2006-10-20
Being an ambivalent sort of chap I don’t know what to make of this hajib business.Fr those who don’t live over here you may be unaware of the great stirring up of the female Muslim community in Britain that has been going on for the last couple of weeks. There are a fairly small number of devout Muslim women who wear the full-face veil – the black ones with the slit cut for the eyes – which they do, they protest, from a strict observance of modesty required by their religion. Their branch of the religion to be more accurate.
A couple of weeks ago Jack Straw, recently sacked as Foreign Secretary (him of the shouldn’t have started wearing contact lenses so late in life eyes, used to follow Ms Rice wherever she led with a puppy-dog expression of someone astonished at being allowed to play with the big boys), made a comment that when women come to his office wearing the veil he asks them if they wouldn’t mind removing it while he talked with them. Not that he demanded, not that he refused to speak to them if they didn’t, just asked if they wouldn’t mind. How mild is that?
[Incidentally I saw an advert for a film recently (did I say this already?) that said it ‘contains mild language’ – not something I would have thought it necessary to warn people of. But then soft words butter no parsnips, as they say]
This remark got the media going, shrieking that these people must be stopped from their insane practice if they want to live in our society – some rightly pointing out that the veil is surely a symbol of subjugation of the female sex.
Now I’m rather inclined to the view that actually these women aren’t doing anything wrong – they’re merely expressing their religion in a way that seems alien to the vast majority o the population. But they’re not really threatening are they? Or if they are it’s in pretty much the same way as a nun is threatening. So part of me is saying we have to accept them for what they are, live and let live, and not ostracise them any more than we should reject Jewish people who wear the skull cap or those black suits and hats.
Of course parts of the media have started making this extension, suggesting that any blatant display of religion should be castigated – to the point where we now have a BBC news woman who has been asked not to wear a crucifix necklace that is too large and shiny. And going down that route just seems so absurd – although presumably certain parts of the media can only understand the this doesn’t apply to ‘our’ religion – or of course to Judaism because we don’t want to be accused of anti-Semitism.
But then we hear about the hajib-wearing classroom assistant in a Church of England primary school who was told she had to remove it to teach five-year old children. One wonders what she was thinking of applying for a job in a Christian school and not understanding that children that young can only be taught effectively if they can see facial expression, but she refused and then took the school to court claiming religious persecution. She lost, but won compensation for ‘unsympathetic treatment’.
At her press conference after (under the glare of the television lights it was evident she was wearing both mascara and eye shadow under her veil, which call me harsh, does seem a little immodest) she said: ‘We’re not aliens! Try to understand us – that’s what integration is about!’
Which is where I get ambivalent. In being race and religion tolerant – which I say we must be – we seem to have got to the point where those who see themselves as victims seem t believe that they have to concede nothing in the general quest for integration. We have to accept them as they are, however far they go in self-imposed segregation. As far as I know no-one is saying to anyone we must all act and dress the same; all that is being asked is that some sense of what is appropriate to any given situation is taken into consideration. If I visit a mosque I expect to observe their requirements as to dress, I wouldn’t dream of taking a ham sandwich into a synagogue.
It does seem the more tolerant a society tries to be the more it fosters sectarianism. And when it comes to things as fundamental in human rights terms as education, I can’t see why there is any place for a religious override. What has the Bible, the Koran or any religious teaching to do with learning to read or calculate? Shouldn’t religious education be the province of the church, the mosque or whatever?
When I become dictator, after the ambivalent revolution, there will be no religious segregation of schooling – no Jewish, no Islam, no Catholic, no Church of England, no anti-Darwinian schools (and so on). And I honestly think that within a generation we will have started to break down fundamentalism, sectarianism and be a long way towards eradicating terrorism.