Don’t attack the veil: attack the misogyny that created it
Rod Liddle says we should not be challenging Muslim women, but displaying the courage to ask why they cover their faces in the first place. All else is appeasement Here’s how far things have moved in such a short space of time. Jack Straw, in an attempt to generate attention (and approval) for his quest to become deputy leader of the Labour party, lets it be known that he doesn’t like talking to Muslim women who are fully veiled. Within two days the entire British public — save for most of our Muslim citizens — are clamouring for space to agree with him. Notable highbrow liberal commentators conclude, sadly, that Mr Straw is right; that full veil, the niqab, really is a bit much, it is stretching our tolerance. Only a year ago the Guardian’s chief leader writer, Martin Kettle, told a Fabian conference on ‘Britishness’ the following: ‘Diversity in the society we live in is a given — that has to be the starting point for talking about Britishness and integration.’ But, for Martin, diversity no longer stretches to the clothes people are allowed to wear and still call themselves ‘British’. Here he was in the Guardian last week: ‘The veil is an explicit statement of separation and distance ... it literally comes between its wearer and other people. It is impossible not to see it as a barrier dividing the individual inside from the outside world.... It says, or seems to say, I do not wish to engage with you.’ Elsewhere in your morning newspapers there were little cut-out-and-keep drawings of niqabs and burkas and jilbabs and the rest, so that the readers could check out their local Muslim population to see if they were dressed in a manner which would please Jack Straw and Martin Kettle. Most people — including a good few Muslims — seemed to agree that a bit of covering up was fine — hair, breasts, etc — but not the whole face. A remarkable 97 per cent of people who took part in a telephone opinion poll for the Daily Express thought Muslims should banish the veil, right now. I heard a similar result (93 per cent) on a local radio station phone-in poll. These are self-selecting polls, of course. It may well be that there are more of us indulgent liberals around who don’t really mind what people wear, but didn’t phone in; we may find burkas and niqabs a bit disconcerting, but then we may also find the habitual uniform of Guardian leader writers a touch de trop — those post-Marxist foxed brown corduroy trousers redolent of separation and distance, a wish not to engage with the real world — either way, it is not something over which we have domain. It is none of our business. We try to see beyond the veil, or the sunglasses, or the safari suit. We don’t let it bother us too much.
Martin Kettle began his piece with the truism, or the self-fulfilling prophecy, that Jack Straw’s comments most definitely constituted an ‘issue’, to judge from the furore which followed. He then proceeded (in my opinion) to miss the entire point of what that issue really is. Not the stuff about veils and just how far it is OK for Muslim people to cover themselves up, nor even about the extent to which private behaviour becomes political. It is — to put it in terms those Chomsky-philes at the Guardian might understand — about the deep structure. By which I mean the rapidly hardening attitudes towards manifestations of Islam (although still, not Islam itself). And the political capital to be made out of taking a swipe at manifestations of Islam. We are groping towards a means of dealing with Islam and we are still getting it horribly wrong. We have become progressively less tolerant towards individuals who do not matter and towards superficial manifestations of Islam which do not remotely matter. But we still, somehow, cleave to the view that the creed of the religion, its ideology, is perfectly fine and dandy, peaceable and amenable to integration, despite the copious evidence to the contrary. Mr Straw was elected MP for Blackburn in 1979. He is an observant chap and reportedly an extremely good constituency MP; we should assume that at some earlier point over the preceding 27 years it must have occurred to him that a substantial minority of his constituents were dressed from top to toe in Hessian sacking, with a small slit for the eyes. He must surely have met some of these women; but he failed to voice his concerns until last week. And you can understand why. Roll back ten or even five years, and any politician who requested female Muslim constituents to strip off a bit when attending surgery would be publicly eviscerated and deselected before you could say Laurence Robertson. Now, though, it is — as one Muslim commentator put it — open season on Muslims. Labour has learnt, this past year, that smacking the Muslims about actually plays rather well with the public and, crucially, does not cost them Muslim votes because, if we’re honest, the invasion of Iraq already accomplished that. There are no more Muslim votes to be lost. And so we have Jon Cruddas and Margaret Hodge and Ann Cryer articulating the legitimate concerns of white, working-class voters who feel estranged by their Muslim neighbours. We have John Reid grandstanding in front of Muslim community leaders, telling them to grass on their kids and fortuitously, or otherwise — facing down a bearded nutter, a foaming representative from that specious, official paradigm the ‘other’ Islam, the bad one, which wants us all killed. And Mr Straw now feels it’s a good time to advise Muslims on their dress code — and everybody agrees, even Martin Kettle.
But I’d contend that those phone poll votes — and the agonised perorations of liberal columnists, paragons of decency all of them — are evidence not of a specific dislike of the veil, but of a more general disaffection with and suspicion of Muslims per se. The veil is just the easy way in; something which they can grip hold of and at last vent their spleen.
And in attacking those who wear the full veil — rather than countering the bitter, misogynist ideology which insists that women disport themselves with modesty lest they incite the uncontrollable urges of men — we do ourselves down. In our con fusion, faced with a coherent, intractable and antithetical ideology, we flail at the wrong targets and leave ourselves open to the one charge which we should reasonably be able to level at the Islamists, without being gainsaid: intolerance.
The veil — whether a gentle covering of the hair with an agreeably patterned silk scarf or the full burka — matters only in that it is a symbol of female subjugation. The varying extremes to which Muslim women will (‘voluntarily’) go in order to comply with their religious strictures does not matter one jot; what matters is the central tenet, that women need to dress this way because otherwise they will be culpable for the lascivious attentions of men. That they are thus guilty of contributory negligence. And that, further, women have a clearly defined and specific role in life, which is to support their menfolk and do as they are bidden.
The best response from us Western liberals, I would suggest, is to counter this primitive, bigoted ideology in public, and leave those individuals who adhere to it alone. Attack the cause, not the practitioners. In other words, do not allow our state schools to cede one inch to ‘local community leaders’ who insist that the girls should be allowed — or forced — to wear approximations of Muslim dress as part of the school uniform, as happens up and down the country. Make the girls wear exactly the same costume as every other girl in the school, with no concessions to creed. Let’s face it: if a white, Christian girl petitioned a headmaster or local education department to allow her to cover herself up from top to toe because she feared the predatory attentions of her male co-students, she would be sent to the school psychiatrist.
And Mr Straw would be better off attacking the sexism implicit in the stric ture that forces some Muslim women to wear the veil, rather than wittering on about the difficulty this presents to him when he is trying to hold a constituency surgery. The truth is, the veil itself presents no real difficulty whatsoever. By his own admission, his meetings with veiled Muslim women were effected without rancour or obstruction. It is what lies behind the veil — not the individual, but the ideology.
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