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Picture this: on TV in the Netherlands, a citizen protests about the money the Dutch government spends on their multicultural programmes, paying for more than 700 Islamic clubs and supporting the teaching of immigrants in their own languages. The citizen calls Islam a backward religion, receiving hate mail, and even anonymous death threats, allegedly from extremist Muslims. The police tell the citizen to change addresses. The mayor of Amsterdam sends bodyguards. Finally the citizen is forced temporarily to flee the country. It happened this September/October.
Just for the record, how did you see this citizen in your minds eye? White, conservative, bitter? A Le Pen/Haider type? Anti-immigrant? She is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a 32-year-old woman, born in Somalia. Her family fled to Saudi Arabia, and she arrived in the Netherlands at the age of nine. She learned Dutch, worked first as a cleaner and interpreter while going to college, then as a political scientist on immigration issues for the Labour Party. (From the New York Times.)
As a university student, she held a job as an interpreter for Dutch immigration and social workers and discovered hidden suffering on a terrible scale among Muslim women even in the Netherlands. Entering safe houses for women and girls, most of them Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, who had run away from domestic violence or forced marriages, she was soon shocked. Many had secret abortions.
Sexual abuse in the family causes the most pain because the trust is violated on all levels, she said. The father or the uncle say nothing, nor do the mother and the sisters. It happens regularly the incest, the beatings, the abortions. Girls commit suicide. But no one says anything. And social workers are sworn to professional secrecy.
She considers herself left wing, but there is a disorienting echo here of the message of the recently assassinated Pim Fortuyn. It was Fortuyns notorious characterisation of Islam as a backward religion that Hirsi Ali used on Dutch TV. Hirsi Ali also says that separatist Muslim language schools and studies hinder assimilation, hold children back, and help maintain repression in the immigrant community. Could one be wrong and the other right? Is there a distinctively left-wing way to oppose the backward elements of an immigrant religion, which is less xenophobic than a right-wing way?
Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali an Islamophobe?
How do people across the political spectrum respond to Hirsi Ali? I see that various conservative web bloggers have passed around news of her, applauding her courage in standing up for western values. I read that, in paid advertisements, more than 100 Dutch writers have offered her support.The Observer, a liberal UK paper, thinks that both of these critics of Islam are wrong: Barely six months have elapsed since his murder but the Islamophobia openly espoused by anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn is now being voiced by a female immigrant whose words are outraging Dutch Muslims.
So now we are in the curious position where a woman of colour, risking death threats to express feminist values, is praised by the right wing for defending western civilisation, and castigated by liberal lefties. The Fortuyn case had the same mind-bending qualities: at what point in our curious history did it become possible that an openly gay man, defending the right to be gay against what he considered to be a rising tide of religious intolerance, could be celebrated chiefly by conservatives, and dubbed right wing by the left press? (Not to mention his being assassinated by a left-wing environmentalist.)
Would the Observer have accused a white woman who uncovered severe gender abuse in a fundamentalist Christian sect in some corner of London, of Christophobia? Would it have said that her words outraged English Christians? The Observer knows that English Christians cover the waterfront from fundamentalist to liberal. It might have said she outraged right-wing English Christians.
Are all Muslims outraged by her words? Here is Secil Arda, who heads an organisation representing Turkish women in the Netherlands. She is an adviser to the Dutch government.
Its true what she says. The point she makes is also my point. Shes only telling us that Islam needs some enlightenment, some further steps and some reforms within the Muslim community.
Arda, reports Radio Netherlands, is aware of fierce opposition from some quarters within the Dutch Muslim community to improving the plight of women. She says defiantly that the threats will never deter her. I always speak my mind, Im not afraid of them. Maybe, a couple of fighters like us take all the flak, but behind us there are many other women and men desiring change.
The Observer quotes Secil Arda, but does not include the last sentence, about the many Muslims wanting change. It spends much more space quoting a spokesman of the Netherlands main Muslim lobby group arguing that the death threats were fabricated in order to harm the Muslim community. It reports that, In an effort to distance themselves from the affair 17 Muslim organisations have signed a declaration condemning the death threats. We can all hope the death threats were not real. Everyone can be grateful to these 17 organisations. But how many of their members, one wonders, signed a declaration condemning some of the gender abuses Hirsi Ali uncovered.
How the liberal press learned to respect religion
Here I must declare my own prejudices and history. Though I have long considered myself on the left, I have an old resentment against it. It treated my people badly. I was brought up in an enthusiastic religious movement in England. When I told Jessica Mitford, the veteran left-wing author, in the 1980s that I was working on a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the Oxford Group/Moral Re-Armament known then as MRA now called Initiatives of Change (IC) she said, Oh! Those horrible fascists! That dropped me right back into my childhood, when I dreaded such words. Tom Driberg, Labour MP and promiscuous gay Anglican, pursued a lifelong campaign against MRA for its neo-puritan ways. Ernest Bevin, left-wing atheist and Minister of Labour in Churchills war cabinet, singled out MRA as the only religious movement whose lay evangelists, essential for running the organisation, would be drafted in the Second World War.
Compared to Christian fundamentalists or Islamic conservatives, we were sophisticated, ecumenical. After all, Alcoholics Anonymous, with its inclusive theology, was an offshoot from us. Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus were included in the movement, and today it is officially open to all religions. But we felt frequently pilloried in the press and despised by most of the intelligentsia. Not that we were paragons (I left the movement in my twenties on the grounds of its puritanism and conservatism). We were homophobic Driberg was right about that. And women did not get out of the kitchen much and on to the ruling councils back then (they do now). But we were not fascists. We did, and the movement still does, some extraordinary, pioneering things in the line of conflict resolution, which were ignored because we were not ideologically correct and were serious religious believers.
Imagine my surprise, then, on visiting England this summer, to read the Guardian, the well-known leftwing newspaper, on Muslims in England. The paper ran a series of articles that fell over backwards to give a positive portrayal of the kind of religious morality that had been mercilessly criticised by the left as repressive, patriarchal, and homophobic when practised by native English Christians. I wish MRA, which was not half as repressive, had ever had half as good a press.
The western left was taught to appreciate other cultures by racial and gender minorities at home, and by those who had suffered imperialism abroad. In its encounter with Islam it has learned that multicultural respect can be extended to religion. It is true that there appears to be reverse racism here: if they are white fundamentalists, have at them; if they are Muslim and brown-skinned, dont criticise, lest you be accused of racism. But look at it the other way: in appreciating Islamic believers, the left might learn to be less judgemental about Christian believers. Maybe thats next: left defence of Pentecostals. But should the government be financing Pentecostalist schools, so that children can learn that evolution is wrong? Should the government subsidise Christian Science schools, so children can learn that medicine is wrong?
Multiculturalism versus Universalism
Multiculturalism is good but can go too far. It mustnt be allowed to trump universal human rights. All cultures are not as good as each other: some are racist, some preach death to homosexuals or Jews, some believe the weak should go to the wall, or all non-Christians to hell. Multicultural postmodernists cop out when they pretend all is relative and no value set is better.
As Gaspar Miklos Tamas wrote in openDemocracy: The problem about multiculturalism as the ideology and practice of weak groups is that it becomes a mutual aid society in which intra-group criticism and politics isnt possible. Culture always reflects the conviction of the elders of a given community. So what happens if you feel the need to rebel within that community? You automatically become a traitor to your own community. You join the whites. This has nothing to do with emancipation. Indeed, it places a barrier between people and their own fight for emancipation.
It is vitally important that Hirsi Ali is not treated by the left press as a traitor to her community: an Islamophobe.
When dealing with Islamic communities in the west, the left especially must not give up its traditional trenchant criticism of the repressive aspects of patriarchal religions. I would have had a happier childhood if the left had been less critical of my religious group, and it should have been. Now it should not throw in the towel either. There has to be a sensitive way of being tough.Few of us like practising tough love. It makes you into the bad guy. Is the left going to bite that bullet and claim its own victories (for feminism, gay rights, human rights) as things worth imposing on the new immigrants? Ah impose. Maybe that is too strong a word. But what, after all, do western governments do, when they send in the police to violent domestic conflicts, and prosecute men for doing what men of many religions have long thought it their lawful or God-given right to do to their women? So, yes: impose.
The left has always been good at being against the powerful: that is its whole stance. But guess what, despite being so long and so often the underdog, it has won battles. In many developed countries, it is now the establishment on issues such as female equality, domestic violence. It is a partner in western civilisation, a creator of it. So now it has to come to terms with being a (partial) top dog, and imposing its values on the new underdog poor patriarchs who are working for low wages and only want to be able to treat their women in their time-honoured ways while doing so.
Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion here. Or email: dave.opendemocracy@earthlink.net
