ANOTHER VOICE
Why does our culture fear for Jemima Goldsmith?
CHARLES MOORE
Some might take it as a sign of the confi- dence of our culture that every newspaper and most of the people one meets are quite sure that it is ridiculous for Jemima Gold- smith to marry Imran Khan. Perhaps it shows that we know we are the best and that anyone, especially a woman, who mar- ries into 'lesser breeds without the law' must therefore inevitably degrade herself.
Certainly it must always be painful for people to see their grandchildren brought up in a faith different from their own, and obviously it is, to put it mildly, a big step for a 21-year-old white girl to marry a world- famous coloured man twice her „age, embracing his religion before she does so. But if disapproval of the match is based on cultural confidence, what is the reason for that confidence?
It cannot be religion. Most marriages, if you include second marriages, no longer take place in church, and most of those that do, though no doubt sincere, are not really intended by the couple to signify, as the Prayer Book says they do, 'the mystical union which is betwixt Christ and His Church'. As for the prayer about Isaac and Rebecca living faithfully together and all the Biblical examples of sober and godly matrons, this, if used at all, is good chiefly for a laugh.
I am not sure, in fact, if Miss Goldsmith was a Christian, since her father is a Jew, but whatever her own background, no objector to her marriage can seriously sup- pose that she is throwing away a religious tradition which dominates our society.
So the widespread belief that she is doing the wrong thing must be based on some- thing else. Some rest their argument on the claim that Imran Khan is a man of the world with an experience of the opposite sex which goes wider than is strictly neces- sary, and that this may make her life diffi- cult. One girl I heard of thought he might be too like 'his father, the Aga' (or his ancestor, Genghis? These Khans are every- where). Others suggest that it is rather as if she were marrying the 'High life' corre- spondent of this paper. Obviously these are considerations, if they are true. But if you are marrying a man in his forties when you are 21, I should have thought it would be even more daunting, and certainly less appealing, if he had no experience of the opposite sex. In any event, it cannot be for this reason alone that people are so excit- ed, since such marriages take place between the English every week without a great deal of comment.
Besides, if one is speaking of the individ- uals involved, I should have thought that Miss Goldsmith was as well qualified as anyone to handle the situation. As the daughter of a man with several wives and a famously eloquent hatred of the decadence of the West, she will find some Islamic atti- tudes familiar and publicity nothing new. As a member of the Vane-Tempest-Stewart family where the blood runs strongest through the females, and brought up by her mother in that spirit, she will be able to give as good as she gets. Whatever the for- mal rules of the household in Lahore, one may guess that it will be the heiress and not the cricketer whose word is law.
In fact, it was Jemima Goldsmith herself who addressed what appears to be the cen- tral objection to her choice in an article on the subject in last week's Sunday Telegraph: `Judging by some of the articles which have appeared in the press, it would seem that a western woman's happiness hinges largely upon her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes; and the absence of such apparent freedom and luxuries in Islamic societies is seen as an infringement of her basic human rights . . .' Yes, that's about it, that is what the press appears to think, though a few more feminist bits about a woman's self-expression tend to be added to the stuff about the nightclubs.
I must go carefully here, since I am not a western woman and am never going to have to decide between a life lived under the Koran and one lived under a merchant banker in Kensington during the week and Gloucestershire at the weekends, but I should have thought that Miss Goldsmith is onto something. One does not have to hate modern western culture (and Miss Gold- smith was careful to say that she does not) to think that its idea of freedom may have become impoverished.
Even more impoverished, though, is its idea of other cultures. That is the most depressing thing about the reaction. Forty years ago, outrage at the marriage would have concentrated on Imran's colour. Now that, fortunately, has waned, but it has been replaced by a horror at foreign ways of doing things which make any real demands upon one, at any foreignness that goes beyond the harmlessly exotic and pic- turesque.
This particularly applies to Islam, which Palestinian terrorism and the Ayatollah have allowed us to reinterpret as simple barbarism, as if it were a faith without rhyme or reason, saints or scholars, without any part in the history of civilisation.
Although we like moaning at our own discontents, we cannot summon the inter- est to try to understand other ways of liv- ing, and we assume that any formalised religion with a Book and a law which it expects to be obeyed is at best boring and at worst horrifying. We assume that because Imran has sometimes been found in Annabel's he cannot be serious about Islam and politics in Pakistan, though we never found it difficult to understand that his father-in-law combined the odd appear- ance in the same club with running a great business empire.
The late Jo Grimond used to tell of visit- ing India and meeting an English woman who was 'pure Croydon' and married to an Indian. She liked to explain, without irony or embarrassment, that 'my husband is descended from the monkey god', rather as people in England say that their family came over with William the Conqueror. That is the right spirit, instead of giggling nervously at anything out of the normal run. All this fuss about the Goldsmith/ Khan wedding shows how provincial we have become.
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