Double Jack’s standards
Comment is free, The Guardian, October 6
It has become routine in this country for those who wish to give vent to prejudice to insist that they only wish to start a “debate”. How could anyone object? Debate is always a good thing. But when the premises informing the putative debate are riddled with double standards and unexamined assumptions, one has to wonder if the real aim is not to provoke (or justify) something much less benign than a debate.
Like Jack Straw, I find it awkward to talk with women who veil their faces. Unlike Jack Straw, I don’t assume that the onus is on them to relieve me of my discomfort, or that this discomfort is inevitable and entrenched, or that it betokens an unbridgeable cultural gap or irreconcilable social difference.
There are a large number of people in this country who find it extremely uncomfortable speaking to a young woman with a bare midriff and rings in her navel. There are others who find it hard to talk with Chasidic Jewish boys with shaved skulls and long pais (sidelocks). There are others who feel intimidated talking to a large white man with a union jack tattoo. All of these reactions may be understandable, but no cabinet member is administering public lectures to young women with bare midriffs and navel rings or to Chasidic Jews or to blokes with union jack tattoos, and if they presumed to do so they would be condemned without hesitation.
But when it comes to the visible indications of certain types of Islamic practices, the rules are different.
The question of the status and rights of Muslim women is a real one, no more or less so than similar questions about the status and rights of women in other religions. In certain Jewish sects, married women must cut their hair and cover their head with a wig; at times of worship, they are not permitted to sit with the men in main body of the synagogue and are confined to an upper gallery. It was because of this that my Jewish mother refused to attend various family functions. And I’m proud of her for it. But she would never have accepted that it was government’s business to lecture Jews about this practice.
Secularism requires the separation of state and religion; and that means that governments refrain from lecturing the population about the rightness or wrongness of religious practices. Obviously, there are limits: no government would tolerate, for example, child sacrifice in the name of religion, and no government should tolerate female genital mutilation. But adopting a veil across the face isn’t remotely in the same category. And Straw’s singling it out as if it were a major social problem or a source of significant social division is ludicrous. Or it would be ludicrous if it weren’t something much worse and more dangerous.
The politicians who have been lecturing Muslims about social cohesion and integration are the same ones whose economic policies have generated vast gulfs in income, resulting in differences in daily life – and social segregation – far greater than anything associated with cultural practices. Yes, the population is becoming more divided – by wealth, which means, inevitably, by health. To cite but one statistic, individuals who are 50-59-years-old from the poorest fifth of the population are 10 times more likely to die than their contemporaries from the richest fifth.
Speaking personally, the people I feel most uncomfortable talking with are perma-tanned politicians in expensive, perfectly pressed suits with a record of shameless mendacity. Jack Straw’s complicity in the lies that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq makes him responsible for divisions both domestic and foreign of far greater consequence, far greater menace to us all, than any woman walking the streets of Blackburn with her face veiled.
