that there isn't an Islamist alive prepared to defend the existence of the Jewish State, but plenty prepared to dispute the historicity of the Holocaust.

Besides which, as Rumy Hasan matter-of-factly points out in his book Multiculturalism: Some Inconvenient Truths:

[C]ontrary to the fear-mongering by the likes of Naseem, we are certainly not dealing with a situation remotely comparable to the Jews under the Nazis in the 1930s . . . If the situation had been akin to [this], then we would surely have witnessed a mass exodus of Muslims to Islamic countries. This has patently not been the case. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite: large numbers of people from many Muslim-majority countries have sought, and continue to seek, asylum in Britain and other Western countries...[T]he alleged Islamophobia in the West appears to be of little or no concern. Contrast that with Nazi Germany: no Jew or gypsy in their right mind sought entry into Germany during the period of Nazi rule. [Pg. 127]

The need to be seen as sensitive to other cultures and ruthlessly critical of one's own has helped infantilise the debate about Islam. Worse, it has led to an apparent reluctance on the part of HOPE Not Hate and like-minded 'anti-racists' to criticise Islamist organisations like Unite Against Fascism with the same vehemence reserved for the nationalist extreme right, particularly if the Islamists in question denounce violent jihad.

The reasons for this silence are beyond the scope of this post, but important among them is a fear of espousing views that may be echoed or applauded by the white nationalist far-right. The irony is that in seeking to deny the far-right an opportunity to indiscriminately stigmatise a group of people, the paralysis of HOPE Not Hate and the broader liberal left has provided one.

This is what explains the growth in popularity and notoriety of far-right nationalist groups like the EDL and anti-Muslim demagogues like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Geller and Spencer style themselves as informed, principled and forthright critics of Islam; noble and fearless defenders of democracy and freedom. However, they share more in common with their enemies than either would care to admit.

Like Islamists, Geller and Spencer aver that the distinction between Islamic extremists and Muslim moderates and reformers is illusory, and that the only the most literal and cruel interpretation of Islam may be regarded as legitimate. Both Geller and Spencer frequently cite Islamist clerics in support of this contention and Geller invariably encloses the words 'moderate' and 'reformer' in scare quotes.

The claim that Islam is therefore "unreformable" satisfies the bigot's need for an eternal, immovable foe and is justified with reference to the Islamic belief that the Qur'an is the final and perfect word of God. Geller and Spencer both affirm (correctly) that Islam is a false religion and that its texts are the work of men, so it takes considerable perversity to insist that these particular man-made ideas are, uniquely, somehow immune to revision. When confronted with the opinions, beliefs and behaviour of secular, reformist Muslims, they either deride their opponents' views as "theologically baseless" and explain that 'their' Islam does not exist, or they accuse those claiming to be moderates of engaging in deliberate mass deception. Not only is this demonstrably false but, unpardonably, it stigmatises those who risk most in the battle to confront Islamism and reform their faith.

Just as Islamists promote a conspiratorial view of Jewish mendacity and evil, Geller and Spencer and the far-right promote a corresponding view of all Muslims. The refusal to recognise the distinction between moderates and extremists forces them to adopt the Islamist's claim that the West is at war with Islam, which in turn licenses the objectification of all Muslims as indistinguishable, deceitful members of a fascist army and fifth column puppeteered by the Qur'an.

I thought that this kind of defamatory cant had reached its squalid nadir in Geller and Spencer's endorsement of apologists for Serbian fascism and anti-Muslim genocide (examples here and here). But, more recently, Geller outdid herself in her eagerness to portray the ugly persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Burma as an elaborate Jihadi hoax:

Why doesn't the media ever ask, hmmmmm, everywhere Muslims immigrate there is conflict. The higher the population, the bigger the conflict. Why is that? Buddhist monks have to carry guns for self-defense. Think about that. Don't buy the Muslim myth of victimhood in Burma. What's comical is that Buddhism really is a religion of peace. [emphasis in original]

This argument and the language used are indistinguishable from anti-Semitic theories advanced by Islamists and the neo-Nazi far-right and used to justify the indiscriminate persecution of Jews. But this deranged anti-Muslim conspiracism is nevertheless attractive to some because Geller and Spencer speak with utter clarity and conviction in a debate largely disfigured by euphemism, double-talk and self-censorship. If people are repeatedly told that Islam is a religion of peace following each violent outrage committed in its name, they will start to conclude that their intelligence is being insulted and look for answers elsewhere. Like all demagogues, Geller and Spencer feed a hunger for certainty, provide a receptacle for bitter resentment and derive their popularity from a confusion of clarity with the Truth.

Which is why the banning of Geller and Spencer has been been so maddeningly counter-productive. In practice it will of course achieve little. After all, Geller and Spencer's views are all freely available online. And, as a strictly symbolic statement, it has only served to reinforce the paranoid far-right's conviction that a dangerous truth is being suppressed by the Establishment in order to perpetuate a lie. Upon receipt of their Home Office rejection letters, Geller and Spencer immediately (and predictably) posted scans on their respective websites (Spencer under the headline Britain Capitulates to Jihad while Geller went for UK Caves To Jihad) and have since been busily promoting their own vainglorious martyrdom narrative.

Fascist ideology is indeed present in the West, both on the Islamic far-right and on the white nationalist equivalent with which it shares so many characteristics. Islamist jihadis have already proven themselves to be a lethal menace and a recent rise in attacks on British mosques indicates that the nationalist far-right may yet become one. Racism, intolerance and bigotry exist in liberal democracies, just as they exist everywhere, but the apocalyptic predictions of civil war and death camps are lurid fantasies peddled by both the Islamic far-right and the nativist far-right to further their conspiratorial grievance narratives.

That some on the liberal left selectively co-opt these narratives in the name of restricting free and open discussion is depressing, if not particularly surprising. HOPE Not Hate would have us believe that the travel ban for which they campaigned sends a message of liberalism and tolerance. On the contrary, the ban is as petty, near-sighted and stupid as the United States' comparable decision to ban Islamist preacher Tariq Ramadan in 2004 (this was finally overturned by the Obama administration in 2010) or the decision by some European countries to criminalise Holocaust denial.

Voltaire's defence of free expression is perfectly suited to opinions like those of Geller and Spencer. HOPE Not Hate realise this which is why they tried to pre-empt it. But it's simply a reluctance to acknowledge just how absurd the parameters of this discussion have become that allows a supposedly serious-minded organisation like HOPE Not Hate to inform us that "unfettered" freedom of speech results in industrial mass murder, and that censorship can help save Muslims from the ovens.

What Voltaire understood but HOPE Not Hate apparently have not, is that the debate about free speech is not simply a quarrel about what we should be permitted to say. It is also a also a quarrel about what we should be permitted to hear. Those who censor opinions they do not like presume to make this decision on behalf of the rest of us. Not only is this reactionary and authoritarian on its own terms, but it will do nothing in this instance to advance a vital debate, already badly compromised by cultural taboos and a dearth of plain speaking, about how Western societies address the challenges presented by political Islam.

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.