Jack Straw's comfort zone
Madeleine Bunting's comments on the veiling row (it hardly qualifies as a debate) are well worth reading:
"It's been quite extraordinary: one man's emotional response to the niqab - the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes - has snowballed into a perceived titanic clash of cultures in which commentators pompously pronounce on how Muslims are "rejecting the values of liberal democracy".
Jack Straw feels uncomfortable and within a matter of hours, his discomfort is calibrated on news bulletins and websites in terms of an inquisitorial demand: do Muslims in this country want to integrate?
Comfort is a disastrous new measure for interactions in a diverse society....forget comfort and accept the starting point for any kind of tolerance: that it's not easy, that it requires imagination, that it makes demands of us.
....the niqab is a drastic option and one that many Muslim women reject. It is the response of a minority who feel that they are living in a hostile climate. Straw's comments have unleashed a storm of prejudice that only exacerbates the very tendencies which prompt some Muslims to retreat....They have elevated the situation of a tiny minority of women who are often the most fearful anyway into a national problem - even that they form a barrier to successful integration.
This is dangerous and absurd. There are many far more important barriers to successful integration. Two-thirds of children from families of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are growing up in poverty. More than 20% of all Muslim youths between 16 and 24 are unemployed. In many areas, the desire of second generation Muslims to integrate is being stymied by "white flight" from residential areas and white families using parental choice in education to avoid schools with large numbers of Asian pupils. Outgoing, confident ethnic communities are built where they find understanding, opportunity and engagement. We need to ask ourselves whether that is what we have provided."
Read the rest here.
The current row seems to me to share most of its fundamental characteristics with the other rows we've had in the West recently about Islam; or rather, about some people's bigoted view of Islam. The basic narrative is that we, the freedom-loving West, are under attack from them, the freedom-hating, backward Easterners, who constitute nothing less than a fifth column in our midst - a dangerous, existential (!) threat to our cherished liberal freedoms that must be resisted. Cue a vast array of powerful politicians and highly paid journalists employed by extremely wealthy corporations proclaiming their fearless stand against (their imagined conception of) one of the poorest and most reviled communities in our inner cities. Truly an impressive spectacle.
Since these fundamental characteristics of the debate are the substantive issue here (and not Jack Straw’s comfort zone or what clothes a tiny minority of Muslim women are wearing) I think my article from earlier this year “Are Muslims from Mars and Europeans from Venus?” is as relevant now as it was then. In the current context, two things in that article strike me as being particularly relevant now. Firstly, Tariq Ramadan’s point that if one is genuinely interested in fostering dialogue (as Straw disingenuously protests) the most important thing is to stress similarity and common ground, and secondly, the political utility of constructing in the public mind a feared and distrusted “other”:
“It is no coincidence that those who most enthusiastically peddle the fiction of a “clash of civilisations” also portray the opposing “other” as a force that seriously threatens to destroy “our way of life”, and therefore advocate an aggressive US-led military strategy across the Islamic world. Manichean rhetoric eulogizing the liberal idealism of “our values” and the necessity of defending them against those who “hate our freedoms” has been the very essence of Western pro-war advocacy in recent years. Observing essentially imperial foreign policies being depicted as altruistic endeavours aimed at bringing enlightenment to backward, inferior (if exotic) cultures, or at least at defending us against them, hardly places us in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, subjugation almost invariably goes hand in hand with the deliberate dehumanisation of those who are being subjugated by those responsible for or whose acquiescence is essential to the act of subjugation. And in terms of domestic social relations, the direct contribution made by stereotypical depictions of certain social groups as in some way inferior to the mistreatment of those groups by the majority is again a dynamic that's hardly unfamiliar, not least in Europe.”
"It's been quite extraordinary: one man's emotional response to the niqab - the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes - has snowballed into a perceived titanic clash of cultures in which commentators pompously pronounce on how Muslims are "rejecting the values of liberal democracy".
Jack Straw feels uncomfortable and within a matter of hours, his discomfort is calibrated on news bulletins and websites in terms of an inquisitorial demand: do Muslims in this country want to integrate?
Comfort is a disastrous new measure for interactions in a diverse society....forget comfort and accept the starting point for any kind of tolerance: that it's not easy, that it requires imagination, that it makes demands of us.
....the niqab is a drastic option and one that many Muslim women reject. It is the response of a minority who feel that they are living in a hostile climate. Straw's comments have unleashed a storm of prejudice that only exacerbates the very tendencies which prompt some Muslims to retreat....They have elevated the situation of a tiny minority of women who are often the most fearful anyway into a national problem - even that they form a barrier to successful integration.
This is dangerous and absurd. There are many far more important barriers to successful integration. Two-thirds of children from families of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are growing up in poverty. More than 20% of all Muslim youths between 16 and 24 are unemployed. In many areas, the desire of second generation Muslims to integrate is being stymied by "white flight" from residential areas and white families using parental choice in education to avoid schools with large numbers of Asian pupils. Outgoing, confident ethnic communities are built where they find understanding, opportunity and engagement. We need to ask ourselves whether that is what we have provided."
Read the rest here.
The current row seems to me to share most of its fundamental characteristics with the other rows we've had in the West recently about Islam; or rather, about some people's bigoted view of Islam. The basic narrative is that we, the freedom-loving West, are under attack from them, the freedom-hating, backward Easterners, who constitute nothing less than a fifth column in our midst - a dangerous, existential (!) threat to our cherished liberal freedoms that must be resisted. Cue a vast array of powerful politicians and highly paid journalists employed by extremely wealthy corporations proclaiming their fearless stand against (their imagined conception of) one of the poorest and most reviled communities in our inner cities. Truly an impressive spectacle.
Since these fundamental characteristics of the debate are the substantive issue here (and not Jack Straw’s comfort zone or what clothes a tiny minority of Muslim women are wearing) I think my article from earlier this year “Are Muslims from Mars and Europeans from Venus?” is as relevant now as it was then. In the current context, two things in that article strike me as being particularly relevant now. Firstly, Tariq Ramadan’s point that if one is genuinely interested in fostering dialogue (as Straw disingenuously protests) the most important thing is to stress similarity and common ground, and secondly, the political utility of constructing in the public mind a feared and distrusted “other”:
“It is no coincidence that those who most enthusiastically peddle the fiction of a “clash of civilisations” also portray the opposing “other” as a force that seriously threatens to destroy “our way of life”, and therefore advocate an aggressive US-led military strategy across the Islamic world. Manichean rhetoric eulogizing the liberal idealism of “our values” and the necessity of defending them against those who “hate our freedoms” has been the very essence of Western pro-war advocacy in recent years. Observing essentially imperial foreign policies being depicted as altruistic endeavours aimed at bringing enlightenment to backward, inferior (if exotic) cultures, or at least at defending us against them, hardly places us in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, subjugation almost invariably goes hand in hand with the deliberate dehumanisation of those who are being subjugated by those responsible for or whose acquiescence is essential to the act of subjugation. And in terms of domestic social relations, the direct contribution made by stereotypical depictions of certain social groups as in some way inferior to the mistreatment of those groups by the majority is again a dynamic that's hardly unfamiliar, not least in Europe.”
It is politically useful for a number of reasons to have a demonised "other" toward whom one can direct collective opprobrium. It distracts from one's own failings, it aggrandises one by comparison with the "other", it prepares the public mind for a range of future policy choices that might otherwise appear somewhat sinister. One need not instigate this dynamic intentionally for it to unfold in the familiar ways and for the familiar people to accrue the familiar benefits. And we ourselves need not bother to delve into the possible workings of Straw's mind to recognise the effects of what he has said or to note that those effects were entirely predictable before he said it. As I say, its a familiar story. Bunting says "this is ugly". She's right.
posted by David Wearing at 11:01 AM
2 Comments:
Excellent essay. I would like to add some reflections:
The basic narrative is that we, the freedom-loving West, are under attack from them, the freedom-hating, backward Easterners, who constitute nothing less than a fifth column in our midst - a dangerous, existential (!) threat to our cherished liberal freedoms that must be resisted.
This is a fair characterization of the majority view of the matter, and I'm sorry to admit I doubt there's a culture in the world of which a majority can reflect without such narcissism.
Indeed, I've noticed the capacity for such honest insight (by a majority of the engaged population) is almost, if not indeed, a logical impossibility. The reason is that people who genuinely love philosophical liberalism are often a horizontal cross-section of humanity, and therefore identify with each other a bit more than with their own tribe.
thanks, jrm
What I was describing was the narrative set out by the political class. As far as the rest of us are concerned, possibly nationalistic chauvinism is inevitable to an extent, but people are pretty complex creatures and factors such as human empathy also play their part.
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