Background

Feminist, lawyer and women’s rights campaigner Seyran Ateş, author of The Multicultural Fallacy (Der Multikulti-Irrtum, Berlin, Ullstein Verlag, 2007) and the autobiography Große Reise ins Feuer (Berlin, Rowohlt Verlag, 2006, henceforth Ateş) has written fearlessly and eloquently about the problems of radicalisation of young Muslims, integration, the desperate isolation in which many Muslim women live, their oppression and social separatism (on both sides of the ethnic divide) in her home country, Germany, all of which are only too familiar in France and Britain as well.

From an early age, her language skills meant that she was expected to accompany adults on administrative business: "At offices and in doctors’ surgeries I noticed how awful it was if you couldn’t communicate properly.  The staff were unfriendly as a general rule and completely devoid of any willingness to help.  They sneered at the people for whom I was acting as interpreter and adopted a very curt tone.  To start off with they frightened me with their loud and overbearing voices and their self confident manner, but as time went by I grew accustomed to it.  As long as you stuck to their rules they left you more or less in peace or behaved as if you weren’t even there.  Which at any rate was more pleasant than being bellowed at" (Ateş, p57).

She vividly describes the dilemmas and strains of being caught between two cultures: "I too perceived my parental home and school as two very different worlds, but didn’t think the Germans were as bad as my parents made them out to be.  fair enough, every now and then people, especially older women, hurled abuse at us.  When we were playing with other children outside our front door they would say things as they walked by, such as ‘Out of the way, you bloody foreign brats.  There’s hardly any room on the pavement any more.  Go back home where you belong’.  Fortunately not all Germans were as frosty" (Ateş, p58).

She was always painfully conscious of the constraints placed upon her by her cultural heritage: "The topic of sexuality was, on the whole, not one that was ever talked about much in our family.  An exception to this rule was swearwords.  The terms tart or whore were bandied about frequently when I was being smacked and cursed at.  I was already familiar with these expressions before I had the slightest inkling of what whores are and what they do for a living.

Daughters embody the family’s honour and have to be protected from all sources of danger.  They must preserve their virginity until they are married.  This is why I was kept locked away.  To avoid all risks to my virtue, so that I would not stray off the path.  Sexuality was to do with honour, I was honour I was my hymen.  When I protested I was told I had to be reasonable and think and behave like a Turkish girl.  That girls and women had a very clearly defined role in our culture and that there was nothing wrong with that.  I shouldn’t think of picking up bad habits from ‘the Germans’.  they were all beyond good and evil anyway.  Allah would punish them at some stage for their wicked ways.

An acquaintance told me once that girls are as precious as gold.  The most beautiful thing was for us to be polished and placed in the display cabinet so that we could not be tarnished.  The very notion that I might have to spend the rest of my life in the display cabinet filled me with anxiety and dread" (Ateş, pp66-7).

Her parents did not ram religion down her throat during her childhood: "I was happy to lean the Lord’s Prayer off by heart and can still recite it today.  The Ten Commandments have certainly influenced me every bit as much as my Islamic upbringing at home, whereby our parents could only pass on the Islam that had become incorporated into cultural traditions.  As a child, I did not pick up much by way of the Islamic faith because my parents themselves only knew what others had told them.  They had never been properly taught.  Only now, in their old age, have they really begun to devote their attention to Islam by reading books, attending a course on the Koran and listening to radio and television programmes.  As a result, my upbringing was not particularly religious, more steeped in traditions.  hence, for example, the issue of whether or not I would wear a headscarf never really cropped up.  My Mother had, with my Father’s consent, discarded her headscarf in Berlin.  Today, having gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, she has begun wearing one again.   My parents continue to be liberal Muslims.  They do not pester their children about this topic, they do not compel us to occupy ourselves with Islam in one way or other.  Faith is a matter between Allah and each individual.

I would have liked to have learned more about Islam in my German school, however.  I never went to a Koran school because the Islamic community in Berlin is too fundamentalist.  My parents and I were in agreement over this issue for once.  My Father stopped visiting the Mosque because it was more about pursuing politics than practicing religion.  Furthermore, downright hate speeches were propagated against the Germans, in whose country we lived, for whom we worked in order to earn a living.  Of course, many Germans were ill-disposed towards foreigners and my Father too was sceptical towards ‘the Germans’, but things must have been overly intense in the Mosque, which is why he refused to attend prayers in Berlin.  In the meantime, my Father’s opinion has been corroborated by many other Muslims, who have searched in vain for a Mosque in which they can go about practicing their religion to the exclusion of anything else" (Ateş, pp70-1).

Her depiction of being embedded in one culture whilst coming into daily contact with another is bound to strike a chord amongst those in a similar situation: "I travelled between two worlds on a daily basis, torn by my thoughts and feelings.  At home, I had to be the Turkish girl who was supposed to think and live in accordance with tradition.  In school, I was confronted with German culture, in which I was granted greater leeway.  Here I was permitted to develop my own independent personality, whilst at home rules were constantly being drawn up regulating how I had to be and behave as a Turkish girl.  Within my family, I was primarily being groomed for my future role as wife and taught how to make life pleasant for my husband and guests.  In school, by contrast, I was encouraged to learn as much as possible and undergo training in a profession to be able to live and autonomous life of my own choosing.

As they years went by, it became an ever greater source of torment that the German girls around me were allowed to do so much more than I was.  They were free, whilst I was confined, as if in a prison without locks and bars.

This experience of migrating between two worlds made it seem as if I had two faces.  Both physically and psychologically it felt as if I were two people in one.

In the course of a perfectly ordinary day I had to switch identities several times over: I woke up in the mornings as a Turkish girl and got ready to go to school.  On the way to school, everything was neutral because I was on my own for the most part and thought about what the future had in store for me.  I indulged in wonderful daydreams about how I would be able to live when I was older and enjoyed greater freedom.  At school I felt German, even though I wasn’t allowed to do everything my German classmates were allowed to.  What was more important to me was how I felt about everything I thought I wanted in life and how I imagined it would be.  It was also interesting that I always felt much better on the way to school than I did on the way back home" (Ateş, pp80-1).

On reaching adulthood, the sexual dimension was added: "I didn’t dress, speak or behave like most Turkish girls.  The greengrocer in whose shop we were regular customers soon took me to task for it as a result.  Why didn’t I live with my parents, but consorting with these hippies?  That was the other side of the coin. I switched shops and only placed my orders in German.  People didn’t realise that I understood Turkish and sometimes even made nasty comments about me.  On such occasions, I would say quite loudly in Turkish iyi günler [goodbye] on the way out.  The reactions to this varied widely.  Some people would glance at me with irritation and then look away at the floor or turn their backs on me.  Others would apologise and ask my forgiveness.  They hadn’t recognised me as Turkish.

I was and am still not identifiable as a Turk.  That annoys both sides and demonstrates how rigid the images are that most people carry around in their heads (…) A bloke who wanted to chat me up in a bar because he though I was a South American beat a hasty retreat as soon as he learned I was a Turk.  In that particular instance I was more relieved than anything else.  However, unpleasant incidents also happen, such as, for example, at a street festival on Wrangelstraße: as we were watching a folk music performance, one guy said to his friend in Turkish he should push his way forward so that he could push himself up against me.  I immediately let loose a barrage of insults in Turkish, let him so much as dare and he would soon see what would happen to him if he so much as laid a finger on me.  They apologised quite abjectly straight away, addressing me as abla (’big sister’) and asking my forgiveness.  They explained their conduct by telling me it was because they thought I was a German.

Once when I was cycling home from school a Turkish man followed me on a motorbike.  When I stopped and yelled at him he should fuck off and leave me alone he was really distraught that I had harangued him in Turkish.  He too excused himself by saying that he had mistaken me for a German.  By way of reply to my question as to what the difference was, all men after such incidents claim that chatting up German women in this manner is not so bad.

Woe betide any German who might have tried chatting up their sisters, mothers or wives like that, however.  They would have lynched the guy.  As if German women had no honour.  Of course not all Turkish men are like that.  Perhaps I was just unlucky enough to chance upon the tiny minority who behaved like that.  Then again, maybe not!  My worst experience in this respect took place at Bahnhof Zoo when I was wanting to catch the metro home with a friend after a visit to the cinema.  We were standing on the platform waiting for the metro to arrive when a Turkish man crept up to me from behind and started stroking my long hair.  I turned round instantly and gave him a dressing down in Turkish.  At first he was taken aback that I could speak Turkish and took a step backwards.  Then he recovered his composure, lunged at me and tried to attack me, saying ‘If you lie underneath German men, you can bloody well lie underneath me too!’  The mere fact that I was waiting for a metro at such an advanced hour provided sufficient grounds for him to assume I was fair game.  The next day I had my long hair cut out of sheer revulsion" (Ateş, pp139-41).

That integration is a two-way street becomes clear from many episodes from her life: "Day-to-day racism has become a part of my life.  Some experiences are so incredible that you can almost laugh at them.  One typical example from my own personal recollections: when my Mother was going through the menopause and has heavy periods that showed no inclination to stop, she had to be admitted to hospital for treatment.  When I visited her the day after she had been admitted, I wanted to find out from the ward doctor how things were looking for my Mother.  I found him in the corridor, between two nurses, went up to him and said: ‘Good afternoon.  Could I disturb you for a moment please?  I am the daughter of Mrs Hatun Ateş.  I would very much like to know what is wrong with her and what treatment she requires’.

He gave me an irritated look and didn’t respond.  After an unexpectedly protracted silence he said: ‘How am I to explain it?’ an expression of despair on his face.  ‘You understand?  Baby box.  Where babies are made’.  As he spoke, he drew a rectangular box in the air with outstretched hands.

The nurses glanced from him to me and back in obvious embarrassment at his display, giving me a look of solidarity.  Unlike him, they had understood me.  Now I was the one who was lost for words.  Having regained my composure, I asked him: ‘What do you mean?  Are you talking about the womb, the uterus?  Does my Mother have a problem with her uterus?’

He gave me a somewhat idiotic look.  I slowly grew angry and said: ‘Feel free to speak German to me.  I can understand you perfectly well.  I have just spoken to you in fluent German.  Why are you speaking to me in such a peculiar fashion?’

He apologised and claimed that he had hardly had any dealings with Turks who speak good German.  But I hadn’t addressed him in broken German.  He didn’t have any reply to that one and started explaining to me normally and sensibly, exactly the way you are supposed to when talking to a patient’s relative, what was wrong with my Mother and what treatment she would need.  my guess had been correct: he had been referring to the uterus.  The term ‘baby box’ was one he had invented specially for the benefit of Turkish patients. Apparently they would be able to grasp it.

As to what ‘the Turks’ might or might not grasp depends on what kind of an image you have of them and how you speak to them.  my parents could only pick up so-called ‘Tarzan German’ because it was the only kind of German anyone had spoken to them.  Naturally no provision had been made for the guest-workers recruited to be taught German.  All they were supposed to do was work. The most important sentence therefore was: ‘You work.  Then you get money’.  Apart from the phrase: ‘Clear off back home, why don’t you!’" (Ateş, pp211-3).

Even feminists have no grounds for self-congratulation: "In my search for feminist examples to follow, I had to leave out my Mother, aunts and other family friends.  They could be of no great help to me, no matter how earnestly I yearned for Turkish women as role models.  Most of the older women in my immediate surroundings could neither read nor write and already had to shoulder multiple burdens in their roles as mother, factory worker and foreigner and were struggling to cope with the numerous demands on them.  The last thing they wanted to do was to start thinking about how all of this was unfair and politically untenable into the bargain.

Hence only few first-generation immigrants joined the German women’s movement or allowed themselves to be caught up and swept along with it.  Immigrants were only discovered in any serious way by German feminists towards the end of the 70s.  And then it was as helpless victims of an Islamic-patriarchal society, oppressed by husband, son and all and sundry male relatives.  Of course we were – I was – oppressed.  But we are not just victims.  This was something that the German feminists were not quite so keen on hearing as, ultimately, it would have necessitated a redefinition of the respective tasks and roles and the Turkish women would not have cooked any delicious dishes or scrumptious cakes for the various events any more.  In those days, German feminists were not genuinely interested in us and our culture.  They showed as little real interest as the others with whom we had frequent dealings" (Ateş, pp241-2).

An attempt was made on Seyran Ateş’ life whilst she was working at an advice bureau for Turkish and Kurdish women.  A man in a beige trench coat and flat cap tried to push his way inside the premises, refusing to take no for an answer when Ateş and her workmates insisted that nobody of the name of Leyla was employed there.  They would be happy to give him assistance, but he was not allowed to set foot inside the office itself.  At the umpteenth reassurance that they would not ignore him provided that he left, he told them that what he was after would not take long, reached into his breast pocket, drew out a pistol and fired three shots, leaving Ateş with a severed left carotid artery and a bullet lodged between her fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.  Miraculously, she neither bled to death nor was she left paraplegic.

The police officers carrying out the investigation refused to lend credence to her theory that the motive behind the shooting was political and that the Grey Wolves might be involved.  In spite of the death of one of her colleagues, Ateş was appalled at the lack of sympathy and support she met with from left-wing members of the Turkish and Kurdish community, her political allies.  Their attitude was based on not rocking the boat when providing social services to women.  This would have entailed taking account of "cultural values" and reaffirming deeply embedded gender roles rather than challenging them.  As far as these men were concerned, sewing classes and German courses would have been more than adequate (for the full account of the assassination attempt and its aftermath, see Ateş, pp144-165 and for details of the trial and litany of procedural errors leading to the release of the accused, see pp166-86).

I travelled to Berlin to interview Seyran Ateş when the European Cup season was at its height.  Both passionate and articulate, I was struck not only by her brilliant analytical intellect, tenacity and toughness, but also by her warmth, her refusal to succumb to bitterness after all the battles she has fought.  With her vision for a renewed feminist agenda, she is a true inspiration.

The Interview

Chameleon: Could you say a few words about yourself by way of introduction for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with your work?

Seyran: My parents came to Germany as guest workers and, at the age of six I joined them in Berlin as the child of first-generation Turkish guest workers in 1969.  I started nursery school here in Berlin, completed my secondary school education here and went on to study law.  In other words, my entire school and university career unfolded here in Germany, more specifically in Berlin.  That summarises my educational background.  I am one of five siblings, the one in the middle, the eldest girl – I have a younger sister and three brothers, two elder and one younger.  My birth was planned.  My parents wanted another child, a third one and when it turned out to be a girl they didn’t mind in the least, I wasn’t an accident.  That was a sketch of my family background.  I grew up in a very traditional family, in other words a family whose members had not gone through the education system.  My parents do not have any academic qualifications.  They had been peasant farmers in Turkey and then simply workers and I grew up in this liminal zone poised between the traditional world of Turkey and the modern world of Germany, which I discovered at school.  My parents and people in my Turkish environment told me again and again and tried to impress upon me to be and behave like a Turkish girl, to be Turkish, although they never did explain what that implied, so I had to try to figure it out for myself as it were.  First and foremost what it boiled down to is that Turkish girls do not enjoy the same freedom of movement, they don’t have boyfriends, they don’t go out that much and certainly are never out and about unaccompanied.  These restrictions were Turkish and the German girls could move about more freely.  After a very short time indeed I really hated the fact that my brothers enjoyed greater freedom than I did.  I very quickly began to rebel, an inner rebellion set in at a very early stage and then somewhere along the line I also started reading books on women’s issues, already in my teenage years and realised that I found their message compelling, that women and men have equal rights also in the meaning of the law and at the age of 15 I decided to study law and to fight for women’s rights and the rights of minorities.  Before turning 18, I cleared off, abandoning the parental home, breaking off relations with my family to begin with, but, years later, reestablishing links with them so that now we are fully reconciled and have very close and loving relations again.  I am a lawyer, I did study law at university, just as I had planned to do and I am an author, writing and publishing books as well as producing articles for newspapers.  I have written two volumes of autobiography, the first when I left home, as a way of describing the situation of girls and set out the reasons why we want to walk out.  It was published in 1983 already.  I have a bent for writing.  I graduated in Germany in 1997 and started working as a lawyer straight away.  Something terrible had happened to me in the meantime.  When I was 20, I began working in a drop-in advice bureau for women from Turkey.  In 1984, when I was 21, I was shot in the office.  It was an assassination attempt.  I survived, but another woman died and the experience has left a profound impression on me and continues to do so because it was a politically motivated attack, an attack on the institution I was working for, against our efforts to help women to attain independence and to enable them to stand on their own two feet and that did not go down too well.  As I say, it still has a profound influence on me today and that was the reason why in 2006 when I was once again subjected to harsh attacks I closed down my chambers, saying to myself that I couldn’t stand the animosity and I was scared that something like the shooting might happen to me again.

Chameleon: So the attempt on your life was politically motivated rather than personal?

Seyran: It was politically motivated, not targeted against me personally.  I closed down my lawyer’s practice because after an appointment dealing with a divorce case, my client’s husband attacked me.  She was beaten up by this man right in front of my very eyes during a period when I was bearing the brunt of a great deal of hostility, with a steady stream of threatening e-mails and letters and I was gripped with fear that the same thing might happen to me as happened in 1984.  I had become a mother in the meantime and feared for my child.  Quite strongly.  That is why I decided to throw in the towel and gave up.  I have since obtained my licence to practice once again and have resumed my professional activity as a lawyer since 2007, although I don’t work in quite the same way as I used to in the old days.  I don’t have chambers where clients can come and go any more and I no longer deal publicly with family law related cases.  Officially I don’t have anything to do with them.  Instead I concentrate on writing and providing advice and assistance to women on an informal basis, primarily via e-mail and telephone, but also via face to face contacts.  I just don’t work in the courts any more, so I no longer legally represent clients.

Chameleon: Your experience illustrates the fact that there are at least no formal barriers impeding social mobility.

Seyran: Yes, of course girls can change and improve their social position.  I had the good fortune to attend a school class in Germany in which the majority of pupils had German as their mother tongue and that apart from me and one other Turkish girl none of the other children spoke Turkish.  We never spoke Turkish to each other, sticking to German even when it was just the two of us.  That was the making of me and I can only – as I always do – encourage others as well as their children to acquaint themselves with German culture, with the German environment and to take the step to establish contact with German society, to get to know the wider community in which they live and to obtain qualifications because you can change your social situation through education.

Chameleon: I find it interesting that you used the expression your "good fortune" in connection with being almost the only Turkish child in the class.

Seyran: I wasn’t relegated to a class full of non-native Germans.  It was indeed my good fortune.  If I had ended up in the kind of class consisting of non-German pupils that existed in those days I would never have had the good fortune to pick up German so quickly and to such a degree of fluency.

Chameleon: What happens in the majority of families?

Seyran: In the meantime most children are concentrated in so-called foreigners’ classes, which are classes for the children of immigrants.  By and large the children who attend them speak Turkish, Arabic or Kurdish to each other and don’t learn German properly because hardly anybody speaks German with them, they don’t know anyone who speaks German.

Chameleon: Is that a form of social segregation practiced by the Germans?

Seyran: It is a parallel society, practiced by both sides.

Chameleon: So it isn’t unilateral?

Seyran: Mainstream German society excludes these children by setting up classes like this in the first place and the children’s parents follow suit by failing to ensure that their children are sent to other schools, for example.  Looking at myself, I am a responsible mother and deliberately live in an area and deliberately send my daughter to a school where she comes into contact with children of many other nationalities.  Moreover, I send her to a school where speaking German is taken for granted, where German is the main language of communication and nobody speaks Turkish with her.

Chameleon: Language is a vital tool of integration.

Seyran: Absolutely.  If you don’t speak the official language of the country you live in, you don’t stand much of a chance of changing or improving your social position.

Chameleon: From that point of view these classes lumping together pupils of non-German extraction are a very bad idea.

Seyran: A very bad idea indeed.  They are counterproductive and impede integration, since integration can only work if you really live in the country fully, in the country as a whole, not just in one segment of it, if you know the country and speak the language.  If you cannot do all that, you cannot be integrated into the community.

Chameleon: But there are no formal barriers hindering the integration of Turks into mainstream German society, are there?

Seyran: Not as such.  Having said that, there is a formal barrier to the extent that if you speak Turkish, or if Kurdish or Arabic-speaking children live in a particular area then they are also obliged to attend a particular school, there are rules about catchment areas in Germany, which means that children have to attend school in the area they live in, nearby, so that they do not have a long trip to school.  Parents do not enjoy freedom of choice of school, but they can move elsewhere.  And a lot of parents do.  It would be beneficial in any case, as the children who are put in classes where almost all their fellow pupils share an immigrant background tend to live in areas with a high concentration of immigrants, in other words their children get off to a bad start in terms of opportunities.  That is why it is a good thing for them to move out anyway.  Not just for their children, but for their own sake so that they, in my opinion, can get away from this process of ethnicisation themselves, which would allow them to observe multi-cultural society first hand, to really become aware of it, to get to know other ethnic groups and cultures and not just stick to their own community.  I think it is bad for a multi-cultural society for all the Turks to live clustered together in a single ethnic group, or for all the Kurds to do the same, or all the Arabs, or all the Russians or Poles.  It is a good thing to have all these individual districts where there is a multiplicity of them, such as in New York with the Italian quarter or Chinatown, but they ought not to be hermetically sealed off from the community at large.  In spite of the preponderance of one ethnic group, they should still genuinely one part of the whole.

Chameleon: I don’t know how you could counteract ethnic pockets from becoming isolated from mainstream society.

Seyran: By creating attractions, by making it attractive to people and really explaining to them, elucidating to them that there are benefits not just for their children, but for them themselves if they move into another district.

Chameleon: I suspect this may have something to do with social class.  In general terms the working class is not quite as mobile as the middle class.  Although, beyond the occasional couscous or curry I am not convinced that the middle class are particularly keen on mixing in the interests of integration and I haven’t a clue how you can overcome this reluctance.

Seyran: What you are driving at is that education plays an important role.  You are distinguishing between the working and middle classes and suggesting that people without an education are unaware of the downside.  This is why society has a burden of responsibility to shoulder, as I maintain, to lend support, so that uneducated people can also grasp it, so that they can be opened up to the notion that they have a responsibility towards their children.  If a person doesn’t know how to sort out an education then the state has a task to carry out, as does the school, as do we as a society.  If I have the opportunity to meet parents because the situation arises for professional reasons and if these parents are in a situation like that I confront them with it, I tell them it straight.  In my view, the point is not being made clearly enough.  They are not being called upon often enough to take the initiative themselves.  I call upon every family, every father, every mother on every occasion available to me to tell them: "You have a share of the responsibility too.  For goodness’ sake move out of this part of town so that your children have a fighting chance!"

Chameleon: Presumably the parallel society comes into being as a result of this ethnic segregation.

Seyran: Precisely!  Because of the ethnic segregation you end up with a parallel society.  It is a creation of both sides.  It isn’t just a coincidence, something that spontaneously turned out that way, but was made that way by society as a whole and also by politics because the rents, for example, are so low in certain areas that only uneducated people can live there and there are landlords who don’t let out their properties to foreigners, there don’t want certain tenants.  In the 1960s and 1970s it was impossible for Turkish families to find a flat without further ado, to find landlords who were willing to accept Turks as tenants.  It wasn’t that easy.  A lot of landlords didn’t want to let Turks move in and that is how it came about that certain streets and houses were open to people from Turkey, as the landlords didn’t care who lived there.

Chameleon: It was quite similar in the UK.  In those days there were signs in the windows that read: "No blacks, no Irish, no dogs".  In London.

Seyran: Exactly.  It wasn’t any different in Germany, I know from Berlin that there were an awful lot of landlords who stated in their ads: "No foreigners".  It is discrimination, but what can you do?  You cannot force them.

Chameleon: You could prohibit it by law, couldn’t you?

Seyran: Yes, of course.  It is prohibited by law already, we have the Anti-Discrimination Law on the statute books, but you can only prosecute it if it is blatant.  Nobody dares to discriminate openly any more.  It will be the same in the UK, adverts like that will be outlawed, but certain people will continue to discriminate covertly.  If I have someone sitting in front of me whom I don’t want, I won’t tell him straight out that I don’t want him because he is a foreigner, but I will quite simply say that there are other prospective tenants.

Chameleon: Indeed.  You can’t prove it.

Seyran: That’s right.

Chameleon: Then surely the local authorities should do something about changing the rent prices.

Seyran: That would be an appropriate policy, a proper urban planning strategy.  What is needed is for rent prices to be set and building policy to be pursued in such a way that you obtain a social mix.  Housing associations building new properties are already tackling this – the attempt to achieve a better social mix is already being made.  It is also important that native-born Germans are included.  That you have German neighbours, that there is an ethnic mix, that people from different ethnic groups come into contact with one another, that ethnic minority families also get to know Germans ones because you will achieve nothing whatsoever if you move everyone from one district wholesale into another so that they all move back in together in the same house.  That would be pointless.  It would not have the desired effect.

Chameleon: Does this mean that the current state of play is that we have parallel societies within which a quite different culture operates?

Seyran: I contend that parallel societies do indeed exist.  There are some who deny their existence.  Sociologists for one, who justify their standpoint by arguing that they don’t have their own laws, they don’t have their own police force, they don’t have their own courts, but I maintain that they do.  Clan structures exist in these parallel societies whereby families say we apply our own laws, we certainly don’t share the laws of the Germans, the Belgians, the Italians or the French.  Our laws are the laws of our culture, or religious laws and then the family clan gathers, decides when someone has done something wrong and does not balk at enforcing that decision.  So what we have is a society with its own set of values and its own laws.  And it lives according to its own culture.

Chameleon: Then there is very little that a police force can do to help girls who might become the victims of an honour killing.

Seyran: The police can offer no help whatsoever in such a case because they only intervene – or for the most part are only called in – when something has already happened.  If a girl is in danger the police could help, but only if the girl reports it.  There are institutions that can offer assistance beforehand, if the threat of an honour killing becomes imminent, if a family says her behaviour transgresses the rules of our culture, we don’t want her to live that way, in such cases she can turn to an advice bureau, which can take her in, where she can find refuge and move in.

Chameleon: I suspect there are not nearly enough such shelters.

Seyran: No.  Globally, there are not enough women’s shelters.  The same is also true of Germany, although in Germany we are better off than other countries.  You have to realise that there are major differences throughout Europe.

Chameleon: How does Germany compare with other countries in Europe?

Seyran: In Austria, for example, there is no comparable institution to the one we have here in Berlin by the name of Papatya where Muslim girls can find a very special type of refuge because the concept behind Papatya is to provide help for Muslim girls in particular.  There is also an inter-cultural women’s shelter here in Berlin, which has no equivalent in other countries.

Chameleon: Back home the problem is that you are not even allowed to broach such issues.

Seyran: Yes, in Belgium [Seyran knew that I had travelled from Belgium for the purposes of the interview] I think the fear persists – a fear that also exists here – that if you ask such questions you will be branded a racist and a xenophobe.  That if you pick up the theme of violence and say that violence is particularly pronounced, if you say that youngsters are particularly violent it immediately means that violence is being ethnicised and attributed to immigrants and that you are pretending that no violence is perpetrated amongst the Belgians or the Germans, but only by the others and this is how the topic is stigmatised and also made into a taboo.  This is a highly detrimental development for our society, I feel, because multiculturalism, by which I mean the multicultural nature of our society in the positive sense, can only be preserved and extended if we take stock of society as it stands at the moment, if we observe each individual ethnic group in itself at its respective stage of development because there are quite simply time lags in the relative level of development of religions and cultures and only when we accurately differentiate them from each other will we be able to determine what work will have to be done where.  So that other issues have to be put in the foreground when dealing with Belgian families than would be the case when dealing with Muslim ones.  In order to be able to provide victim protection I have to know what kind of violence a woman has been affected by, that forced marriages simply do not happen in Belgian families any longer.  That is why I have to look at where one particular kind of violence is happening and why and to come up with explanations and responses to the many questions I also have to accept the reality that forced marriages and honour killings only occur in certain social groups.  Without this knowledge at my fingertips I cannot do anything about tackling the problems.

Chameleon: Our politicians back home are in denial.

Seyran: In Germany too there are politicians who deny the existence of parallel societies and there are some who trivialise the problems, saying that everything is a lot better than it is reputed to be, that things really are not that bad, that honour killings and forced marriages are isolated incidents, you can encounter such attitudes here too, but since 11th September 2001 at the very latest we have become aware that we have a common problem and we can no longer simply sweep it under the carpet.  Obviously we have to take the message public, that has to happen back home for you too so that the message is disseminated and the issues discussed.  To the best of my knowledge the number of women wearing headscarves in Belgium is also increasing, in schools as well.  That is tangible proof that a backwards-looking Islam is ensconcing itself.  Religious freedom is always being proffered as an argument, but the real question is whether what is being practiced is indeed freedom of religion or is something else going on?  Are we talking about an ever-widening chasm opening up between different segments of society?  It is the responsibility of politicians to address this.  Politicians must take a very close look to see whether society is drifting apart, whether certain groups are being separated and whoever is irresponsible enough to look away and mistakenly believes that he is showing tolerance by turning a blind eye is ignorant, plain and simple, ignorant because it is too complicated to look at it properly and too strenuous an effort to draw conclusions from what you see.  They also ignore it for reasons of not straying outside their comfort zone, out of convenience and because they don’t want to annoy anyone and, above all, when you speak out you are labelled a racist and so on, you open yourself up to attack and have to issue a disclaimer first, which is far more taxing than just pretending that everything is hunky dory.

Chameleon: That’s all very well, but it doesn’t exactly help those poor girls.

Seyran: It doesn’t help them, no, it doesn’t help anyone, not even society as a whole because if you look at the demographics you will have to face the question in Belgium, just like in Germany, of what your society will look like in a decade’s time?  How many children will there be?  How many children are going to school, which ethnic groups are prominently represented?  What is the degree of mixing in society?

Chameleon: What does multiculturalism mean then, in practical terms?  Anything at all, or is it merely a slogan beloved of politicians?

Seyran: I reckon that for most politicians it is merely a slogan and that multiculturalism, in common with all -isms, is an ideology that describes the existence in parallel of different cultures, it is quite closely related to cultural relativism in that everything is indeed relative, every culture is entitled to do and to be permitted to do anything that society, the community deems culture.  In essence, multiculturalism describes a society in which people live in discrete clusters, without overlap, which means that there is no meeting of cultures, but they cohabit side by side with no overlap.  The proponents of multiculturalism actually prevent the meeting of cultures and exchange between cultures and, above all, mutual criticism, the right to engage in mutual criticism.  They also impede finding common ground in the debate on values by preventing us from saying that in a multicultural society we are more than capable of agreeing on common values.  If you want to live together in a society you have to agree on a common set of values.  There is no getting round that fact.  In which case you have to hold a debate about values.  And most of the adherents of multiculturalism obstruct that because they argue that every culture has its own values, they exist side by side and any assessment of relative merits is prohibited.  Placing one culture in a position of hierarchical superiority above another and thereby creating a "dominant culture" [Leitkultur] is completely beyond the pale.  A lot of Germans have a problem with the term "dominant culture" because they don’t want to be the leaders [Führer], the ones in charge, the ones who call the shots.  I don’t have any such hang-ups because I maintain that there is a European culture, a dominant European culture, which is that of the Enlightenment, the sexual revolution, the Reformation in religious matters and that these are the three important pillars, which brought, which catapaulted Europe into modernity, and with massive, painstaking efforts, terrible labour pains and much bloodshed we have reached the stage of development we have today: that democracy has taken hold, a very important aspect.  Democracy coupled with individual freedom, the importance attached to individuality more generally.  Within the Enlightenment one significant aspect was that neither the state nor paternalism were placed in the foreground, but that the individual was strengthened.

Chameleon: Does that outlook exist in Islam?

Seyran: That is the main contradiction with Islam and the main means of resistance as well.  In Islam we have a clan-based culture, a community consciousness.  This is why the battle against the West focuses so strikingly on this particular point, because the West is rejected for being an individualised society.  The West is not only hallmarked by individualisation, but at the same time also allows for self-determined sexuality, for example.  That everything is freely determined by the individual in other words.  It is precisely this feature that is differently conceived in Islam.  There the group takes precedence, it is the community that is important.  The notion of the individual who also possesses their own rights belongs to a legal school, or is an interpretation of Islam that was suppressed in the 14th century.  There is definitely also a legal school of thought and there definitely are also supporters of reason, of autonomous initiative on the part of the individual, of İçdihat [critical hermeneutics, the process of critical reasoning, for which see Asma Barlas, "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002, especially pp68-71] as it is called, the inner struggle with oneself, not the jihad with the outside world, the defence of religion, but the inner disputation and that certainly does exist in Islam, as Irschad Manji describes eloquently in her book [German edition Der Aufbruch: Plädoyer für einen aufgeklärten Islam, English edition The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith].  It was, for example, also the foundation of Islam as it flourished in Spain in the 14th century in Andalusia which continues to be regarded as the blossoming of Islam by many today.  That was modern Islam.  Not a trace of it remains.

Chameleon: Things went badly wrong.

Seyran: Things did go badly wrong.  We can ask what went wrong, or put the question the other way round and ask what went right in Christianity?  Indeed.  Things went well because Martin Luther and the other reformers succeeded, whereas in Islam they failed and it is now high time that the reformers in Islam join forces and succeed in their undertaking, to bring Islam into the modern age.  This is a movement that can be observed right across the world and the reformers live dangerously, the human rights activists likewise live dangerously, free thinkers always live dangerously and that is why carrying through reforms in Islam will not be a simple matter.

Chameleon: But Islam can be reformed.

Seyran: It can definitely be reformed.  I am a person who thinks very logically and pragmatically and I reckon that if Catholicism could be reformed Islam can too.  Just look back over the history of the Catholic church with witches burnt at the stake and Inquisition trials.  Against that backdrop I don’t see why everything should be that much more difficult in Islam.  There is no difference.  I really can’t see any difference there, even if we bring out individualism and the ego-consciousness, which does exist in the Christian church, the individual, but I don’t think that it will founder because of that, I really don’t believe it will.

Chameleon: Do you think that individualism is the only philosophy that is good for women?

Seyran: Definitely.  I believe it is an extremely important aspect for the women’s movement and in terms of women’s rights because it is through individualism that we arrive at the concept of human dignity, which resides inalienably in each individual, which every human being possesses and by accepting human dignity in every single human being I also accept a free and self-determined life and a free and self-determined sexuality.  These are the pillars on which freedom rests and without them there is no freedom.

Chameleon: And that doesn’t exist at the present juncture.

Seyran: It definitively doesn’t exist in a great many traditional and highly orthodox families, not even in the most rudimentary form, not even for men never mind women.  It doesn’t even exist for men.  It isn’t true that men enjoy these rights to individuality and women are deprived them.  No, men too form part of this structure and because the community as a whole does not recognise them why should a man who thinks in patriarchal terms within a clan-based culture founded on a We-consciousness, and who thinks in terms of the community and who enjoys a certain status within the community, why should he suddenly turn round and give something to the female members of his community that he does not have himself, namely individual freedom?  He enjoys the freedom of the community, within this community he enjoys a putative individual freedom, only it isn’t individual.  Therefore if you look at it from the outside, even from the West, superficially, you might arrive at the conclusion that in the Muslim world the man enjoys individual freedom, but he doesn’t.  It isn’t.  Instead, it is the community once again that nevertheless determines how free he is within its boundaries.  Even if he has four wives, he is still under the constant scrutiny and surveillance of the community.

Chameleon: That is interesting because you always automatically think of the woman as being the one who enjoys no rights of self-determination.

Seyran: No, ultimately men don’t have them either.  Within the system they are a thousand times better off because a more convivial role is allotted to them.  They are better off, but if they are forced into marriage they don’t fare much better emotionally at the end of the day; they are only better off in practice.  Men too are the victims of forced marriages and they too are deprived of the right to love.  The right to decide for yourself whom you are going to marry is taken away from men as well.  Boys and men are brought up to kill their sisters if they commit a breach of honour, for example.  In such a case it is impossible to talk of freedom, of a liberal upbringing and certainly not of individualism because these young men have never lived completely alone or individually in any sense of the word, but they have been incorporated into a clan-based structure, steeped in a way of thinking that gives precedence to family honour.  They have an extremely close bond with their mother and with the family more generally.  The dependence of these young men on their mothers has to be examined and the mothers – it degenerates into a vicious circle – the mothers in this system also act as custodians of this patriarchy.  They are the ones who bring up their sons and they are also the ones who encourage their sons to behave like pashas and machos.  It is not just their fathers who are to blame.  And it is the mothers too who force their daughters into marriage, saying, well it happened to me, why should it be any different for you?  Christian women, Catholic women did exactly the same.  Human history is littered with examples of the fact that men are not the only ones we have had to fight against to break down the old structures, but women as well.  We had to push through women’s right to vote in the teeth of fierce resistance on the part of women.  The women who struggled to obtain the right to vote and stand for election for women and won through in the end had to fight against women who suddenly founded associations opposing votes for women.  You should never lose sight of that.

Chameleon: That brings us right back to the question of parallel societies.  Their existence would appear to be a key issue.

Seyran: The worst disaster that can befall multicultural societies is parallel societies, which come into being through excluding themselves from mainstream society and by setting themselves apart from, disassociating themselves from it and only by dissolving them can we hope to find a better way of living together because what emanates from these parallel societies is a quite candid, direct contempt for mainstream society because the members of the parallel society say we don’t want to live the way you do.  I am not arguing that there is anything wrong with cultural ethnic groups, or that there is anything wrong with having entire streets where only Africans, Poles, Russians or Turks live.  The problem arises when everything can be done in one language and I don’t have any need of mainstream society any more and I say at the same time that I do not agree with the overarching social system in the country concerned.  And when I start making my own laws and when my family has to live in accordance with the values I espouse, which stand in stark contradiction to the constitution and the fundamental tenets of the wider society.

Chameleon: How can you ensure that the laws of the wider society are enforced?  It sounds perhaps more repressive than I mean it to.

Seyran: Not everyone who lives in a parallel society is a criminal offender, of course they are not.  If you take a look at the cases that come before the courts you do not see masses of illegal acts being committed by people from the parallel societies.  It is more of an inner attitude and a day-to-day culture.  In order to change it you need to carry out educational work.  You mustn’t try to tackle it repressively by passing laws.  Our laws are in place.  They have legal force and they are recognised.  When you become naturalised, for example, you have to sign up to them, you have to acknowledge them.  That this recognition is absent within the family is linked to education and awareness and to my mind that in turn takes us straight back to the fact that these parallel societies exist in the first place.  What we have to put a stop to is that girls live in these enclaves, these islands.  Or we will just have to go right in there and carry out as much educational and awareness-raising work as possible, in nursery schools, in schools, to make attendance at nursery school compulsory, for example, so that the girls learn the language from the very outset and that they get to know the culture of the country they live in, that we manage to bring the country they live in closer to the children who live in families without an educated background, so that they become aware that there are other districts in the city beyond the confines of the one they live in, than the one they spend the entire day in, that they should be given the opportunity to see the main monuments of the city they live in, that they should visit the most important places that the tourists visit, for example, that they should get to know the city.  Very many children who live in these parallel societies do not even realise that there are sights in the cities they live in, that tourists are willing to fly thousands of miles to take a look at and familiarise themselves with their history.  These children might not have seen them for themselves.  You really have to ask yourself to what extent these children have been given an education if they have not even been on a school trip to the Victory Column, or the Brandenburg Gate.  Or who knows how many children from Kreuzberg know that there is such a thing as the Tegel Forest, or Grünewald, or Wannsee or Teufelsberg, all these places that go to make up this city.

Chameleon: And they have never even seen them?

Seyran: A lot of families haven’t, no.  A lot of families don’t know it themselves, hardly ever leave their home district, which means of course that their children certainly don’t and I know people from Kreuzberg who, when they travel from Kreuzberg to Mitte get the feeling they are on holiday in a foreign city, even though it is their city.  Because they never stray beyond the confines of their own district.

Chameleon: Recently there has been a debate about the acceptability of various forms of dress, for which the headscarf is emblematic.  Some maintain that wearing it is a form of oppression, whereas others argue the opposite, that it is a form of emancipation.  Where do you stand on this?

Seyran: My position on the headscarf is a quite clearly feminist one and my arguments are grounded in the philosophy of women’s rights, from the perspective of a campaigner for women’s rights.  I maintain that the primary aim the women’s movement set itself was to put an end to the sexualisation of woman, to ensure that women are not viewed as sexual objects, but as human beings vested with human dignity.  The headscarf sexualises women by saying that the woman has hair, which exudes sexual allure to the opposite sex and that these charms are to be concealed.  Women’s hair is thereby sexualised and I cannot accept that.  It is not a religious symbol as far as I am concerned, one worth continuing to exist and being preserved.  Without exception, the explanations given in the Koran only pertain to the concealment of charms, to the effect that a woman should, because she has sexually attractive features, cover herself up so that she will not be raped, assaulted and so on.  Now that really was the case in the 7th century and you can also appreciate that such an arrangement was put in place in those days to protect women.  Women fell into two categories, honourable and dishonourable, the latter comprising slaves and they were supposed to be mutually distinguishable.  I belong to the ranks of Muslim women who contend that we live in the 21st century and that form of protection has become obsolete.  We don’t require that it any longer because there are no slave women any more and because the distinction between the two categories no longer exists, or ought not to exist, there should be no distinction between honourable and dishonourable women.  Every woman is honourable.  And nobody has the right to attack her or rape her in the middle of the street because she is not wearing a headscarf.  What that means is that her hair possesses no intrinsic sexual allure and that the sexualisation of her hair has no place in the 21st century.  And that is why I combat the headscarf as a political symbol, as a political symbol for the segregation of the sexes within a society.  Everyone who advocates the headscarf in my eyes also advocates the segregation of the sexes, sexual apartheid in society and I cannot accept that.  When small children start wearing the headscarf too, a practice that has crept in in Germany in the meantime in nursery and primary school and in Belgium I know the same applies, then it represents a sexualisation of children, which has nothing to do with religion.  This is where I see it as a responsibility for the country as a whole, for politics to ban it.  Laws can be of help here, you can say we are banning the wearing of headscarves in nursery and primary schools at least because it leads to a sexualisation of children.

Chameleon: Once again, however, politicians wouldn’t have the courage to say something like that.

Seyran: The reason they do not dare to say it is that it would seem like they were encroaching on freedom of religious expression because the counter-argument put to them is always that of religious freedom.  They do not have the courage, however, to hold a debate about how it has nothing to do with religious freedom when you tie a headscarf round the hair of a five or six-year-old child.

Chameleon: On the other hand you always hear the point made that nobody is forcing women to wear the headscarf.  That it is purely a matter of choice.

Seyran: Right now we are talking about small children.  They don’t even dare talk about the issue in relation to children and then the discussion immediately veers off to women, you’re quite right.  So the whole discussion is diverted away from children, bringing you straight on to the subject of women.  But if I already start binding a headscarf around a child’s hair then by the time she becomes a grown woman she will not have had the slightest chance to develop a free will of her own.  The same debate also exists in relation to genital mutilation, whereby it is claimed that the woman allows herself to be mutilated of her own volition.  Really!  No, that is quite simply absurd.  Amongst the women who appear on television with headscarves, amongst older women and students who are dressed so fashionably, even amongst them a certain ambiguity persists.  If she is a modern woman she will grasp that she is giving her endorsement to a sexual apartheid by doing so.  Then she should be honest and say "I am in favour of a division of roles".  I don’t have anything against people saying "I am in favour of our splitting roles up into ones appropriate for men and ones appropriate for women, that I am a woman active in a given area, that it is fair enough and I have a different attitude towards gender roles accordingly", but our constitution regards both sexes as equal and in official settings that kind of behaviour is not acceptable.  I cannot force every single family to practice democracy between the sexes in the way they live their lives in the intimacy of their own homes.  I cannot do that, but what I can do is to say that the state espouses democracy between the sexes and for that reason I can ban the wearing of the headscarf in official surroundings.  If a woman turns round and says "I am wearing it of my own free will and I don’t have a problem with it" then let her feel free to do so in her private life.

Chameleon: There was a major dispute over a teacher, whose name escapes me.

Seyran: A teacher, indeed, which is why I was alluding to formal, official settings.  Mrs [Fereshta] Ludin, a supply teacher who wanted to wear a headscarf whilst giving lessons.  She was not permitted to do so and the Constitutional Court subsequently issued a ruling [see Dominic McGoldrick, Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe, Oxford and Portland, Oregon, Hart Publishing, 2006, pp111-8] stating that as no law banning the wearing of headscarves exists here in Germany it is up to each federal state to draw up such legislation in the first instance to settle the issue of wearing the headscarf.  Now there is a patchwork of different rules in different federal states.  Baden-Württemberg banned it and now the woman is teaching here in Berlin in an Islamic school with a headscarf because Berlin also banned teachers from wearing the headscarf.  The ban also applies to civil servants.  Because it is the state that presents itself in public in schools and must preserve its neutrality, hence religious symbols are not allowed to be put on display in such a blatant manifestation.  This is the main line of argument adopted by the federal states that have instituted a ban.

Chameleon: However, within the parallel societies themselves if these young women do not wear the headscarf then they run the risk of being bullied by the young men of their community, of having abuse hurled at them that they are whores.

Seyran: What you can observe in the parallel societies is an extreme social pressure to conform.  Hard evidence has been produced to corroborate this pressure.  So it is something that can actually be observed and sociologically proven on the basis of research.  Turkey also provides a good example of how social pressure outdoors in the streets has increased exponentially and the same is true of pressure in the wider neighbourhood and in school classes.  Here too in Germany, where Muslim school pupils, boys and girls alike ostracise other Muslim pupils of both sexes, hurl abuse at them when they don’t wear the headscarf.  Yes, quite clearly social pressure does exist and that includes pressure to wear the headscarf.

Chameleon: Under such circumstances is it meaningful to say with any honesty that a woman is wearing it of her own free will?

Seyran: Under these conditions who can speak of it being voluntary?  Nobody.  And if the congregation of a mosque says they won’t allow a woman to go without a headscarf, or if an imam says "I demand that your daughters wear the headscarf" where is the voluntary aspect of that?  If an imam preaches a conservative version of Islam – and 100% of all imams here in Germany do – then I cannot maintain that it is voluntary within the congregation of this particular mosque and if women who do not attend the mosque, who are not integrated into a given congregation wear it too then they are once again being influenced by an interpretation of the Koran that is also conservative.  And if these women wear it in an allegedly modern style, the Iranian way of tying the headscarf counts as modern – when you look at a headscarf you also have to look at how it is tied – and then from the neck downwards they are swathed in tight clothes, are wearing very erotic clothes and are veritably plastered with make-up, in other words, the whole of the rest of their bodies is sexualised, whilst the main charm, their hair, is covered, then they are projecting a sexuality to the outside world that stands in flagrant contradiction to their religion.  Then too I cannot accept it when she claims to be wearing it as a matter of personal choice because it represents a religious contradiction of such magnitude that it is insincere, hypocritical, so I quite simply refuse to believe her when she tells me she is wearing it for religious reasons.  She is actually wearing it for political reasons because she has to dissociate herself from the West, as, if she were wearing it for religious reasons she would conceal her charms and not offer a man any incentive to attack her, but if she dresses erotically, emphasising her breasts and her backside, wears high heels – and here in Kreuzberg you can already observe women with bare midriffs, belly button piercings and headscarves – then you realise how mendacious this debate is.  We are dealing with a political movement when examining women wearing headscarves.

Chameleon: What is the aim of this movement?

Seyran: The aim of this movement is to foster acceptance of gender apartheid, that in hospitals, for example, women treat women and men treat men, so that all of society is separated into the domain of women and the domain of men.  Encounters between the sexes are placed under supervision, sexuality is not practiced before marriage and the family, yes, in the final analysis the vision of society is identical to that of the National Socialists, which envisaged exactly the same structures, the more children the better, the woman is relegated to the domestic sphere, the man to the public sphere, the absolutely classical old division of roles.  Children, kitchen, church.  Yes, it is absolutely identical.  That is why I become really morose, to put it very mildly, when I am labelled a critic of Islam.  I am not a critic of Islam.  When I contemplate this division, and then look at how things were in other religions, I am a campaigner for women’s rights, a feminist, I look at this phenomenon within society and know only too well that things are no better in other religions and endeavour, precisely because I look at the whole from an international perspective and from a genuinely multicultural vantage point, I am aware that what we are dealing with in the Muslim community is a time lag, and that is why it is incorrect to call me a critic of Islam because if I am a critic of anything I am a critic of religion, at least in part, because I take a very close look at exactly where a woman is put at a particular disadvantage due to her gender within society and it is religion that is at fault.

Chameleon: Then my question would be is any religion – and I am not singling out Islam or Christianity – is any religion compatible with women’s rights?

Seyran: Equality between the sexes is probably most likely amongst Buddhists, but not amongst any of the rest.  Basically, there is no genuine equality of opportunity unless religion is interpreted and lived contemporaneously, in accordance with the times we live in.  It is perfectly possible for a Catholic, a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian to practice genuine equality in his marriage and thereby in conflict with his religion, along similar lines to the Pope, who says I reject homosexuality, but at the same time I reject discrimination against homosexuals.  In other words, he inhabits this contradiction.  And a great many people live in this conflict, they practice their religion, which actually promulgates discrimination against women as women are represented again and again as inferior, but in their daily lives they can quite happily treat their wives as equals.  It does exist, but if we return to religion per se, I suspect that the most likely candidate for espousing what we can summarise in the phrase "all human beings are equal" irrespective of sex, would be Buddhism.

Chameleon: In Islam, or so I have read at any rate, in the Hadith it says that women are worth only half as much as men.

Seyran: Yes, exactly.  Similar examples can be found for all religions, the Old Testament is chockablock with quotes like that as is the Koran.  "Man is the head of woman".  The same applies to literature as well.  "When you go to a woman, don’t forget the whip!"  And Mohammed is alleged to have said "I have looked into hell and more than half of its inhabitants are women".  All of this is well known.  My appeal, for example, also to politicians is that if they are afraid of being depicted as critics or enemies of Islam that they should take the wider view, they should admit that in Europe, including in Belgium amongst the Catholics, amongst the Christians and the Jews these battles had to be fought.  If they devote any thought to the matter, it will dawn on them too that they have a duty to call for reforms within Islam because they, as politicians, occupy a position that enables them to support the cause of democracy between the sexes and obviously to live in the context of such democracy between the sexes, whilst in another religion in the midst of their society the concept is not even accepted.  They have to confront this contradiction and they have a responsibility, a duty to intervene.

Chameleon: Since we are on the subject of religion, religion passes laws.  In Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that the introduction of sharia law in the UK was unavoidable.  How do you respond to such a declaration?

Seyran: It is appalling!  making concessions is precisely the wrong course of action to follow.  I reckon that the Archbishop of Canterbury called for that because his church enjoys a panoply of rights and he is afraid for his own church that his conservatism might at some stage be open to attack and so he wants these backward-looking and conservative Muslims to be given a great deal more rights in order to safeguard his own.  All religions converge in conservatism and show solidarity towards each other.  That is the only way to interpret his statement.  If he were to sit down and study the implication of what such a step would mean, in the final analysis, for women he would not issue such a demand.

Chameleon: He is wrong.  It is by no means unavoidable.  Why should religious law be deemed acceptable for one section of the community?  Doesn’t that constitute a form of racism?

Seyran: It does.  Of course what he is claiming is not unavoidable.  The only way to describe it is bullshit, my apologies.  Really, that is the only appropriate term that comes to mind and you really do have to be careful in Britain of all places if you look at what is going on with the spread of the Muslim community there not to make further concessions, but set the limits instead and ask the question what kind of a society do we want to live in?  If the majority of the Pakistani Muslims in Britain were to turn round and declare that they didn’t want to live in this social order any longer that would have an impact on political life, on democracy, on the fundamental structure of society.  In that case you would be forced to create a different country, a different constitution, a new constitution – everything.  If we are talking about a people, a unified people taking such a step then there is no getting round it, there would be a revolution and you would have a new Britain.

Chameleon: What would it mean in practical terms in the lives of Muslim women if sharia law were introduced here?

Seyran: If we take a look at the Islamic countries then we have a shrewd idea of what it would and could mean in Europe.  Look, there are already swimming baths in Germany at present, which have set aside certain days when only Muslim women are allowed to go swimming.  That is pure separatism in society and discrimination against German women who are not allowed to go to the swimming baths because Muslim women are there.  What this means is that even superficial contact between Muslim and Christian women is not wanted, is deemed undesirable.  That is apartheid.  There were times when blacks were not allowed on board buses, were prohibited from sitting in the same bus as whites in America.  For a long, long time.  It reminds me of that.  It is reverse discrimination.  Discrimination on the part of Muslims, the racism, which Muslims are guilty of as well, the anti-Semitism that Muslims certainly preach as well are phenomena which people are happy to play down.  If Muslim women refuse to go bathing in the presence of Christian women it is to my mind an insult to Christian and Jewish women.  It is a kind of separatism, which cannot be healthy for society.  And I do not want to bring up my child in such a way, I don’t want children in general to be brought up to say "We are not going to the swimming baths with Christians".  We have gone beyond that.  At least I sincerely hope we have moved on beyond that.

Chameleon: I do too.  Hopefully it will never get that far, but supposing sharia law were to be introduced then women would have to live in our midst as if they were stuck in the Middle Ages.

Seyran: In the Middle Ages, indeed.  They already do live in our midst in part as if they were in the Middle Ages.  And if sharia law were to be introduced it would pertain primarily to family law where it would quite unequivocally be to the detriment of women.  Beyond dispute.  The sharia, Islamic law, not only contains legal prescriptions, but also governs the daily life of the Muslim, how he is supposed to pray and how he is supposed to wash, but if we concentrate on the legal side of sharia it lays down provision in family law in particular, that is its main focus, and it regulates family law in accordance with the relationship between the sexes with the woman put at a disadvantage.  It would clash with the family law provisions currently in force.

Chameleon: Wasn’t there a woman judge who passed a really idiotic ruling?

Seyran: In Frankfurt, yes.  A prime example of saying, "Well yes, that’s the way it is amongst the Muslims, so I won’t apply German law, but will apply the yardsticks of Islamic law instead".  It’s not on!  It is perverting the course of justice, yes, in essence that’s precisely what it is, perverting the course of justice to fail to apply the law at hand, but instead discriminating against people who are allegedly subject to a different set of laws.

Chameleon: Do you think there is some kind of movement at work here?  For example, there was the case in France with the annulment of a marriage because the bride turned out not to be a virgin.  What do you think of that?

Seyran: It is both terrible and dreadful.  It is proof of what we have been talking about.  In the near future we will hear about an increasing number of such cases and if you look back over recent years, at the trend for more and more little girls to wear the headscarf, such decisions will no longer be isolated.  More and more gang rapes are being committed by young Muslim men on the pretext that their Muslim girl victims were behaving indecently.  Right here in Europe.  You can read about it in a book, for which I wrote the foreword, by Ni putes ni soumises, a movement in France, which means Neither Whores nor Doormats [German edition, Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi and an introduction by Seyran Ateş, Weder Huren noch Unterworfene, Berlin, Orlanda Frauenverlag, 2005; English-language edition, Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi, translated with an introduction by Helen Harden Chenut, Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006.  On gang rapes, I recommend Samira Bellil's harrowing To Hell and Back, translated by Lucy R. McNair, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2008].  It deals in particular with these gang rapes where young Muslim men target Muslim girls who, according to their notions, are behaving immorally, living in keeping with the Western model and rape them as a punishment or because they consider them fair game.

Chameleon: As you have said, new cases are cropping up all the time, with judges trying to prove their impeccable credentials.

Seyran: How culturally sensitive they are.

Chameleon: Yes, they are trying to prove their intercultural competence, or whatever.  Where is this coming from?  Does it come from them themselves or is there some kind of coordinated movement behind all of this?

Seyran: It isn’t a political movement perhaps in the sense that there is a party with a programme, but it does constitute a political attitude, a political stance, which permeates society as a whole and you can find it in every political party.  It is a variety of ostensible liberalism, whereby people feel they live in a liberal country, that they are liberal and liberalism means you also have to be very liberal towards other cultures.  A mix-up occurs, as the people you are showing tolerance towards and/or to whom you wish to be liberal are people who fight against liberalism and another confusion is that liberalism does not mean accepting every breach of our constitution and that liberalism does not mean neglecting to demand that other cultures adapt to our constitution.  Yes, there is a great deal of muddle-headedness amongst people whom you would designate as decent people, and who consider themselves especially liberal.  There is a particular way of thinking that prevails amongst many Westerners, who are particularly individualistic.  They cannot get their heads round the fact that they might be comparing chalk and cheese and they would say, "Fair enough, if she is wearing a headscarf as a matter of personal choice, then why not?  What objection could you have against it?" because this person takes free will for granted, he knows what personal choice is, he knows that he enjoys the greatest of latitude when it comes to taking decisions and assumes that the person opposite him has grown up in exactly the same context and is as familiar with the concept of free will as he is himself.  Whereas in reality he is confronted with a person who has never acquired free will in the form he learned it.  Obviously you can hold a philosophical debate about whether people in the West have acquired free will, of course they haven’t either, and I am perfectly willing to take part in such a philosophical discussion and would be happy to admit that I am no exception, that I am not free in my choice of clothes, but the nub of the question is what degree of latitude I have and how much latitude does the person opposite me have when they come from a Muslim clan-based extended family.  There are nuances in other words and these superficially liberal-minded people do not work their way through them.

Chameleon: So no deliberate erosion of the law is taking place?

Seyran: No, there is no deliberate erosion taking place.  Definitely not.  It is taking place through naivety.  By adopting a naive and superficial approach to the subject, yes, but there is no clear, inexorable or cold and calculated conscious undermining taking place.  The judges even believe that what they are doing is fundamentally good, even in terms of the law.

Chameleon: It cannot be good, however.

Seyran: No, it most certainly isn’t.  It most certainly isn’t because the signal they pass on is deeply flawed.

Chameleon: In this context I have heard of the so-called "cultural bonus" [whereby cultural background is factored in as a mitigating factor during sentencing]

Seyran: The cultural bonus when dealing with honour killings, precisely.  Unfortunately, it continues to exist in the lower courts here in Germany, but in the Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, previous rulings are regularly quashed and there is no culture bonus for these murders in Germany.  Provided that the case gets as far as the Supreme Court.

Chameleon: What should we be doing as feminists?

Seyran: As feminists we should at long last resurrect a true women’s movement, put an end to its Sleeping Beauty-like slumber, we have to awaken all our women with a kiss, we have to set ourselves an aim again, to fight together for equality between the sexes, the war of attrition is not over yet, we act as though we had sorted everything out and although a lot has been achieved it simply isn’t true that our work is finished.  Women continue to be driven back into the domestic sphere and they do not enjoy equal representation on the labour market.  The women’s movement can boast a great many achievements, but we have not attained our ultimate objective yet, we still have a long way to go and it is up to the women’s movement in particular to show solidarity with Muslim women because our sisters have not even set off along the road whilst we have reached the first staging post.  If I draw an analogy with the world of golf, we have got as far as the first hole whilst the others have not teed off yet.  So what we have to do is help them catch up, we have to galvanise our movement into action.  What I want is a new women’s movement, or rather, the revival and continuation of the old one.  Somewhere along the line, the women’s movement fell into a deep slumber and it needs to be stirred awake and go back to its roots, to re-read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.  The introduction alone would be more than enough if you don’t necessarily want to read the entire volume.  Then, equipped with these benchmarks, evaluate the situation of Muslim women.

Chameleon: Sometimes I have the impression that – unfortunately – the women’s movement in the West has lost its way, that it prefers to address issues such as Internet pornography, that feminists have divided themselves into opposing factions, the sex-positive and the rest and then become embroiled in bitter in-fighting whilst all the time Muslim women are being murdered across the length and breadth of Europe.

Seyran: They are being forced into marriage and murdered.  It is pretty absurd that we currently see these Alpha-females and laddish girls who say "Of course I like sex and watch porno films now and then".  For goodness sake this is not what feminism is all about.  It is definitively not what feminism is all about.  What is primarily being insinuated is that feminism means not feeling like having sex, that feminism is conflated with hostility towards sex.  Which it definitively is not, quite simply because feminism is all about self-determined, freely self-determined sexuality.  Yes, and this means not only that these women have not understood feminism, but also that the feminists from way back when have gone into retirement prematurely.  And have unfortunately left the field open to others, who perhaps convey these false impressions.  What we need is for older and younger women to join forces once again, who would explain what feminism is all about, who would define it, agree on objectives for it, put forward demands, to be an alliance that is worthy of the name of a movement, but at the same time that would put women’s individuality in the foreground once again, stressing that a woman as an individual possesses human dignity, her own rights, everything that the women’s movement argued from its very beginnings, and which continue to be relevant themes today.  As you say, it is absurd in the extreme that whilst women are being genitally mutilated, right in our midst in Europe, whilst they are being forced into marriage, whilst they are being forced to flee from honour killings, are compelled to live on the run, that we have to occupy ourselves with literature in which women explain how fabulous they find pornography, how freely they live out their sexuality because they have sex in the most perverse of positions with ease, and as to how free and liberated that really is, as to whether that really constitutes freedom is a big question mark in my mind.  And how wonderful they find it to chat online.  Yesterday I watched Sex and the City for the second time.  I believe it shows us – it is an important series for our times – it demonstrates to us quite clearly how little has changed in terms of the roles assigned to women and men.  The four single women are on a quest, searching for the man, the handsome Prince who will come to their rescue, who will make them happy, in sex and in love.  It is the age-old archetypal model for women that continues to exist.  You encounter the same thing when you go out shopping, if you want to purchase underwear or clothes for children, they are split into pink and blue, which means the war of attrition is far from over, who is going to tell me it’s all over and done with, consigned to the past?  No, it most certainly isn’t over and done with, far from it!

Chameleon: If you challenge them, they will claim it is meant ironically, in the spirit of postmodernism…

Seyran: It is neither postmodern nor ironic if in Tchibo or Eduscho I can only choose between pink and blue.  It is an insult to my free will.  I can’t buy green or orange garments for my child, or yellow ones.  I have to choose between pink and light blue.  No, we haven’t carried the day yet.  That women go out to work, that we have a few women in leading positions, that we have a Chancellor who is a woman, these are all mere drops in the ocean.  That we have a lot of female politicians – how many do we have ultimately?   Right across Germany women earn 20% less than men.  This trench warfare, this war of attrition is far from won and our Muslim women – many of them, not all of them, but many of them – are still living in the Middle Ages whilst we have at least secured some of the advances mentioned.  That is what I want to draw attention to.  Please look at what is going on!  You have fought for and obtained all these achievements and come out the other side – you fought for the right to wear trousers and today there are Muslim women who are not allowed to wear trousers.  It is not a self-evidence.  That you are allowed to smoke in public.  There are women who continue to huddle in the toilets at weddings for a puff on the sly because women do not smoke in the presence of men or older people, the simplest of things that sound so natural, are not nearly so simple after all.  Choosing your own partner, getting a divorce if you want one, not to be despised by society, all of these things are being denied many – not all, of course not all – Muslim women right under our noses.  We have to help them progress as far as we have and march forward together.

 

 

[Interview, portrait of Seyran Ateş and all translations © Chameleon, 2008.  No portion of this interview may be reproduced without prior written authorisation, which may be obtained via the e-mail address listed on this blog's Profile Page]

Marianne Mikko (PES, Estonia) apparently harbours a profound suspicion of blogs and blogging, as reflected in the terminology she has employed in relation to our "polluting" cyberspace and our propensity to indulge in "misinformation and malicious intent".

Such generalisations, inaccurate and offensive though they may be, could have been shrugged off had it not been for the fact that Ms Mikko is the author of an own-initiative report on Concentration and pluralism in the media in the European Union (final version, PE402.864v02-00).  Although it possesses no legal force, the report nevertheless offers an insight into what future legislative initiatives may be expected from the Commission.  On the one hand, blogging has grown into a form of expression important enough to have caught the eye of politicians and regulators, whilst on the other the response illustrates the complete lack of understanding of the phenomenon amongst those eager to place restrictions upon it.  Incidentally, she has in the meantime hastily cobbled together a blog of her own, presumably to stave off accusations that she is busy shooting her mouth of on issues she is eminently unqualified to address.

Background

The initial working document (PE398.617v01-00) sets out the background to the report, articulating the concerns that inspired it: "Media freedom and pluralism are vital for democracy, given their essential role in guaranteeing free expression of opinions and ideas and in contributing to peoples’ effective participation in the democratic process.

The European Parliament has shown continual concern for the defence and the promotion of media pluralism, as an essential pillar of the right to information and freedom of expression enshrined in Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which remain fundamental principles in preserving democracy.

Plurality of information from a wide variety of sources, as well as access to a wide range of high quality information, are the prerequisites for democratic communication in an open and democratic society.

European citizens are not only entitled to have guaranteed access to independent, objective and impartial information but also to a wide choice of other high-quality content".

I doubt very much whether any of these sentiments in themselves would upset bloggers.  After all, absolutely anyone can create a blog – you don’t even have to own your own computer to do so, as libraries and Internet cafés provide access without the cost being prohibitive and if you do not want to pay a monthly fee to a host you can sign up to Blogger.  Your arguments and viewpoints are similarly preserved in the virtual world and, unless you are a ferociously outspoken critic of certain regimes your writings can potentially reach an audience right across the globe.  What could possibly be more conducive to "effective participation in the democratic process"?  This is precisely what sets blogs apart, what makes them intoxicating for those who devote their time and energy to them.  Their sheer variety is overwhelming: there are teenagers seeking catharsis for their hormonally-induced angst, feminists picking apart the latest batch of newspaper articles perpetuating gender stereotypes, even politicians anxious to show that they are not so out of touch as they are often lambasted for being.  Yes, there is plenty of dross, yes, there are exquisitely crafted products that do not receive the recognition they deserve, but this cacophony of voices competing for public notice has permanently altered the relationship we have with those in authority over us, increasing accountability (for the simple reason that it is no longer possible for local councils to behave in a heavy-handed manner without provoking an outcry on the Web).  Instantaneity of communication amongst members of, for example, a pressure group to save a stretch of woodland with a shared blog as a forum and the flow of information more generally increases transparency and (hopefully) discourages those in positions of power from abusing the privilege.  The most anti-democratic move conceivable would therefore be to attempt to stem that flow.  Blogging reigns supreme when it comes to "democratic communication in an open and democratic society".

Turning back to the working document, an extension of the EU’s powers is a recurrent theme throughout the text.  It would be an error to dismiss these calls out of hand as they represent an endorsement to the Commission in striving to enhance its role:

"The EU competence to act on media pluralism is confined to the area of competition law.  However, the financial scale of activities directed at vertical and horizontal concentration of media ownership in the most new member states of the EU does not extend to the point where EU competition law would apply.

The media is not only a business but also an ideological and political tool of considerable influence.  A case could therefore be made for greater EU and international involvement.

We should consider creating a charter for media freedom and strive for its Europe-wide and indeed global acceptance and ratification.  There is a need to monitor systems for media pluralism based on robust, reliable and impartial indicators".

Another preoccupation pertains to the erosion of quality of content, or "dumbing down", of the entertainment on offer (yet who is going to stop a bored pensioner from tuning into the thousandth episode of a Brazilian soap when the only alternative is another generic home improvement or antiques auctioning show?):

"Despite the progress of new information technologies, television remains a most influential source of information for European citizens.  Viewers now have hundreds of channels at their disposal.  As new formats such as Mobile TV as well as new channels made available by the digital switchover develop, there are now endless possibilities for the display of [a] wide variety of content.

However the greater quantity available has not lead to an increase in quality.  Instead there has been a noticeable drop in the quality of content throughout the EU, most notably and seriously in news reporting, TV throughout Europe becoming less informative and more sensationalist.

Concentration of ownership has resulted in a lower quality of content.  The current drop in quality of programs is most noticeable in Member States where there is a high concentration of media ownership.

The most powerful corporations are able to use the scalability of their business models to displace the possible new entrants.  new and high-quality providers will find it hard to compete against the content cheaply recycled from other markets, other channels and from the archives of a big company.

Thus the proliferation of new channels may simply increase the power of a few corporations, solely concerned with profit maximisation".

As Ms Mikko goes on to admit, this is primarily a problem in the new Member States.

Cheap schedule-fillers also come under fire:

"Especially the publications aimed at entertaining the mass market customer are increasingly using the content generated by their readers and viewers.  Videos and pictures from mobile phones, holiday or real-life stories are some of the examples of the content generated by the general public and published through for-profit channels.  The customers receive at most symbolic rewards for their content, sometimes in the format of the customer lottery with a main prize and several smaller prizes.

Such content is displacing professional content to the detriment of the media professionals’ livelihood and to the journalistic level of the content.  The measures to counter such trends could include institutionalised rates of compensation for user-generated content.

User-generated content also creates a danger of constant surveillance and invasion of privacy for public figures as well as private citizens.  Therefore the applicability of ethical and legal codes to such content should be debated".

Frankly, I would have thought that the paparazzi have cornered that market.  The price of celebrity, no matter how minor or fleeting, the unrelenting glare.  An insatiable demand exists for every tiny detail of the lives of the famous, the wrinkles on their hands and necks that ruin the deception of eternal youth so carefully (and expensively) performed by the plastic surgeons, or whether the PM bites his nails (which could be interpreted as a physical manifestation of his inner turmoil).  Even the humblest citizens are under constant scrutiny anyway.  Personally, I am infinitely more worried by government surveillance, the CCTV cameras, the desire to track our every movement by installing devices into cars, ostensibly to tax drivers more fairly, the more exhaust fumes you pump out into the atmosphere, the more you pay, but which in reality, is a means of keeping tabs on every trip (the same goes for the Oyster card, which can likewise be used to establish our whereabouts, provided it is registered in our name, of course). The minutiae of our daily lives is available for bureaucrats and corporations to pore over, right down to which brand of biscuits we prefer, courtesy of our supermarket loyalty cards.  In this wider cultural context you can hardly blame the casual bystander for cashing in no matter how disapproving you might be of the wider cultural trend that whets this unsavoury appetite.  Ms Mikko is shooting at the wrong target.  Indeed, more relevantly, where is the condemnation of journalists cheerfully reproducing passages from bloggers without permission or remuneration?

Finally, the core anxiety is rendered explicit, the presumed incompetence of the ordinary consumer:

"Some would argue that at the end of the day viewers are responsible enough to regulate themselves and freely decide what they choose to watch, and there is no need to regulate to preserve media pluralism.  This would be the case if viewers were media literate.  Unfortunately this is far from true.

Information today is above all visual.  All media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules, promoting values and points of view and are often designed to gain profit and/or power.

Media literacy would constitute a good tool for safeguarding media pluralism, as viewers would be able to independently judge the content of the programs or information to which they have access.

In this respect, the EU citizens should be encouraged to develop the skills to analyse content and manage information, which would allow them to think creatively and critically".

These points are reiterated in the report proper, as it emerged from the Committee on Culture and Education (PE402.864v02-00), with 33 votes in favour, one against and no abstentions, as demonstrated by the passages cited below. 

Recital S: "whereas, however, respect for pluralism of information and diversity of content is not automatically guaranteed by technological advances, but must come about through an active, consistent and vigilant policy on the part of the national and European public authorities".

Recital V: "whereas the media remains a tool of political influence, and whereas there is a considerable risk to the media’s ability to carry out its functions as a watchdog of democracy, as private media enterprises are predominantly motivated by financial profit; whereas this carries the danger of a loss of diversity, quality of content and multiplicity of opinions, therefore the custody of media pluralism should not be left purely to market mechanisms".

The recitals are so numerous that they continue into double letters: "AB. whereas media consumers should have access to a wide choice of content".

AG. whereas in commercial media outlets private user-generated content, especially audiovisual content, is increasingly utilised for a nominal fee or without any payment, raising problems of ethics and protection of privacy, a practice putting journalists and other media professionals under undue competitive pressure,

AH. whereas the increased use of user-generated content does not always respect the rules on privacy of citizens and public figures, and whereas, therefore, legal means need to be provided to protect those concerned".

"AU. whereas the EU has no intrinsic competence to regulate media concentration, nevertheless its competence in various policy fields enables it to play an active role in safeguarding and promoting media pluralism; whereas competition and state aid law, audiovisual and telecommunication regulation as well as external (trade) relations are areas in which the EU can and should actively pursue a policy to strengthen and foster media pluralism,

AV. whereas there are a growing number of conflicts concerning freedom of expression,

AW. whereas, in the information society, media education is an essential means of empowering citizens to make an informed and active contribution to democracy,

AX. whereas the increased supply of information (particularly thanks to the Internet) is making the interpretation and assessment thereof increasingly important".

"BA. whereas we live in a society constantly being bombarded with information, instant communications and unfiltered messages, while the selection of information requires particular abilities".

Once again, we are confronted with Ms Mikko’s  patronising assumption that the Great Unwashed are idiots, devoid of an ounce (or should that be a gram?) of discernment and common sense.  Even if this were true, the best means of remedying the perceived problem would indeed be to enable readers to maintain a critical distance from texts through developing their analytical skills, rather than clamping down on blogs.  The public are portrayed as hapless, guileless infants, bloggers cast in the role of the wicked witch with the apple, one bite of which would poison their victims.

The actual recommendations are presented in the body of the report:

Paragraph 5: "Points out that the development of the media system is increasingly driven by profit-making and that, therefore, societal, political or economic processes, or values expressed in journalists’ codes of conduct, are not adequately safeguarded; considers, therefore, that competition law must be interlinked with media law, in order to guarantee access, competition and quality and avoid conflicts of interests between media ownership concentration and political power, which are detrimental to free competition, a level playing field and pluralism".

Paragraph 12: "Welcomes the Commission’s intention to develop specific indicators to evaluate media pluralism".

Paragraph 13: "Calls for further indicators, in addition to media pluralism, to be drawn up as criteria for analysing the media, including its orientation as regards democracy, the rule of law, human and minority rights and professional codes of conduct for journalists".

Paragraph 14: "Considers that the rules on media concentration should govern not only the ownership and production of media content, but also the (electronic) channels and mechanisms for access to and dissemination of content on the Internet, such as search engines".

Paragraph 21: "Stresses the need for the EU and Member State authorities to ensure journalistic and editorial independence by appropriate and specific legal and social guarantees, and points out the importance of creation and of uniform application in member States, and all markets where EU-based media companies operate, of editorial charters to prevent owners, shareholders, or outside bodies such as governments, from interfering with news content".

Paragraph 22: "Calls on Member States to ensure through appropriate means a suitable balance among political and social sensibilities, in particular in the context of news and current affairs programs".

Paragraph 27: Recommends the inclusion of media literacy among the European key competences and supports the development of the European core curriculum for media literacy while underlining their role in overcoming any form of digital divide".

Paragraph 28: "Maintains that the purpose of media education must be, as laid down in Council of Europe Recommendation 1466 (2000), to provide citizens with the means of bringing critical interpretation to bear on, and utilising, the ever growing volume of information being imparted to them; considers that this learning process will enable citizens to formulate messages and select the most appropriate media for communicating them, and hence to exercise their rights to the full where freedom of information and expression is concerned".

This is the backdrop against which Ms Mikko’s pronouncements on blogging have to be assessed.

Blogging

The working document states:

"Weblogs are increasingly popular among the general public as well as among the media professionals. In several cases they have considerably influenced the decisions taken by the business and media executives – or even regarding those executives.

Many professional journalists run blogs on their employers’ websites; others do it on dedicated hosting sites.  the legal status of weblogs kept ‘privately’ by media professionals is undetermined, causing uncertainties regarding source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits.  the same questions apply to a certain extent to the weblogs of politicians/public figures and private citizens.

Additionally, the widespread use of weblogs by media professionals gives rise to questions regarding the pluralism of the content in their primary occupation".

The report itself deals with blogging in two recitals and two paragraphs:

Recital T: "whereas, while the Internet has greatly increased access to various sources of information, views and opinions, it has not yet replaced the traditional media as a decisive public opinion former".

"AI. whereas weblogs represent an important new contribution to media pluralism and are an increasingly common medium for self-expression by media professionals as well as by private persons; their proliferation implies a need to establish legal safeguards providing for the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits, and establishing the right to reply".

Paragraph 25: "Suggests clarifying the legal status of weblogs and sites based on user-generated content, assimilating them for legal purposes with any other form of public expression".

Paragraph 26: "Supports the protection of copyrights at the level of online media, the third parties having to mention the source when taking over declarations".

The Explanatory Statement endeavours to account for Ms Mikko’s eagerness to meddle: "The development and acceptance of new technologies have led to the emergence of new media channels and new kinds of content.  The emergence of new media has brought more dynamic and diversity into the media landscape; the report encourages responsible use of new channels.

In this context the report points out that the undetermined and unindicated status of authors and publishers of weblogs causes uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits.

It recommends clarification of the legal status of different categories of weblog authors and publishers as well as disclosure of interests and voluntary labelling of weblogs".

Four alternative resolutions were tabled by way of amendments (as prescribed by Rule 151 (4) of Parliament’s internal procedures) jointly by Christa Prets on behalf of the Socialist Group and Hannu Takkula for the Liberals (A6-0303/1), by Pál Schmitt for the European People’s Party-European Democrats (A6-0303/2), Helga Trüpel for the Greens/European Free Alliance (A6-0303/3) and finally by Věra Flasarová, Giusto Catania and Umberto Guidoni for the United European Left/Nordic Green Left (A6-0303/4).  Although there are slight variations in the numbering of the recitals and paragraphs between the modifications, the wording on blogging is identical in each.  The new recital reads: "whereas weblogs represent an important new contribution to freedom of expression and are increasingly used by media professionals as well as by private persons" and the less belligerent passage in the main text: "Encourages an open discussion on all issues relating to the status of weblogs".

Evaluation

As has become apparent, the main focus of the report is on the mainstream media, more specifically television.  Blogging seems curiously out of place, tacked on gratuitously, or perhaps because Ms Mikko is keen to demonstrate how web-savvy she is and the Internet to her mind poses a threat to the livelihood of journalists as the public have grown tired of reading the bland, editorially triple-checked output of paid columnists, whose authority to pontificate on subjects about which they know little (often in a drearily didactic tone) has correspondingly diminished.  Niche blogs where members of a given profession reveal what goes on behind the facade, demystifying their occupations and mercilessly expose the flaws that riddle the system, rightfully condemning the resulting absurdities, might even intrude on the territory of the undercover investigative journalist, but, given the incomparable wealth of insight and experience of the insider, this is not necessarily to be lamented.

The democratic credentials of blogging cannot be impeached, but its very popularity (fuelled in part by the dream of discovery and escape, or the yearning to establish contact with others in the same situation) has attracted politicians and journalists, who have parasitically exploited our medium to generate cheap publicity for themselves, to clamour for our admiration, in short to maximise the privilege they already enjoy in excess, yet we bloggers are expected to submit to regulatory intrusions because of their relentless self-promotion (for them to fall out of the limelight is to cease to exist).  Surely this is the wrong way round.  Not that I am advocating that blogs by public figures or newspaper scribes be targeted, subscribing to the thin-end-of-the-wedge theory.  If the blogs in question are subsumed under the newspaper’s or party’s main site then the halfway intelligent reader will surmise that – in the absence of a specific disclaimer – the contents meet with party/editorial approval or will at least to some extent accord with the general outlook or policy of the organisation involved.  Any postings will therefore be influenced by the values that the newspaper or party adhere to, even supposing they deliberately wish to provoke debate by disagreeing with a specific initiative or viewpoint.  So far, so patently obvious.  When the same politician/journalist maintains a private blog (what Ms Mikko frets over), as a form of flaunting themselves or a less than subtle means of soliciting business, it is highly unlikely that they will suddenly abandon those core convictions.  Far from desperately trying to conceal their affiliations, they are usually quite brazen about displaying their status.  Companies with something to sell might potentially go to great lengths to disguise advertising as blogging.  It is conceivable that, let’s say, a washing powder manufacturer might employ someone to pose as a housewife churning out glowing testimonials to the ability of a given brand to remove the peskiest of stains.  Unless, however, they were willing to fork out for a writer of genuine brilliance who would only occasionally sneak in such praise and deal with other topics or adopt a truly convincing fake persona it wouldn’t take long for readers to suss out that they were being manipulated.  So far, the preferred method of hawking wares (potency-enhancing pharmaceuticals and diet pills) has been to bombard blogs with comment spam, with all the subtlety of a gaudy neon sign at Piccadilly Circus.

The most cursory examination of the nature of blogs suffices to illustrate quite how misplaced Ms Mikko’s fears are.  For a start, blogs are written by private individuals with limited resources (time and money).  Most bloggers depend for their livelihood on their day jobs and cannot afford to give them up, myself included.  Only a miniscule number of bloggers have been able to switch to blogging as their main source of income, no matter how stratospheric their statistics (number of hits, subscribers to feeds).  The handful of book deals that certain bloggers have secured has not yielded enough in advances or royalties to fund a life of untroubled leisure.  From that point of view alone, we cannot really compete with newspapers, which command both advertising revenues and a staff of trained correspondents and specialists covering the entire spectrum of what is deemed newsworthy.  Nor can we for the most part pursue leads or maintain contact with sources who might alert us to a story.  Hence the accusations levelled against us by our "betters" that our activity is merely reactive (sounding off about articles we have unscrupulously culled from newspapers) or derivative.   

The key issue is the professional/amateur divide.   This cannot be reduced to an argument about the quality of writing (and I am sick and tired of being derided as a mere dilettante by one snotty columnist who immediately springs to mind).  Much of what bloggers write is of a higher standard as far as both accuracy and the pleasure derived from reading the final product are concerned.  Bloggers can be incisively analytical and every bit as eager to uncover and castigate hypocrisy in crusading mode.  Bloggers are not encumbered by space constraints and can develop a complex argument at length, a luxury beyond the reach of those labouring under strict word limits.  What most of us do not have is a diploma in journalism or the undisputed benefit of having clawed one’s way up through the ranks from local stringer to the exalted heights of editorship.

Then there is the matter of reputation, which can only be earned over time and with unflagging, painstaking effort alongside raw talent.  Blogging can be little more than a hobby for some, a harmless way of passing otherwise dull hours, whilst for others it might evolve into an obsession.  A blogger can spend months or years slogging away without any guarantee of being noticed, much less of gaining recognition or acclaim.  Accordingly, free hosting sites, such as Blogger, are bleak repositories of defunct projects, of thwarted ambition, of passing fancies, of extinguished passions.  Compare this with the established cultural presence of the broadsheets, anything other than ephemeral.  Although individual contributors may have been crucial in the attainment of their stature, their fortunes do not depend on any single person, gradually accruing over the decades.  The great newspapers are veritable institutions, imprinted on the nation’s consciousness, a self-evident part of daily life.  Blogging can never dislodge them (as the report acknowledges when it talks about the dominant position they occupy on the Internet) precisely because their authority has built up in geological strata, layer after layer.  They are ritually consulted, morning after morning on breakfast television as well as on politics shows, reinforcing that authority, that ability to influence opinion, to call politicians to heel.  The first pot of call of the reader wishing to access quality information will be the paper they trust, whether in dead tree or electronic format and it is simply absurd to claim that bloggers command the same respect.  Unfortunately.  Journalists are only too keen to remind us of our comparative lack of prestige, occasionally condescending to quote from us (without paying for the privilege) on the assumption that we will feel immensely flattered to have been showcased.  Although we cannot topple the mainstream media from their pedestal we are too important a phenomenon to be completely ignored and still possess novelty or curiosity value for those looking to fill column inches.

What are the motives for reading a blog?  A blog can provide a shrewd idea of what one person thinks and might not constitute a reliable guide to party or organisational policy, but instead of the bland pap routinely posted on official sites can lapse into the most glorious vitriol.  Blogging tends to complement rather than usurp newspaper reading.  It tends to be more narrowly focused on single subjects, cataloguing reactions to government proposals, defending or attacking them depending on political conviction, pointing out inconsistencies and discussing the relative merits of the arguments advanced.  Blogs are for spare time, for coffee breaks, evenings and weekends, consulted for entertainment, distraction or relief from the daily grind, for their stridency and refusal to slavishly regurgitate received wisdom.  As to which particular blogs are likely to appeal, we enter the territory of personal biases.  As Julian Baggini writes in Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (London, Granta Books, 2007): "The papers that do best are those which reflect the basic values their readers already have.  If they fail to strike a chord, they just won’t sell.  That’s why, although imperfect, they are more reliable barometers of national opinion than many would like to think" (p62).  What applies to the papers for once applies to blogs equally well.

Our credibility does not emanate from our association with a venerable publication, or our respect of a strict ethical code, but from the authenticity and directness of our personal voice, from our independence and the fact that our motivation is not turning a profit.  When it comes to our writing, we are not on anyone’s payroll, we are not beholden to anyone (which brings us straight back to preserving pluralism and diversity: we bloggers are the embodiment thereof).  The trustworthiness of what we say arises from the fact that we are not pretending to endorse a view, but genuinely hold it.  Our reward is to know that someone is actually reading (and, hopefully, appreciates) our scribblings.

In short, blogs are not assimilable to newspapers and it is therefore out of all proportion to attempt to subject them to the same rules. 

As for the insistence on the right of reply, this again betrays complete ignorance of the most rudimentary facts about blogging.  If you feel slighted by a blogger, you can immediately reply by leaving a comment.  What could be simpler?  If the comments are disabled, or the host is curmudgeonly enough to delete your remarks no matter how obstinately you persist in typing them in (so that they never actually appear on the site), then reply on your own blog.  It is unpleasant to be lacerated in public, but you can stick up for yourself.  Unsubstantiated allegations and nonsensical, unfounded accusations are usually recognisable as such (admittedly provided the reader is willing to give a fair hearing to both sides, though this is something no writer can control).  Just ignore the slanders or distortions if they are not worth bothering with.  If your words have been ripped out of context and misrepresented you have to rely on the integrity of the reader to test the validity of the criticisms by consulting the original text.  At the end of the day, nobody can force you to read a blog.  If it offends you, all you need do is close the window…The most that a legislator could hope to achieve would be to compel us to insert a (redundant and sterile) standard formula at the end of a post prefacing the rebuttal or objections from the complainant (without the remotest assurance that anyone will bother to give it more than the most cursory of glances) or correcting a factual inaccuracy.

The call for voluntary labelling was dropped from the body of the text, but reared its ugly head in the Explanatory Statement.  Such a label is intended as a substitute or surrogate for readers’ powers of judgement, but its effect would prove infinitely more insidious, casting an automatic pall of suspicion over any blogger who refuses to adopt it.  I could not help but be reminded of a recent discussion with my colleague EP.  She takes turns to mind the children in the church crèche in a mutual support network, enabling the off-duty mothers of the congregation to listen to the service in peace without the squalling of fractious infants whose appreciation of theological niceties somewhat limited.  These are all middle-class, middle-aged working women helping each other out on an informal basis, not men lurking around playgrounds trembling as they proffer sweets to unsupervised pre-pubescents, but now the diocese has demanded that they fill in a sex offenders screening form in order to continue because the crèche operates in public premises.  She recounted how the mental images conjured up the questions left her physically sick.  Have you ever had sex with a baby?  She was left breathless with indignation at the politically correct gender blindness permeating the exercise.  To her mind, the mere existence of the form was corrosive, especially now that accusations of abuse must likewise be recorded, decrying it as a charter for revenge and petty jealousies, whilst at the same time agonising over whether she should pull out of the babysitting network so deep was her resentment over the implied slur on her character.  The dilemma was exacerbated by the knowledge that if she didn’t fill in the form, it could be construed as a tacit admission of having something to hide.  A classic example of how the well-meaning desire to protect the vulnerable can end up severing bonds of solidarity and trust (pedophiles still slipping through the net to blight the lives of their victims).

Bloggers should refuse to adopt such a label on principle.  Certain practical difficulties might suffice for it to be shelved.  Who would award it?  Who would adjudicate whether it was deserved or not?  Would regular content checks be carried out to ensure the standards were being rigorously maintained over time?  By dint of the very nature of the blog as a vehicle for personal opinions, no blog can be impartial, as what is committed to paper (or rather the screen) passes through the filter of consciousness, class, education, political persuasion, preoccupations and gender to name but a few of the more obvious factors.  This is true of any vehicle of expression (newspapers and television channels are not miraculously exempt and operate under a commercial imperative to appeal to their chosen constituency) and healthy scepticism ought to be the default position of any reader, listener or viewer.   Bloggers do not in my experience subtly masquerade as neutral.  In fact, as alluded to earlier, most readers turn to blogs precisely because they are refreshingly candid, if not immoderately opinionated.

One final issue of vital significance is that of anonymity.  Ms Mikko wants to eliminate the possibility of blogging under a pseudonym.  What we have witnessed is the ugly and unjustified persecution of bloggers by employers terrified that their good name might be besmirched.  Rather than reviewing or eradicating the practices the blogger has lamented, employers have preferred to lash out with a "fire first, ask questions later" policy.  There is no comeback for the blogger concerned, no means of retaliation beyond highlighting the injustice on their site.  No adequate protection has been put in place to prevent such arbitrary and unfair dismissals.  On both sides of the Atlantic bloggers have come to prominence for falling victim to such treatment (securing book deals and leaving the jealously guarded reputation of their former bosses in tatters).  In spite of the photographs (most of which date back twenty years anyway) in sidebar and profile page, I have been relatively watchful about covering my tracks in order to avoid incurring the wrath of my employers (search engines concentrating on texts as opposed to pictures, which can be carefully captioned), for whom the distinction between contractual and private persona might be overly nebulous and contrived.  Organisations are notoriously reluctant to have their flaws brought to light, no matter how great their ostensible and publicly proclaimed commitment to transparency, whistle-blowing and loyalty still regarded as mutually exclusive.  Without safeguards the only outcome of forcibly outing us would be to stifle dissent, stifle criticism and thereby stifle pluralism.  Servile, cringing conformity to the officially sanctioned line would be all that remained and our paymasters would impose their orthodoxy with all the monotheistic zeal of the Inquisition.  I find it extremely sad that Ms Mikko seems to be utterly oblivious to the irony of how her proposals would promote blatant censorship, achieving the exact opposite of her stated aims (not to mention the hugely detrimental impact on European business either provoking a mass migration to American and other ISP’s which do not have to capitulate to regulation on labelling).

The Debate (Monday 22nd September)

(The statements dealing with blogging have been marked in bold)

"Dear colleagues, dear President, Commissioner, EU membership has almost doubled since the beginning of 2004.  Ensuring the convergence of standards for the protection of democracy and basic freedoms towards the highest existing levels is one of the main post-Enlargement challenges.  In this context, the report welcomes all initiatives aimed at safeguarding democracy and points out that the media remains an influential political tool, which should not be treated solely on economic terms.  The report recognises the decision of the European Commission to entrust the determining of reliable and impartial indicators of media pluralism to a consortium of three European universities.

In addition, this report stresses the need to institute the monitoring and implementation systems based on the indicators thus determined.

The report also recognises the ongoing efforts of publishers and journalists’ representatives to create a Charter of Media Freedom.

In addition, the report underscores the need for social and legal guarantees for journalists and editors.

The report advocates the adoption by multinational enterprises of the best practices for editorial and journalistic freedom in each country where they operate. 

It expresses concern over lower standards being applied in the Member States that acceded to the EU in 2004 and 2007.

The development and acceptance of new technologies have led to the emergence of new media channels and new kinds of content.  The emergence of new media has brought more dynamic [sic] and diversity into the media landscape.  The report encourages responsible use of new channels.

Weblogs.  I understand and I do not understand the concern of webloggers.  My entrance into cyberspace has created among a lot of bloggers rapid reaction.  I make it clear now: nobody is interested in regulating the Internet.  That’s why I support, as rapporteur, the compromise that has reached common understanding in the Socialist, ALDE [Liberals] and Greens political groups and which underlines the following: encourages an open discussion on all issues relating to the status of weblogs.  Full stop.  We remain here.

The report acknowledges the challenges posed to the print outlets by the migration of the advertising revenues to the Internet, but points out that the new commercial media landscape is dominated by the established public and private media content providers.  It also takes the standpoint that the concentration of media ownership is approaching levels where media pluralism is not guaranteed by the forces of the free market, especially in the new Member States. 

The report recognises that the public service media needs a sizeable and stable market  share to fulfil its mission.  It points out that, whereas in certain markets, the public service media is a leading market participant, it mostly suffers from inadequate funding and [from] political pressure.

The report recognises the need to increase media literacy in the EU, recommends the inclusion of media literacy among the nine basic competences and supports the development of the European core curriculum for media literacy.

Once again, the report welcomes all initiatives aimed at safeguarding democracy and points out that the media remains an influential political tool, which should not be treated solely on economic terms. 

Freedom of expression is the key of my report.  For that I really stand for.

Thank you".

Commissioner Figel’s reply: "Distinguished Members of Parliament, I’d like first of all to congratulate Madame Marianne Mikko for the excellent report.  The Commission shares many of the views expressed in this report.  We are convinced that this resolution sends a very positive signal in favour of media pluralism to all interested parties, including Member States and, of course, European institutions, namely here the Commission as well.

Safeguarding democracy and plurality, as you have said, plurality of expression, is essential.  We must maintain a good balance between the objectives of the diversity of voices in media and competitive strength of media.

However, earlier and intensive consultations indicated that it would be politically inappropriate for the Commission and for the European Union to harmonise media ownership rules or media pluralism.  Subsidiarity is effectively a strong consideration here and a "one size fits all" measure or model would not suit the variety of situations.

This is the reason why I think it would be a mistake to over-regulate a very lively blogosphere.  Nevertheless, I agree with you that certain legal obligations imposed on the press, such as respect for copyrights, or the right of reply must be respected in any case by websites.

Putting user-generated content sites on an equal footing with any other forms of public expression seems like a desirable aim to us.

Conversely, creating a rigid and special status for blogs seems counterproductive and in contradiction with the genuine spirit of Internet.

The Commission agrees with the Parliament that European Community’s competition rules themselves can only partly, partially ensure the pluralism of the media.  This is exactly the reason why media pluralism is regarded as a legitimate public interest by Article 21 of the EC merger rules, or regulation.  Therefore, Member States may take appropriate measures to protect media pluralism by implementing additional rules beyond the merger regulation.  They must apply, however, national and EC law.

However, as regards the competition rules, I would like to nuance a little your statement on the harmful character of concentration of ownership on media pluralism.  Europe’s media companies, including the written press, must be strong enough to withstand competition at global, international level.  We are against over-restrictive rules on media ownership, which could reduce the competitiveness of EU companies.  Situations are not comparable from one Member State to another.  There is real, real diversity of situations.

I am, of course, in favour of more transparency of ownership and of complete information being available to the public regarding the aims and background of broadcasters and publishers.  This is a sine qua non condition to attain more authoritative and reliable media. 

As you insist in your resolution, public service broadcasters are an indispensable element for media pluralism.  This is why the Commission thinks that their missions of public service must be clearly specified and their funding ensured, otherwise great uncertainty will ensue.

In this respect, Ladies and Gentlemen, we all agree that the definition of the public service remit is in principle a matter for Member States to decide, rather than the Commission.  Member States also decide the mode of financing public service broadcasting, as indicated in the Amsterdam Protocol.  In this context, the Commission’s role is to minimise distortion of competition between all types of media.  The Commission also appreciates your position on codes of conduct and self-regulation as instruments to support media pluralism.

Thank you, Mr President".

At the vote held on Thursday 25th September, the watered down, amended version of the report was adopted with 307 in favour and 262 against.  Although this represents a climb-down, the euphemistic phrase "encourages an open discussion" means that while we may have stopped them now, our elected deputies are not going to let the matter drop, but are likely – after an appropriate "reflection period" – to engage in window-dressing by inviting tame "stakeholders" (based on the model established by the Constitutional Convention’s sham consultation) to spout set pieces before re-tabling restrictions.  This is not about passing fads, or vanity, but one of our most fundamental freedoms.  We must resist all proposals to muzzle us and we must band together to ensure the effective conveying of our viewpoints and the unflinching defence of our interests, which coincide with the interests of democracy.

Other Reactions (without the slightest pretence of exhaustiveness):

Jon Worth:

http://www.jonworth.eu/more-eu-controlling-blogging-outrage-a-more-careful-analysis/

http://www.jonworth.eu/if-you-are-nice-to-me-i-might-be-nice-to-you/

http://www.jonworth.eu/whinge-whinge-get-a-grip-ep-has-no-chance-of-controlling-blogging/

 Daniel Hannan:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2008/09/04/how_the_eu_plans_to_regulate_blogs

 EU Referendum:

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/06/oh-yes.html

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/09/blogs-away.html

 Iain Dale:

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2008/09/eu-mounts-another-attempt-to-regulate.html

 Dizzy Thinks:

http://dizzythinks.net/2008/09/eu-wants-to-take-contorl-of-message.html

 Cranmer:

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2008/06/eu-scrutinises-malicious-bloggers.html

 The Devil’s Kitchen:

http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2008/06/ep-monitoring-blogging.html

 Bruno Waterfield:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/3059617/Euro-MPs-to-vote-on-anonymous-blog-ban.html

 Mr Eugenides:

http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/2008/09/malicious-intentions-or-hidden-agendas.html

Tim Worstall:

http://timworstall.com/2008/09/24/that-eu-blog-suggestion/

Charles Crawford:

http://charlescrawford.biz/blog.php?single=542

EU Observer:

http://euobserver.com/843/26813

Is there more to life than shoes?:

http://more-to-life-than-shoes.blogspot.com/2008/09/blogs-were-not-clear-yet.html

Seyran Ateş’ Der Multikulti-Irrtum [The Multicultural Fallacy], Berlin, Ullstein Verlag, 2007, hardback, 282 pages.

Susan Moller Okin’s prescient Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (reproduced in the volume of the same name, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999) asks a question that has become ever more prominent on the political agenda: “(…) what should be done when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in their practices)?” (p9).

Before addressing the issues at stake, she first defines the terms in which her argument will be presented: “By feminism, I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognised as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.  Multiculturalism is harder to pin down, but the particular aspect that concerns me here is the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should be protected through special group rights or privileges (…) In other cases, groups have claimed rights to govern themselves, to have guaranteed political representation, or to be exempt from certain generally applicable laws” (pp10-11, emphasis in original).

Individual and group rights may be discordant: “Suppose, the, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life).  Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities in power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests.  Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist.  They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can.

Advocates of group rights for minorities within liberal states have not adequately addressed this simple critique of group rights, for at least two reasons.  First, they tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths – to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them.  Specifically, they accord little or no recognition to the fact that minority cultural groups, like the societies in which they exist (though to a greater or lesser extent), are themselves gendered, with substantial differences in power and advantage between men and women.  Second, advocates of group rights pay little or no attention to the private sphere.  Some of the most persuasive liberal defences of group rights urge that individuals need ‘a culture of their own’ and that only within such a culture can people develop a sense of self-esteem or self-respect, as well as the capacity to decide what kind of life is good for them.  But such arguments typically neglect both the different roles that cultural groups impose on their members and the context in which persons’ sense of themselves and their capacities are first formed and in which culture is first transmitted – the realm of domestic or family life” (p12, emphasis in original).

The potentially adverse impact of setting aside a space within which group rights take precedence will be disproportionately greater for women: “First, the sphere of personal, sexual, and reproductive life functions as a central focus of most cultures, a dominant theme in cultural practices and rules.  Religious or cultural groups often are particularly concerned with ‘personal law’ – the laws of marriage, divorce, child custody, division and control of family property, and inheritance.  As a rule, then, the defence of ‘cultural practices’ is likely to have a much greater impact on the lives of women and girls than on those of men and boys, since far more of women’s time and energy goes into preserving and maintaining the personal, familial, and reproductive side of life.  Obviously, culture is not only about domestic arrangements, but they do provide a major focus of most contemporary cultures.  Home is, after all, where much of culture is practices, preserved, and transmitted to the young.  On the other hand, the distribution of responsibilities and power at home has a major impact on who can participate in and influence the more public parts of the cultural life, where rules and regulations about both public and private life are made.  The more a culture requires or expects of women in the domestic sphere, the less opportunity they have of achieving equality with men in either sphere” (pp12-13).

Although they are by no means perfect, Western liberal democracies have their merits nevertheless: “While virtually all of the world’s cultures have distinctly patriarchal pasts, some – mostly, though by no means exclusively, Western liberal cultures – have departed far further from them than others.  Western cultures, of course, still practice many forms of sex discrimination.  They place far more importance on beauty, thinness, and youth in females and on intellectual accomplishment, skill, and strength in males.  They expect women to perform for no economic reward far more than half of the unpaid work related to home and family, whether or not they also work for wages; partly as a consequence of this and partly because of workplace discrimination, women are far more likely than men to become poor.  Girls and women are also subjected to a great deal of (illegal) violence, including sexual violence.  But women in more liberal cultures are, at the same time, legally guaranteed many of the same freedoms and opportunities as men.  In addition, most families in such cultures, with the exception of some religious fundamentalists, do not communicate to their daughters that they are of less value than boys, that their lives are to be confined to domesticity and service to men and children, and that their sexuality is of value only in marriage, in the service of men, and for reproductive ends” (pp16-17).

We should therefore proceed with caution in assessing the merits of claims: “It is by no means clear, then, from a feminist point of view, that minority group rights are ‘part of the solution’.  They may well exacerbate the problem.  In the case of a more patriarchal minority culture in the context of a less patriarchal majority culture, no argument can be made on the basis of self-respect or freedom that the female members of the culture have a clear interest in its preservation.  Indeed, they might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct (so that its members would become integrated into the less sexist surrounding culture) or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women – at least to the degree to which this value is upheld in the majority culture.  Other considerations would, of course, need to be taken into account, such as whether the minority group speaks a language that requires protection, and whether the group suffers from prejudices such as racial discrimination.  But it would take significant factors weighing in the other direction to counterbalance evidence that a culture severely constrains women’s choices or otherwise undermines their well-being” (pp 22-3, emphasis in original).

We should also ensure that the group spokespersons with whom we engage in dialogue are genuinely representative of the community as a whole: “Moreover, policies designed to respond to the needs and claims of cultural minority groups must take seriously the urgency of adequately representing less powerful members of such groups.  Because attention to the rights of minority cultural groups, if it is to be consistent with the fundamentals of liberalism, must ultimately be aimed at furthering the well-being of the members of these groups, there can be no justification for assuming that the groups’ self-proclaimed leaders – invariably composed mainly of their older and their male members – represent the interests of all of the groups’ members.  Unless women – and, more specifically, young women (since older women often are co-opted into reinforcing gender inequality) – are fully represented in negotiations about group rights, their interests may be harmed rather than promoted by the granting of such rights” (pp23-4).

Against this backdrop, Seyran Ateş’ brutally honest and courageous warning about the deficits of multiculturalism could hardly have been better timed.  Living in Berlin since the age of six (in 1969), Ateş made the trip back to Turkey on holiday almost every year with her Kurdish father and Turkish mother, both of  whom were convinced that they would one day return for good, a sentiment that has been passed on to the third generation.  They never felt that their period of residence would be anything other than transitory, regardless of how many years went by.  Germany was always perceived by them as resolutely foreign and Turkey remained the focal point of their emotional attachment.

Like many Turkish immigrants before and after them, her parents never really felt at home in Germany and acquiring such a sense of belonging was not exactly made easy for them.  For today’s young people, gloomy job prospects exacerbate such underlying tensions.  Under these circumstances, many members of the third generation now cling tenaciously to the culture of a distant homeland they were not born in and its religion as the only things of value they possess.  They do not so much confidently straddle cultures, as feel exiled from both.

Ateş formerly practiced as a lawyer, but closed down her practice in the summer of 2006 after being assaulted by a defendant.  Because of her uncompromising stance on the plight of Muslim women and girls in contemporary Germany, she has been forced to remove her name from both doorbell and post box and has no official address.  As she pointedly writes, she lives in a country where freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution, yet she has no choice but to live in hiding, punished for speaking her mind with overt hostility and even death threats.  Intimidation is thus the penalty for truthfulness and honesty, accusations of being a traitor to her community, undermining its image and contributing to animosity against immigrants have not deterred her from speaking out.

When honour killings and forced marriages are discussed in media, community representatives immediately go on the defensive.  However, little by way of effort is made to wean them off antiquated traditions, help them find their place in modern world and thereby set a process of change in motion in the Turkish-Muslim world.  Without this, justified criticisms make no impact whatsoever.

Ateş describes her book as an appeal for genuine tolerance, which she defines as the opposite of indifference and ignorance.  Instead, it involves becoming familiar with and accepting the other, their social milieu and culture: “Many Germans, particularly those of the Left, still continue to believe that the dream of a multicultural society will at some stage become a reality if things are simply left to run their course.  This is a mistake, however.  Multiculturalism, as it has been practiced thus far, is organised irresponsibility” (p9).

One of her primary endeavours is to demonstrate to the cultural relativists that they are committing a grave error of judgement with serious implications, when they trivialise the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Islam or even blame the West for them (p10).

Her aim is that all women, with or without the help of Islam, should have the opportunity to live the lives they want to, in dignity and freedom, but she is aware that in issuing this plea in public, she is fighting against people who do not want to engage in discussion, but prefer to silence their opponents by murdering them (p9).

In spite of the hardships she has encountered, she remains firmly convinced that cultures, languages and religions can live peacefully side by side, but that the precondition for this to happen is a genuine exchange.  Integration will only be possible if its objective is to establish a stable identity, when the majority culture does not demand that the immigrant community abandon wholesale the culture it has brought with it from its country of origin and when parallel societies that seek to subvert the way of life of the majority have ceased to exist.

Ateş concentrates primarily on the Turkish and Kurdish communities, partly because she has the greatest personal experience of them, and partly because they constitute the biggest contingent of “foreigners” residing in Germany.  Her focus is on Islam because religion represents a further problem.

She begins by tracing the origins of the multiculturalism debate in Germany.  Valid concerns blighting the lives of women have been deliberately pushed into the background.  I wholeheartedly agree with her condemnation of the abdication of the Left in the debate, which combines haughty dismissiveness with culpable neglect.  This almost total capitulation is not confined to Germany alone, and smacks of a cowardice, which serves only to perpetuate the sufferings of the most vulnerable in our society.  By ostracising anyone who voices reservations about the wisdom of prevailing orthodoxy, the Left has permitted racists to monopolise the debate, contenting itself with regurgitating truisms rather than examining the less savoury aspects of a more complex reality.  An impeccable example of just how difficult it has become for the Left to speak up in defence of the Western liberal democratic model is afforded by Balibar’s essay Is There a ‘Neo-Racism?’, (in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, London, Verso, 1991, pp17-28), which employs P.A. Taguieff’s concept of differentialist racism: “It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others, but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions” (p21).

This form of racism insidiously swathes itself in the language of its opposite: “It is granted from the outset that races do not constitute isolable biological units and that in reality there are no ‘human races’.  It may also be admitted that the behaviour of individuals and their ‘aptitudes’ cannot be explained in terms of their blood or even their genes, but are the result of their belonging to historical ‘cultures’.  Now anthropological culturalism, which is entirely orientated towards the recognition of the diversity and equality of cultures – with only the polyphonic ensemble constituting human civilisation – and also their transhistorical permanence, had provided the humanist and cosmopolitan anti-racism of the post-war period with most of its arguments” (p21, emphasis in original).

Balibar debunks its propositions: “(…) if insurmountable cultural difference is our true ‘natural milieu’, the atmosphere indispensable to us if we are to breathe the air of history, then the abolition of that difference will necessarily give rise to defensive reactions, ‘interethnic’ conflicts and a general rise in aggressiveness.  Such reactions, we are told, are ‘natural’, but they are also dangerous.  By an astonishing volte-face, we here see the differentialist doctrines themselves proposing to explain racism (and to ward it of)” (p22, emphasis in original).

What we witness is a displacement of the problematic (p22): “Prophylactic action against racial mixing in fact occurs in places where the established culture is that of the state, the dominant classes and, at least officially, the ‘national’ masses, whose style of life and thinking is legitimated by the system of institutions; it therefore functions as a unidirectional block on expression and social advancement.  No theoretical discourse on the dignity of all cultures will really compensate for the fact that, for a ‘Black’ in Britain or a ‘Beur’ in France, the assimilation demanded of them before they can become ‘integrated’ into the society in which they already live (and which will always be suspected of being superficial, imperfect or simulated) is presented as progress, as an emancipation, a conceding of rights.  And behind this situation lie barely reworked variants of the idea that the historical cultures of humanity can be divided into two main groups, the one assumed to be universalistic and progressive, the other supposed irremediably particularistic and primitive” (pp24-5).

Hence Balibar is reluctant to concede that Western democracy might exhibit any virtues whatsoever: “The difference between cultures, considered as separate entities or separate symbolic structures (that is, ‘culture’ in the sense of Kultur), refers on to cultural inequality within the ‘European’ space itself or, more precisely, to ‘culture’ (in the sense of Bildung, with its distinction between the academic and the popular, technical knowledge and folklore and so on) as a structure of inequalities tendentially reproduced in an industrialised, formally educated society that is increasingly internationalised and open to the world.  The ‘different’ cultures are those which constitute obstacles, or which are established as obstacles (by schools or the norms of international communication) to the acquisition of culture.  And, conversely, the ‘cultural handicaps’ of the dominated classes are presented as practical equivalents of alien status, or as ways of life particularly exposed to the destructive effects of mixing (that is, to the effects of the material conditions in which this ‘mixing’ occurs).  This latent presence of the hierarchic theme today finds its chief expression in the priority accorded to the individualistic model (just as, in the previous period, openly inegalitarian racism, in order to postulate an essential fixity of racial types, had to presuppose a differentialist anthropology, whether based on genetics or on Völkerpsychologie): the cultures supposed implicitly superior are those which appreciate and promote ‘individual’ enterprise, social and political individualism, as against those which inhibit these things.  These are said to be the cultures whose ‘spirit of community’ is constituted by individualism.

In this way, we see how the return of the biological theme is permitted and with it the elaboration of new variants of the biological ‘myth’ within the framework of cultural racism” (pp25-6, emphasis in original).

I fully accept Balibar’s call to vigilance against a racism in disguise, yet am deeply concerned about how such ideas have been translated into the vulgate of public opinion where any questioning of difference is automatically deplored as racism.  Is defending the achievements of the West, one of the most important of which is the recognition that there is no justification for treating women as the inferiors of men nothing more than cultural imperialism?  Is it racism to believe that minimum standards of decency and justice should apply to all ethnic groups within our society?  Shrugging our shoulders and invoking cultural difference is not going to stop women from having their clitoris and labia hacked off as a pre-emptive remedy to promiscuity.  The Berührungsängste [aversion to tackling the issue] of the Left is one of a series of disappointments and downright betrayals of its emancipatory origins.  The insufferable air of self-righteousness the Left adopts when at its most doctrinaire is in this instance directly harmful, stifling debate with an intellectual laziness matched only by its moral bankruptcy.  Small wonder that hardly anyone dares to speak up in a context where ceding ground has lent force to the charge that only racists harp on about cultural difference.

Timothy Garton-Ash, in What does a free society require of believers and non-believers alike? (The Guardian, 29^th November 2007), resists the creeping censorship spawned by the aversion to a serious engagement with the issue of where tolerance should end: “Among the essentials is freedom of expression, which has been eroded to an alarming degree, both by death threats from extremists and by misconceived pre-emptive appeasement on the part of the state and private bodies.  Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to offend; not the duty, but the right.  We must, in particular, be free to say what we like about historical figures, be they Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Churchill, Hitler or Gandhi (and then let our claims be tested against the evidence).  We may not agree with what controversialists say about these figures but we must defend to the death their right to say it.  There should, for obvious reasons, be limits to what we are free to say about living people, but these limits must be very tightly drawn.

Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women.  Among the essentials is also freedom of religion.  Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion.  In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes.  This – and apostasy in particular – is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere.  But what exactly do we mean by that?  To say “Enlightenment values” begs the question, “which Enlightenment”?  The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion?  (I deliberately simplify a complex history.)  A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist – correctly, in my view – that there is no God?  Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square?  (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States‘ first amendment tradition to the former.)  I’m more of a Lockean myself, but I don’t think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of “which Enlightenment”?  Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism.  Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life.  Today’s debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two.  Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: ‘Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God’.  Believers must be free to argue back: ‘You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe’.  But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society.  The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

That distinction would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were in fact incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society.  I feel this is what quite a few participants in the current debate, both atheist and Christian, really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly.  Yet the thought keeps peeping through, for example in the formula ‘Islam is incompatible with democracy’.  But as a non-Muslim I can only agree with the author Edward Mortimer who, in his book Faith and Power, concluded that there is no single, unchanging Islam, ‘there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do’.  What Muslims say and do in the name of Islam has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today.  Yes, of course, there is the Qur’an and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretations”.

Joan Smith, likewise taking inspiration from the Gillian Gibbons teddy bear case in Islam and the modern world don’t mix (The Independent, 28^th November 2007), more clearly stresses the gender dimension: “The stark fact is that the notion of “honour” and the violence linked to it cannot co-exist with the modern idea of universal human rights.  It encourages men to create oppressive laws which do not recognise individual liberties, and to break the law in states where those liberties have been acknowledged.

I have never claimed that Islam is the only religion that does this, and there are anomalies in British law – the archaic offence of blasphemy is an example – which reminds us of a time when Christians reacted just as violently to what they perceived as “insults”.  In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised. Not as much as I’d like – there’s still a way to go on homosexuality and abortion – but there is no doubt that the influence of Christian churches has dramatically declined.

At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts.  The Old Testament is full of hair-raising injunctions and barbaric punishments but I don’t know anyone, apart from a few extremists on the Christian right, who takes it seriously.  The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged”.

She elaborates further: “No book or person has a monopoly on truth, and I certainly don’t regard Muhammad, Jesus or Marx as beyond criticism.  But while Muslim scholars are prepared to argue about interpretation, they have this in common: they all agree on the primacy of the Qu’ran and the hadith.

Even the suggestion that the text needs to be reformed, which she has denied making, was sufficient to force Taslima Nasreen to flee her home country, Bangladesh, and seek refuge in Sweden.  She recently moved to India, hoping to find more tolerant attitudes among Indian Muslims, and is now being hounded from one city to another by angry mobs.

It is not enough in these circumstances to claim that Islam is a religion of peace, and dismiss all the things non-Muslims don’t like – honour killings, relentless assaults on free speech, and now an accusation of blasphemy related to a teddy bear – as aberrations.  The mores of the seventh century have no relevance in modern life, especially in the arena of sex where decisions about who to sleep with are widely regarded as a personal matter.

The damage that is being inflicted daily on the image of Islam doesn’t come from people like me, who are constantly accused of Islamophobia, but practices such as forced marriage, honour killings and heated denunciations of ‘Western’ values.  I can’t think of any secular country where a rape victim or a well-meaning British teacher would find themselves threatened with flogging”.

Ateş unflinchingly confronts the Left and Liberals with their share of the blame for the coming into being of parallel societies by elevating multiculturalism to the status of an unchallengeable ideology.  The result is that people of different ethnic origins lead hermetically sealed lives with virtually no contact or crossover.  At the same time the unwitting instigators of this segregation are astonished that such separate spheres have come into existence, as if they had been conjured up from nowhere.  They are, quite simply, oblivious to their own share of the responsibility: “I mean the variety of Leftists and Liberals who appear to be of the opinion that they enjoy a monopoly on being good, the so-called multiculturalists [Multikultis].  I would even go so far as to designate some of them as multicultural fanatics because they are downright obsessed with their vision of a multicultural society.  They propagate it with missionary zeal, are blind to reality and respond to doubt and divergent opinion with abrupt intolerance” (p14).

Ateş convincingly argues that leaving as much room as possible for cultural peculiarities and avoiding arrogance in dealings with other cultures is one of the cornerstones of the rule of law.  There are limits to tolerance, however, and these are set out in the Constitution.  Neither a fundamental nor a human right to culture is recognised.  Culture ends where racism begins.  This cuts both ways, though, applying to majority and to the disparate minority cultures alike.  Ateş does not object to the idealism of the multiculturalists, but to their lack of realism.  When they feast on other cultures, they fail to appreciate that they are projecting on to them all that is positive, embracing them with boundless admiration, reserving their ire/disdain for their own, impoverished, degenerate, led-astray culture (the complaints are familiar: materialism run riot, absence of spiritual values, lack of respect for the elderly).  In short, the multiculturalists glorify the foreign at the expense of their own culture, which they devalue (perhaps from a guilty conscience).  They are, however, looking at the minority culture from the outside, with the inevitable bias such a vantage point entails: “The reason why I call the multiculturalists irresponsible is that they are indulging in a non-binding tolerance of other cultures.  As long as they are not influenced by other ways of life, ‘the others’ can do what they like.  Since the true multiculturalist is in essence an opponent and in some instances an outright enemy of the state, it is very difficult to convince him if at all that the welfare state can no longer sustain a putative integration policy in the form in which it has existed hitherto” (p15).

The multiculturalists are not consciously aware of their hypocrisy: “The tolerance of classical ‘multiculturalists’ towards foreigners has clear limits, however.  As soon as offspring are on the way, he very soon seeks out another area to live in with fewer ‘foreigners’.  Because his progeny are supposed to have decent chances in life.  The multicultural fanatic on the other hand, you have to give him credit where it is due, even manages to remain faithful to his multicultural part of town.  When his children do not settle down in school because proper teaching is impossible when the majority of pupils in the class barely speak German you start hearing slogans, such as ‘I sacrificed my child on the altar of multiculturalism’” (pp15-16).

With her straight talking, Ateş breaks through the obfuscations and hand-wringing anxieties that hamper debate: “This does not mean treating minorities with kid gloves in a spirit of cultural relativism due to the all-pervasive fear of offending them.  Such behaviour is every bit as racist as the opposite, in other words, perceiving minorities as barbarous and acting as if they had a monopoly on all the nastiness that exists in dealings between human beings.  Irrespective of whether a deplorable state of affairs is played down or projected onto the culture of ‘the other’, both prevent equal treatment.  And equal treatment is precisely what I am after (…)

For that to happen, however, we first have to ascertain how much the majority society composed of native-born Germans actually knows about ‘other cultures’ in Germany and about what their circumstances and living conditions actually look like within this society because only once I am familiar with the particular features of the communities can I provide effective victim protection.  At the same time, agreement needs to be reached about being allowed to criticise, condemn and combat as contemptible traditions everything that contradicts universal human rights” (p107).

This presents many feminists with the dilemma of where to seek allies.  Multiculturalists and Islamic fundamentalists make strange bedfellows, their coalition as unlikely as one between feminists and the Right.  Nevertheless: “When dealing with topics such as integration, Germany as a country of immigration and Islam, the old dividing lines between Left and Right don’t operate any more.  All of a sudden as a left-wing feminist I find myself allied with Conservatives.  I feel that they understand my positions and concerns and take them seriously.  Whereas many Leftists are ideologically blinkered and unaware of the questionable alliances they occasionally enter into” (p249).

Immigration began in earnest over 40 years ago in Germany, but the response of politicians until very recently was to ignore it, Sleeping Beauty-style, as Ateş puts it.  Being in denial can have pernicious consequences, which she charts.  The ethnic composition of certain districts within German cities changed rapidly, a process accelerated by reunification, leaving some blocks of rented flats with no “native Germans” [I am painfully aware of the limitations of this translation of Urdeutsche, since the main objection to the conceptual and linguistic inadequacy of the terms hitherto used to describe the Turkish population in Germany is that they bracket out, or overtly deny the fact that many of them were born in Germany] and certain school classes almost exclusively (80-100%) made up of the children of immigrants.  Thus parallel societies have gradually come into being: “By this I do not mean the many subcultures, which have emerged within an increasingly differentiated society, such as the gay scene in Berlin for example, or the community of football fans or carnival enthusiasts, ballroom dancers, singletons, single mothers, etc.  What I actually mean is an alternative society, which delineates itself in contradistinction to and as a rival of our majority society and which pursues the declared aim of altering structures within majority society that are incompatible with its own culture.  Majority society is supposed to adapt or even subordinate itself to the traditions and customs of the minority.  We are dealing with a very strong, self-confident and in part extremely arrogant Muslim (regardless of whether they actively practice their religion) community, who have created a world independent of that of the majority with its own legislative, executive and judiciary powers.  Contact with native Germans is no longer necessary in this separate world and often not even deemed desirable” (pp16-17).

Within these communities you can find a Turkish greengrocers on every street corner, halal meat is easily obtainable, any Turkish speciality, no matter how exotic can be found with minimal effort, services are provided in Turkish, problems are resolved in Turkish and according to Turkish tradition.  Marital disputes often never make it as far as court because the family takes care of them instead.  The multiculturalist might welcome Turkish bakeries as a colourful addition relieving the monotony of the street landscape, but Ateş is acutely aware of the unhealthy isolationism in the Turkish neighbourhoods: “Very many Turks and Kurds live today in Germany without any kind of contact with native Germans even though they live in the same building or street.  Majority society has long ignored the existence of such parallel societies.  The multiculturalist bought his vegetables at the ‘Turk’s’, his kebab at the Döner shop and was fiercely proud of his first-hand multicultural credentials and anti-Germanness.  In the meantime he did not demonstrate the slightest interest in the culture of the greengrocer or the owner of the kebab shop who might well have been a patriarch filled with contempt for the native German and his way of life.  The blinkered multiculturalist didn’t even notice.  He was convinced that the ‘Turk’ must adore him because he was, after all, ‘foreigner-friendly’.

Ultimately this meant that the multiculturalist had formed a bond of solidarity with the Turkish or Kurdish patriarch, although he would never have dreamed of doing the same with his uneducated, rough and ready German fellow citizen who beat his wife and drank away the housekeeping money down the local or squandered it in fruit machines” (pp17-18).

She distinguishes between three groups: the advocates of the notion of a multicultural society, multiculturalists and multicultural fanatics.  The first lack the power and the majority backing to set the agenda politically and are slowly moving towards a concept of transculturalism.  The latter two have accumulated a burden of culpability, which they ought to face up to and modify their views accordingly.  For Ateş, multiculturalism is outdated.  In its place, she promulgates transculturalism, which we have been drifting towards unawares as it is.  In her opinion, the fatal shortcoming of multiculturalism is to be found in its assumption that in a single country different cultures would be able to live together peacefully side by side, all acknowledging and submitting to the authority of the same state.  Each one of these cultures would remain fairly distinct and self-contained.  Indeed, this very separateness and exclusion were allegedly the hallmark of multiculturalism as cultures that insisted on their uniqueness/individual distinctiveness excluded difference whether intentionally or not.  Today, however, we inhabit a globalised world in which people constantly shift or migrate between the most disparate cultural domains and are therefore exposed to the most diverse cultural influences.  From this arises a blending of cultures and a new set of identities far more complex than those produced in sealed off, monocultural environments.

These processes are far from unique to Germany alone and Ateş provides an objective and illuminating survey of the evolution leading up to the situation that prevails today.  Germany has long been a favoured destination for immigrants, without ever having put in place the legislation to merit such status.  Immigration has almost exclusively taken place through family reunification or asylum-seeking and has always been tightly regulated for employment purposes.  Her historical overview of the vocabulary used to describe immigrants exposes the underlying lack of acceptance on the part of the majority as well as the presumed transitory nature of sojourn, not seen as a permanent putting down of roots.  The drearily literal designations constitute a clear and succinct illustration of everything that has gone wrong.  In the1950s a labour shortage in Germany attracted 700,000 or so foreigners from Portugal, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey who were lumped together under the term Gastarbeiter [literally guest workers], the implication of that word being that they would, sooner or later, pack their bags and go home, even though their willingness to take on the menial tasks the Germans turned their noses up at meant they were greeted with open arms.  This was a particularly strong assumption concerning the Turks and Kurds: Muslims would harbour no desire to stay in a Christian country longer than absolutely necessary.  In fairness, the Turks and Kurds thought in identical terms.  If asked, representatives of the first generation would proclaim that they would spend a year in Germany tops earning a good living.  Thus twenty years were allowed to elapse with no integration policy worth the name.

The oil crisis in the 70s put an end to the recruitment drive abroad, but this did not mean that the flow of immigrants dried up.  Many of the Gastarbeiter availed themselves of the right to bring their families to join them once it dawned on them that the likelihood of their returning home in the near future was slender.  By the 80s, the number of Gastarbeiter had reached some 4.7 million.  The demand for their labour had diminished and the climate towards them became increasingly hostile.  Why did they not just go back home?  Ateş quite rightly retaliates with the question of why, if Germany was only interested in workers, did its politicians not opt for fixed term contracts for the incomers without making provision for their spouses and children to join them?

In the meantime, the workers had moved out of the hostels and into flats of their own, if they were fortunate enough to have found a landlord willing to rent out rooms to “foreigners”.  They moved into areas dominated by the working class and formed mini communities of their own, mirror images of the villages or towns they had left behind.  The number of foreign-born occupants of such streets swiftly rose.  By this stage they were referred to, starkly, as Ausländer [foreigners].  Earlier predictions about the Muslims proved erroneous.  How to get rid of them became the main preoccupation of the majority.  They couldn’t simply be deported as most of them were in possession of a residence permit of unlimited duration or an entitlement to stay and carry on independent activity (self-employed).  Some were even holders of a German passport.  At this juncture, some bright spark reasoned that since they had come to Germany in the first place to make money in order to establish themselves comfortably in Turkey later on they could be given an incentive to leave Germany.  On 1^st December 1983 the law on encouraging foreigners to return entered into force.  Financial assistance to the tune of approximately 5,300 Euros was to be put on offer to those willing to go back.  In addition, their pension contributions were to be paid out.  In 1988 Ateş’ parents availed themselves of the measure, but not as many as had been hoped by the initiators of the legislation followed them.

By the end of the 80s it was no longer politically correct to call the resident immigrant population “foreigners”, and so the unwieldy substitute ausländische Mitbürger [foreign co-citizens], which coincided with the discovery of ethnic diversity and a debate on the merits of multiculturalism, was coined to replace it.  This new term soon fell out of favour, because it emphasised the alien, the coming-in-from-the-outside-aspect.  “Migrant” and “immigrant” did not appear fitting either, as the Chancellor was at pains to stress that Germany was not an immigrant country.  In the mid-90s the latest effort to express difference came in the shape of türkeistammig [originating from Turkey], türkischstamming [of Turkish origin] and Deutsche türkischer Herkunft [Germans of Turkish extraction].  As Ateş remarks, the plethora of linguistic innovations did nothing to alter the fact that neither side had a clear image of how to relate to each other.  She draws the comparison with an open relationship in which the partners are wary of entering into a full commitment, yet neither do they wish to split up altogether.

Following reunification, tensions erupted and houses occupied primarily by immigrants were burned down, people were hunted down and executed.  Although shunned by the politically correct, the designation “foreigner” was used liberally by the media (little has changed in that respect according to Ateş), particularly when reporting on riots by right-wing extremists.  The September 11^th attacks have instigated a further terminological modification: Arabs, Turks and Kurds are now subsumed under the heading “Muslims” and have been placed under blanket suspicion of terrorist sympathies.

Her conclusion: “The 40-year history of migration from Turkey into Germany is the history of an absence of social acceptance.  This lack of social acceptance, the social devaluation and exclusion of people from Turkey – for the most part people of other nationalities do not fare much better if they do not happen to belong to the European community – is reflected in the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for them.  As long as these people are not accepted as an integral part of this society they will continue to be perceived, denoted and excluded as foreigners.

In my opinion it is of the utmost significance to find a term that can be used to describe those of us who are not of native German extraction with which we can identify and which will enable us to feel as if we are part of German society.  The kind of term I am looking for is one that does not in itself contain implicit discrimination, such as “foreigner”, “foreign co-national” etc.  All of the terms used up to now suggest that the people they refer to are different, foreign and not native to Germany.

“Deutschländer” [as opposed to Deutsche, which would translate as “Germans”; an approximation might be “Englanders” for English.  I propose to leave it in the original rather than render it as German-Turks analogous to, for example, British-Asians] is what (…) the Turks living in Germany are called in Turkey.  The term bore a primarily negative connotation, but I find it very fitting for people whose lives are centred in Germany without being able to look back on a long family history in that country.  You can always start filling it with positive meaning.  At any rate I prefer “Deutschländer” to any of the alternatives.  Personally speaking, I can identify with it quite well, even if there is a type of sausage of the same name.  The term “Deutschländer” includes the country in which we live and emphasises the sense of belonging to it and its society” (pp26-7).

Ateş then sketches out attitudes and the genesis of present day integration problems.  First generation immigrants arrived with the expectation that they would not stay permanently.  They felt and behaved like guests.  They wanted to earn money, which they would set aside and take back to Turkey with them.  Initially they did not bring their families with them either because they only envisaged a short spell in Germany.  Children were left behind with relatives, brought up within the extended family.  When the immigrant workers were recruited nobody took the trouble to point out to them that their belief that they would only remain for a year or so before returning with a large amount of savings was unrealistic and that the likelihood of their spending many years or even the rest of their lives in Germany was far greater.  Ateş characterises this as the crucial difference between Germany and a genuine immigrant country, such as the US.  Nor were her parents enamoured of the idea that Germany might be their new home.  They had neither the will nor the inclination to integrate.  However, as Ateş makes clear, it would be grossly unfair to blame the first generation for failing to do so.  Irrespective of the fact that the country was not geared towards integration, no efforts were made by society at large to teach the immigrants anything other how to perform their jobs correctly.  They were patronisingly addressed in “Tarzan German”, in keeping with the lowly status accorded them.  Most were unskilled workers filling in vacancies that Germans did not deign to accept.  Their physical constitution was of greater concern than their level of schooling.

The second generation was far more heterogeneous.  The extent to which they integrated depended to a large degree on the timing of their arrival.  The older they were, the lesser the chances of completing their education successfully.  Again this should not be taken as an indicator of a lack of desire to adapt on their part, but rather as a serious charge against a system that foresaw no dedicated support for them (thankfully this has been remedied in the meantime, although the opportunities that now exist for those who failed to leave school with any qualifications smack of palliative activity, an “alibi function”, as Ateş puts it, as most do not have any real prospect of employment).

For those who settled in Germany in the 70s their future hinged on whether they were placed in classes reserved for immigrants or in classes where the majority of pupils were Germans.  The prevailing policy of the time was to gather together Turkish children in segregated classes, although in those days mixed classes would have been perfectly possible.  Those who were incorporated into ordinary classes quickly made friends and secured better results.  Ateş attributes the stubbornness displayed by the school system in separating off children of different ethnic extraction to simple lack of interest based on the misguided assumption that they would soon be going back home anyway.  Her verdict: the second generation was shut out of the education system.  A complicating (and still highly relevant) factor was that certain Muslim families did everything in their power to keep their daughters out of school to avoid their being “led astray”.  In addition, many second-generation children were sent to remedial schools because of learning difficulties arising from their imperfect command of German.  The result was that huge numbers left school with nothing to show for it and this severely restricted their employment prospects.

The fortunate few as a rule outperformed their German classmates in the knowledge that they had to do better as immigrants if they wanted to carve out a decent living for themselves in later life.  Girls were under even greater pressure to achieve because they had to prove that their ethnic origin did not mean they were less intelligent.  Upward social mobility was their prize, but even the most successful members of the second generation felt torn between their own vision of how to live a good life and that of their parents, leaving them unable to pass on any clear guidelines to their own children.  On the one hand, they sought to distance themselves from the first generation whilst on the other they were only too aware of being excluded within their adopted homeland.  Fluent in two languages and equally comfortable in both cultures these few are feted as examples of successful integration and their identity is transcultural.

This group does not accurately reflect the situation of the majority of second-generation immigrants whose mastery of German and qualifications are not comparable, who were the first to lose their jobs in the recession following reunification and who had little option but to fall back on the social security safety net.  Their fate had a direct impact on the third generation who have lost out in every respect, having grown up to believe that they are neither wanted nor needed in Germany and that regardless of how much energy they devote to improving their lot their exertions will remain futile as far as their labour market opportunities are concerned.  At the same time they learn that it is possible at least to get by on benefits.  Ateş classifies them as the lost generation, living proof of the disastrous consequences of the chronic aversion to confronting the real need for integration.  Most are unable to speak either German or Turkish properly, in the throes of a permanent identity crisis.  The combination of feeling as if they do not belong, lack of recognition and paucity of life chances leads them back to the culture of their forebears and they reject mainstream German lifestyles.  Against this backdrop, violence is rife with large numbers of young men convicted for it (every third persistent offender, defined as having committed more than ten crimes a year, comes from an immigrant background, with Turks, Vietnamese, Poles and Lebanese topping the list).

These young people are positioned between cultures with all the tensions thus implied.  Their parents are often anxious that the old traditions not be lost (although very few observe them strictly), but their children lose sight of their positive elements, absorbing instead those related to power and violence.  The nihilism of hopelessness gnaws at them, their emotional poverty coupled with material deprivation.  As if this were not bad enough, they also experience the narrowing of horizons and poverty of ambition of the chronically disadvantaged: of school leavers without qualifications, 9.2% are “native Germans” compared with 20.5 of Deutschländer (figures from 2003-4).

That integration would take place by osmosis or immersion within the wider mainstream without the need for any outside agency or support has been shown up as a myth.  Ateş dismisses the idea that the extent of integration depends on social class, since approximately 80% of Deutschländer do not feel they form part of German society.  Integration is not a one-way street: both sides have to meet half way.  If majority society is unwilling to adapt, German nationality, speaking the language and living in German surroundings will still be considered inadequate.  In spite of above average fluency and impressive educational backgrounds, fully assimilated immigrants will go on being looked upon as non-German on the basis of their looks and foreign sounding name.  As it is, they are treated like walking miracles even though what they have done is exactly what the majority demands of them.  More German than the clichéd German they are performance-oriented and highly disciplined.  What more are they supposed to do to gain acceptance?  Even the complete assimilation entailed by Germanising their names (Ayşe to Anja and Mustafa to Manfred) cannot eradicate the mark of exclusion constituted by their appearance.

In the rhetoric of politicians, “integration” should not be taken at face value, but read as “assimilation”.  Ayşe might not want to become Anja, however, as her identity and personality derive sustenance from both cultures.  She possesses an intercultural competence, which can only be of benefit to society.  This is precisely why there are no reasonable grounds for her to turn her back on her Turkish culture.  Only once politicians wake up to the vast potential that is being squandered in parallel societies, that there are young people who speak two, three or more languages will an important step towards a feasible integration policy have been taken.  The worst possible message to transmit would be to urge the Deutschländer to preserve their original culture completely intact with no concessions to the German environment, that they can expect no help in becoming German because the native population is ashamed of its own culture.

The burden of responsibility for peaceful co-existence rests on the shoulders of the second generation, as the attitudes of the third will be moulded by them and their long-term input will continue as grandparents to the fourth generation.  It is from their ranks that the “cultural chauvinists in the Islamic Associations and the hate preachers in the mosques” are drawn (p40).  These are the parents who refuse to send their children to nursery school, ask permission for their daughters to be excused from lessons and marry them off forcibly, who instil in their sons an image of humanity and of women in particular that shows contempt for rights and law alike, transforming them into violent guardians of “honour” and even into murderers.

Having thus clarified the context, Ateş moves on to the substance of her analysis: the situation of Muslim women and girls in Germany.  Her position is unequivocal.  In the same way as no democracy worth the name can function whilst women are oppressed, integration is doomed to failure as long as women are denied equality, the opportunity to lead a fully autonomous life on their own terms.  As a result, integration policy across the globe must have the emancipation of women as its first priority.

Discrimination against women in the Turkish and Kurdish communities begins before birth.  Prior to conception, both men and women hope for a boy, as the birth of a daughter is not so much a cause for celebration as regret.  Bringing a boy into the world is viewed as a proof of the husband’s manhood and enhances the status of the wife.  Ateş herself was spared the trauma of being grudgingly tolerated as two older brothers had preceded her.  Pre-natal diagnostics allow the gender of the foetus to be established and female embryos are aborted with monotonous regularity, a practice which has spread to Germany (compare this with a recent article by Paul Bracchi, Britain’s missing babies, Daily Mail, 3^rd December 2007, which publicises research revealing that between 1990 and 2005, about 1,500 fewer girls were born to Indian mothers living in England and Wales than would have been statistically probable for this group.  The expert who collated the information insists that the discrepancy in birth ratios is too “sudden and pronounced to have a likely biological or environmental cause… the most probable explanation is sex-selective abortion”).

Girls bear the brunt of an authoritarian tradition of rearing children that does not balk at corporal punishment as they are the repositories of the family honour.  The onset of puberty is fraught with conflict, with every male relative interfering in a girl’s upbringing and asserting their claim to power by force if necessary.  Bringing pressure to bear is not the exclusive preserve of men, however, as female relations and friends can also help uphold “virtue” (As Phyllis Chesler remarks in The Death of Feminism (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005: “Arab and Muslim women are not exempt from universal women’s ‘ways of being’.  This includes female-female aggression, competition, conformism, sexist policing, gossip, envy and hate – as well as female-female kindness, compassion, support for resistance and rescue from violence”, p124).  The girl must not suffer damage to her “reputation”.  This is often the juncture at which even daughters of “modern” Turkish families start wearing headscarves, rebelling against their more progressive parents by adopting this potent symbol.

The one socially acceptable role for a Muslim woman is that of being a good wife and mother.  The more suitors a girl can boast of, the greater her standing.  She might show off about the number of proposals she has received without fully grasping what is at stake.  The resulting “marriages” cannot be deemed voluntary in any genuine sense.  The brides are mostly between 12 and 18 years of age and are “joined in wedlock” by Muslim clerics, the couple living together until they have reached legal adulthood and can be officially married at a registrar’s.

Amongst the Deutschländer, marriages are quite literally family affairs as opposed to a commitment entered into by two individuals.  Entire clans have to get along with each other and frictions are often rife.  Daily life can be soured by gossip and wrangling, the older generations convinced that they know best and advising the husband on how to extract obedience from his spouse.  Even when the marriage has the potential to work, it often founders because the newly weds are not permitted uninterrupted time together, under a continual obligation to prove their loyalty to their respective extended families.  Daughters-in-law have a particularly hard time of it, as they are required to submit to the authority not only of their husbands, but also of all the other male relatives.  They have no choice but to run both their own households and those of their parents-in-law.  Until they have children of their own they are in many instances put in charge of caring for their nieces and nephews.  None of these duties is a matter of choice, but taken for granted and the women concerned are never consulted as to their opinion.

Ateş makes no bones about her stance: “[The situation of Muslim girls and women] is an excellent yardstick against which to measure integration policy.  If one really had existed, there would be no need to lament such deplorable circumstances in the lives of many Muslim women and girls today.  The integration of all Deutschländer would have progressed a long way further.  The manner in which a society treats its women and children also demonstrates the level of civilisation and democracy it has attained.

State and society have allowed Muslim women and girls to fall victim to antiquated traditions and patriarchal structures which show contempt for humanity.  Even now thousands of them are locked up in their dwellings and beaten.  They can barely string two words together in German and have no contacts with anyone outside their family.  Many of these women live in the so-called [ethnically segregated] neighbourhoods where they virtually never encounter any native-born Germans.

The situation of Muslim girls and women is being played down in order to justify decades of omissions in integration policy” (p44).

Counselling services and courses are on offer to introduce Muslim immigrants to German society (though many initiatives tailored specifically for women have been abandoned due to a chronic lack of funding).  It has become increasingly apparent, however, that for them to stand any chance of success the entire family has to be involved.  The taboo against any meddling in the private lives of people from a different cultural background long hindered such realisation.  Since the amended immigration law entered into force in 2005 it has been compulsory for all newcomers to attend an integration course to enhance their language skills as well as improve their knowledge of social, cultural and economic life in Germany (and overcoming the ingrained recalcitrance of the Left has been an uphill struggle: “We have spent decades convincing the multicultural dreamers that it is not racist to demand of immigrants that they learn German.  It was a hard slog.  But we are far from having won everyone over yet.  Integration is not contingent upon language knowledge some continue to maintain in all seriousness”, pp236-7).  Following reforms (applicable as of July 2007), the length of these courses has been increased from 600 to 900 hours.  The possibility of penalties for non-attendance has also been opened up.

The laudable intention behind the courses is that women should be given a helping hand in becoming more independent and thereby empowered to take charge of their own destinies.  Ateş regrets the fact that the courses have not yet attained the conceptual maturity to be able to reach women who have been conditioned by traditional thought patterns.  The most serious problem is that participation is only mandatory for new arrivals.  Women who have been resident in Germany for a longer period are unfortunately not entitled to take part in them.  Not that the women themselves would necessarily want to take part if left to their own devices.  Ateş recounts an incident whereby a Turkish woman had been given a placement under a job creation scheme, not an integration course proper, but a similar initiative.  She complained to the teacher that she could not even work half days because of having to look after the children.  Later on, she confided in one of the other Turkish participants: “‘These Germans simply can’t get their heads around it: I can’t go out to work because it is a question of honour!’”.

Ateş shows little sympathy towards such attitudes, asking why the state should foot the bill for such misogynistic traditions, as what it boils down to is these women claiming benefits because in the eyes of their husbands remunerated employment outside the home is incompatible with his sense of “honour”.  For which read anxiety that their wives might be corrupted by coming into contact with strange men and developing sexual desires of their own.  One of her clients had been severely battered by her husband for having the temerity to express a wish to supplement the housekeeping money from social security by helping out in a shop.  He snarled at her that what she really wanted was to be ogled at and felt up by other men.

Ateş dismisses the notion that this represents an extreme manifestation of simple jealousy, classifying it instead as the will to regulate and control every aspect of female sexuality on the part of Muslim men.  For her, this insatiable appetite for power and domination is the single key issue determining the position of Muslim women in Europe, the unpalatable truth which underlies the wearing of the headscarf, forced marriages, honour killings and domestic violence.

The majority of women Muslim immigrants in Germany (and here she draws on her vast experience as a lawyer) are largely confined to less privileged social milieus and are not particularly well-educated.  They are highly dependent on the family network and would be at a total loss without it.  Everything revolves around the family group, individuality is downgraded.  Many immigrant women have never learned how to take decisions of their own let alone take charge of their lives.  For some of those who succeeded in breaking out of forced marriages being freed from the constant threat of violence and always being told what to do by others was entirely new.  Even something as self-evidently banal as doing the shopping when they wanted and for what they wanted imparted a heady sense of freedom.

Not that Ateş idealises the realities of life in Western Europe for non-immigrant women, acknowledging that we have not yet achieved full equality regardless of what the statute books stipulate.  Most immigrant women have not yet taken the first faltering steps towards catching up, however, and precisely because of their lack of education and social vulnerability require assistance to pluck up the courage to set off down the road to emancipation.  What we witness instead are clear trends towards a new religious conservatism, turning back the clock to the 7th century.  Ateş regards the headscarf as the visible indicator of this tendency.  Whereas most Turkish and Kurdish women of the first generation deliberately and demonstratively cast their headscarves aside when they came to Germany, more and more women of the second and third generation are covering themselves up.

Ateş goes on to address the myriad flagrant abuses of human and women’s rights committed in the name of culture in great and harrowing depth, meticulously tracing the cultural history of forced marriages (“Silence is a very widespread reaction on the part of Muslim women when asked whether they would like to marry this man or another one.  Silence, because they have never learned to give a genuine answer to enquiries because they are ashamed.  In certain families fathers no longer speak to their daughters once they have reached a certain age.  At most they issue the occasional instructions, but no real conversations take place – and a chat about such an intimate matter as marriages is certainly off limits” (p55); “One motive for forced marriage which is only seldom mentioned is the homosexuality of the children, particularly of the sons.  Marriage is expected because it offers the possibility of a ‘cure’ for this sexual orientation, which is viewed as an illness by many Muslims and is fought against with the utmost vehemence.  The wife frequently only discovers that her partner is gay late on.  Sometimes the spouses come to an arrangement.  The man says: ‘OK, I will fulfil my duty to father two or three children, but then I will leave you in peace.  In return please let me go about living my own life’.  Here too the men are at an advantage.  A lesbian who is paired off in a forced marriage has barely no chance of leading a double life, certainly not on the basis of making an arrangement with her husband” (p56); “Some of my clients were beaten on a regular basis for years on end by their mothers-in-law for refusing to have children.  In part, these women stated quite clearly that they did not want to start a family yet, or they did everything in their power to prevent a pregnancy from happening.  All but the tiniest number of these women had no access to contraception.  Only very few had friends or neighbours who acted as their accomplices and obtained the pill for them in secret.  This is why many women have recourse to subterfuge to prevent unwanted pregnancies.  It is not a rarity for them to fake migraines or other physical ailments over such a long period that real somatic illnesses or depression ensue.  For other women by contrast children represent the only source of solace, the only positive feature in their lives” (p57)), and the range of practices flanking it, such as the pathological obsession with virginity as the mark of honour, the unrelenting supervision and chaperoning of young people and the plight of imported brides (according to the prevailing legislation they only acquire an independent right of residence once two years have elapsed and have to endure their husband’s brutality in the meantime as they can be deported for trying to escape the marriage except in circumstances of demonstrable hardship, p59).

Ateş proposes a series of remedies, the first of which is to make forced marriage a criminal offence in its own right.  This would not only allow it to be punished more effectively than hitherto, but also serve to raise awareness of the wrongfulness of the practice, not only amongst perpetrators and victims, but also within the judicial system itself.  Most of the former do not realise that it is already prohibited by law as a particularly serious form of coercion (not that its victims are generally of an age or possess the requisite education or specialist legal knowledge to be able to invoke the protection it affords), and making its illegality explicit would chip off the veneer of tradition that renders it acceptable.  The penalties meted out thus far have not sufficed to convince families of the injustice of selling their daughters and calmly sitting in the room next door whilst she is raped.  Although it would be possible to convict those responsible for forced marriage of rape, coercion, grievous bodily harm and deprivation of personal liberty simultaneously, most judges have shied away from doing so because alleged cultural peculiarities are involved.

Furthermore, the one-year period which must elapse before a marriage can be annulled should be scrapped and the rules governing the right of residence of victims revised to make it possible for girls carried off to Turkey to be married to a partner they barely know to return to Germany even in cases where they have spent over six months abroad in the interim.

Finally, girls who have not yet reached legal adulthood should be given the opportunity to flee to refuges without their parents’ consent being required as this puts them at greater risk: most do not want a complete break with their families, but neither do they wish to be married off against their will and the law as it stands confronts them with a dilemma many cannot cope with.

Reformed legislation must be accompanied by preventive measures, such as lessons incorporated into the official curriculum at nursery and primary schools and letting girls know about where to turn to for help.  From her legal practice, Ateş can corroborate that many women only find out about their rights and the support mechanisms in place when they start attending the aforementioned integration courses.  Passing on this vital information should therefore become a mandatory part of the courses.  Since the entire family is usually implicated in arranging a forced marriage, cooperation with immigrant associations is likewise indispensable given that they play such a key part in relaying the laws, values and standards of majority society.  As Ateş points out, many of these associations have been accepting subsidies to carry out integration work for decades without, to the best of her knowledge, fulfilling their side of the bargain in an active and satisfactory fashion.  On too many occasions they have simply denied the existence of the problem or are guilty of trivialising it.

Honour killings are not condoned by Islam, but, originate from much further back in history, and are deeply entrenched in the tribal societies of the Near and Middle East.  However, passages in the Koran and traditional Islamic texts pertaining to the appropriate conduct of women are often cited by way of justification.  Mosques and Islamic associations therefore ought to be the first to correct misapprehensions amongst their brethren.

Her resounding indictment: “It is deeply shocking that even in a country such as Germany many women had to die before the debate reached its current stage.  The bogus tolerance of so-called cultural peculiarities has led to the toleration of violations of the most fundamental human rights.  For this reason I also accuse the multicultural fanatics of a share of the responsibility for what has gone wrong in Germany.  Honour killings were already being committed in the 1970s and 80s, just as they are today.  But neither the media, mainstream politicians or the diehard Leftists, who were part of the squatter movement and caught up in their autonomous struggle against the ‘filthy state’ bothered their heads about human rights abuses that were taking place right under their noses.  It was the hard-line Left that learned about the immigrant community, including its darker side, from us Turkish and Kurdish women who worked together with them in the widest possible variety of projects.  Many such Leftists did not want to shake the foundations of a world view that cast the foreigners as the good guys and the Germans as the bad”, p62).

Women are regarded as property, not merely of the husband, but of the entire community.  Article 1, paragraph 1 of the German Constitution states that the dignity of the human being is inviolable and that the state is called upon to both respect and protect it.  Unfortunately, large segments of the Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany do not feel bound by the strictures of the Constitution, which to their minds only applies to native Germans.  Once again, therefore, Ateş suggests that honour killing be included as a separate offence.  Turning a blind eye to this appalling negation of women’s worth would be obscene and cannot be treated more leniently as the product of a different cultural tradition (the so-called “culture bonus”).  We have a moral obligation towards those who cannot defend themselves against social pressure (increasingly, women are being driven to suicide by their relatives in preference to overt slaughter) and to condemn harmful and archaic traditions.

We should not lose sight of the fact that honour killings are not an exclusively male crime.  Because the honour of the entire family is believed to have been besmirched or compromised, female relations are also complicit, though their participation is usually restricted to the planning phase (or furnishing alibis), leaving the actual “execution” (in both senses of the word) to the men.  Mothers in particular might be motivated by envy or resentment to remove the “taint of disgrace” (Chesler agrees: “Many women know that at any moment they might be ‘honour’ murdered by a male family member with the approval of their female relatives.  Like men, many women also internalise their society’s hatred of women and suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of unworthiness.  Like men, women are sometimes exceptionally cruel toward other women”, op. cit., p132).

One of the central messages of the book is made explicit in connection with domestic violence: “It also has to be clear that German laws apply to all the nationalities that live here.  It might seem self-evident, but it is not.  The patriarchs from the parallel societies have laws of their own.  As long as it is not impressed upon them, with all possible rigour, that they are subject to German laws every bit as much as their native-born neighbours, nothing will change.

Again and again I hear certain Turkish and Kurdish men say ‘I couldn’t care less about German laws’.  It is not a matter of coincidence that some Islamists contend that Germany is the most Islamic country in the world because democracy and freedom of religion prevail here.  For which read: ‘Here I can do whatever I want with my wife.  All I have to do is invoke my religion’.  And the not especially religious men say: ‘I am not in the least bit interested in what the German laws state.  I am a Turk and I have a different culture’.  Unlike the German ‘namby-pambies’ these men know how to treat women.  Of course this does not apply to them right across the board.  There definitely are also Turkish and Kurdish men who are labelled ‘namby-pambies’ by their compatriots and fellow males when they treat their women lovingly, with respect, humanely and as equals and neither hit them nor insult them with swearwords” (pp114-5).

 Once again, Chesler concurs: “While some Western men are also domestically violent, woman-battering is no longer culturally acceptable.  Indeed, thanks to Second Wave feminism, it is increasingly prosecuted.  Also, Western woman-battering does not spring from a culturally induced source of shame and honour.  Because of this, preventing, tracking, and abolishing woman-battering among Muslims and non-westerners may need to evolve in different ways” (op. cit., p13, emphasis in original).

No mere scrap of cloth the headscarf is indeed more than a religious symbol, condensing a whole vision of society and how it should be ordered, which advocates the segregation of the sexes in a kind of gender apartheid.  Ateş is not surprised that the most ardent champions of covering up are men since what is really at stake is their ability to assert their supremacy and enforce their view of female sexuality.  On the question of whether women adopt the headscarf voluntarily, Ateş recounts the experience of an acquaintance of hers, a very devout man who never misses Friday prayers when on holiday in Turkey, but who shuns most of the mosques in Berlin because he objects to the imams demanding of the men that they ensure their wives take the veil.  For the thirty years since she first arrived in Berlin, his wife has not worn a headscarf and he could not imagine attempting to compel her to put one on again.  He often feels that he is being accused of not being a proper Muslim and that the mosques are driving through a political agenda.

To quote Chesler again: “Of course, women may wear the hijab for reasons of modesty and to express their respect for both God and the family.  They may do so, just as Catholic nuns or Orthodox Jewish women do, in order to set themselves apart from secular standards of behaviour.  Perhaps some women also feel that such garb might protect them from male sexual violence.  Still, Muslim women bear a greater symbolic burden than their Muslim male counterparts and are more closely scrutinised, no matter what they do” (p155).

For Ateş, regardless of whether the wearing of the headscarf is a religious duty, it stands in flagrant contradiction to Article 3, paragraph 2 of the Constitution, which talks about the equality of everyone before the law.  Men and women enjoy equal rights and the state must ensure that this equality is implemented as well as working to remove disadvantages.  Nobody may be discriminated against or given preferential treatment on grounds of their gender.  When the wearing of headscarves is aimed at influencing others or is abused politically in public life to undermine the principle of equality it becomes an issue of crucial social significance.  It has no place where the state is being represented in any capacity, since the state, unlike the individual, has an obligation to obey the provisions of the Constitution in its entirety and must prevent everything that creates the impression that the sexes do not possess equal rights.  In the context of schools in particular the state’s duty is to impart these rights and put them into practice.  It damages its own credibility if it applies double standards, absolving one group, in this instance Muslims, of the responsibility of observing the principle of equality.

Following an examination of controversies over veiling within Islam, Ateş concludes: “When a religion calls for the complete subordination of the woman to the authority of the man, or cites such religious precepts in order to justify such subordination, limits have to be placed on the freedom of religion and belief.  I am of the view that the headscarf is not a religious, but a political symbol of the subordinate position of women.  The headscarf is a gender-specific outward mark of differentiation between men and women, which emphatically postulates such a difference.  It does not demonstrate the religious subordination of women in their relationship with God, but the social subordination of women under the dominion of men.  For this reason it should not – as repeatedly occurs – be treated as the equivalent of the cross or the kippah, which are exclusively religious symbols and do not in any respect define gender roles.  The headscarf signals the sexual value of the woman, which would arouse men if it were not concealed.  It is a symbol of the reduction of women to a sex object” (p126).

The German Constitutional Court’s so-called headscarf ruling from 24^th September 2003 was a landmark victory for cultural relativism and a complete cop-out.  Prospective Muslim teacher Fereshta Ludin was instructed by the Baden-Wurttemberg Ministry of Culture not to wear a headscarf whilst giving lessons.  When presented with the opportunity to introduce uniform legislation by instituting a complete ban, the Court left the decision to the discretion of each federal state.  The minority opinion from the dissenting judges found fault with the ruling because it neglected to consider the implications of the headscarf in terms of the role accorded to women, the view that veiling guarantees the woman’s subordination to the man being very widespread amongst Muslims and therefore clashing with the Constitution’s stipulation of equality.  As Ateş remarks, it was, ironically, the conservative judges who adopted this firm stance in favour of equal rights.

Fitting in with the crowd can be a reason for adopting the headscarf for schoolgirls, but the real unifying factor is the wish to dissociate themselves from their Christian and Jewish peers and display their Muslim identity for all to see.  Ateş expresses irritation at young girls and women who wear a headscarf, yet at the same time plaster themselves with make-up and wear figure-hugging, erotic clothes.  Some of them even combine the headscarf with bare midriffs that show off their belly piercings.  Whereas for Ateş this approach is riddled with contradictions the standard retort from the women themselves when challenged about why they wear sexy apparel when a headscarf is supposed to stop them being looked upon as sex objects is that just because they wear one it does not mean they have to walk around looking ugly.  As long as their hair is covered, putting on make-up and being pretty is no sin.

Ateş: “These women are of course, however, making themselves into sex objects since they are also playing up to men’s fantasies of what might be concealed beneath the covering.  I can see no genuine difference between a woman draped half naked for advertising purposes over a car bonnet and one hidden under a veil.  In both cases she is a sex object and is reduced to that alone” (p131).

We should be under no illusions about the seriousness of the threat to equality for girls.  For example, in its judgement on excusing a Muslim girl from mixed gym classes dated 24^th March 1992 the Supreme Administrative Court of Bremen stated that in deciding whether the pupil could be exempted it did not matter whether her religion discriminated against her as a woman.  Such scruples as whether Muslim girls were as a result of religious commandments (such as wearing the headscarf) being treated as full equals according to Western standards or whether such practices impinged on their equality as women within Western society were likewise deemed irrelevant.  In other words, in the Court’s learned estimation the equal rights to which Western girls and women are entitled cannot be demanded for Muslim women because their religion obstructs it.

Ateş is dumbfounded by the mind-boggling hypocrisy that informs such a verdict, which completely overlooks the fact that we live in a secular, pluralist society in which even Muslim schoolgirls can hardly escape noticing the “nudity” of others given that we are all bombarded with highly sexualised advertising images of naked women on the TV and in magazines.  The Court’s pronouncement smacks of ignorance and indifference, an easier way out than subjecting the (massive) social implications to careful scrutiny.  More perniciously, such reactions from the authorities make it possible for girls to be confined in an Islamic parallel society against their will.  Parents who want to keep their daughters away from all Western influences feel vindicated in their strivings by such a response.  Letting the girls off gym lessons is entirely at odds with the school’s educational brief, and it is incompatible with the right of the child to equal opportunities and to develop her full potential within mainstream society.  Efforts to promote religious and cultural diversity are taking place at the expense of women and girls when traditions that show contempt for human beings in general and women in particular are endorsed out of a misconceived notion of a multicultural society and when their irreconcilability with inalienable rights is ignored.

Turning to the Sharia (the primary sources of which are the Koran and the Sunna, as set out in the Hadith), Ateş is careful to dispel any misconceptions by reminding us that the “path to the watering hole” is not a coherent, monolithic, clearly delineated set of rules, containing as it does both legal and moral components.  The Sharia is not a conventional legal text in the sense that it has been codified, could be purchased in book form and used as a reference work.  Nor is there one single Sharia, with identical rules applicable throughout the Islamic world.  Instead there are five major legal schools, four Sunni and one Shiite and even within the schools themselves no general consensus exists amongst scholars as to how it should be interpreted beyond the fundamental matters of religious observance, which takes up its bulk.

The Sharia does provide regulations governing every aspect of life, encompassing civil and social law, which includes family and marital relations, criminal law, ethics and precise edicts on religious practice, such as praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan.  No area of human activity is omitted, which is why many of Islam’s critics feel that secularisation attempts are doomed to failure by definition.

Crucially, the Sharia does institutionalise inequality between men and women (equal worth in the sight of God not being quite the same thing, as evidenced by the Cairo Declaration of 5^th August 1990, which already in Article 1 diverges from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  It avers that all human beings form part of a single family, whose members are linked through subjugation to God and as descendants of Adam.  They are all equal in the sense of fundamental human dignity, rights and duties.  “True faith is the guarantee for the enjoyment of such dignity on the path towards human perfection”.  Article 24 leaves no doubt as to the source of authority, specifying that all of the rights and freedoms mentioned in the Declaration are subject to the Sharia.  In Article 6 women are accorded equal human dignity with men and we are told that they too have rights and duties.  They come under autonomous civil law and are financially independent as well as entitled to retain their own name and descent.  The husband must provide for his family and its welfare).  Family, inheritance and criminal law are the best sources for gauging the legal situation of women according to the Sharia.  Ateş believes that we are living through an Islamic Reformation of equal historical significance (and every bit as traumatic) to its Christian counterpart, the most striking difference being that so many of its leading figures and thinkers are women, both in Muslim countries and the West.

Many of the rules in the Sharia are misogynistic and for Ateş the real question is whether or not they can be changed.  Many of them appear so backward that they cannot be salvaged for use in a modern, liberal democracy, such as the lesser value attached to a woman’s testimony, the smaller portion of an inheritance granted her by virtue of her sex and the right of a man to physically chastise her, or polygamy.  Ateş is baffled as to how women’s rights campaigners in certain Muslim countries can sincerely believe that if only Islam were interpreted correctly the disadvantages accruing to women would vanish.

Equality can only be arrived at through a root and branch reform of Islam, which would require agreement being reached amongst Muslims that certain parts of the Koran have to be consigned to the past.  That the sacred texts are held to be direct revelations of the timeless and eternally valid will of God acts as a barrier to jettisoning practices which have been overtaken by social evolution.  In spite of ongoing exertions to bring laws up to date in countries such as Turkey, the tacit assumption is that women are inferior and subordinate to men.  One of the principles of Islamic law is that like must be treated as like and unlike as unlike.  When He created them, Allah gave men and women equal worth, but because of their differing natures assigned different tasks to them, from which follows that their rights and duties are not identical.  Furthermore, the fact that women possess fewer rights than men should not be seen as unjust as men are the breadwinners and protectors of their families and as such have a heavy burden incumbent on them.  Some Islamic scholars go so far as to contend that women are thereby given preferential treatment.

In the meantime, Europe can no longer avoid interrogating the issue of whether the Sharia and the rights it sanctions for men (and denies for women) is compatible with secular, enlightened principles of the rule of law and what the limits to religious freedom are.  Within German society (and the same is true elsewhere in Europe) there is a group of people who want to withdraw from the prevailing legal order altogether.  This would mean introducing the Sharia in matters pertaining to family and inheritance law for the Muslim community: “I am of the view that the Sharia, even in its most liberal interpretation, is not in harmony with our Constitution.  Because it represents a religious system of laws, which lays claim to regulating every area of the individual’s life and only recognises Allah as lawmaker.  Such a system of laws shuts itself off from any secularisation.  It should not become established in Germany and Europe through certain parts of it being permitted to apply to Muslim citizens.  For Islam too the line of secularisation must run through religion and politics.

If the Sharia were – even in part – to be introduced into Germany Muslims would obviously assess it as a sign of acceptance.  They would thereby be given official permission to bid farewell to the generally applicable system of laws and set up an Islamic parallel society with laws of its own.  This is in my opinion quite clearly the objective of those Muslims who are clamouring for the application of the Sharia in Germany and other democratic societies.

Given that in Islamic law Allah is understood to be the sole legislator, a principle is articulated that is incompatible with the central proposition of the rule of law, namely that laws are devised by human beings and may therefore be changed.  This is precisely the aspect stressed by many opponents and critics of Islam, who believe that Islam cannot be reformed.  If the people or its representatives cannot convince the legislator to the need for better and more appropriate laws that take account of contemporary realities because Allah as legislator is not available to mankind then the laws are inalterable and irrevocably fixed” (p159).

Ateş opens her chapter on sexuality in Islam with characteristic frankness: this is the area where women’s relative lack of privilege is most blatant.  Provided that women follow the rules drawn up exclusively by men they are accorded a right to exist, but this is a far cry from a life lived to the full since participation in social life is reserved for men.

In the Muslim world an extreme hostility to sexuality holds sway alongside a high degree of sexualisation with all the tensions this implies.  Double standards are rife.  All matters sexual are hedged about with shame and taboo and sexuality is repressed, combated and subject to controls whilst at the same time men satisfy desires that are not always compatible with religious commandments.  In this context, Ateş draws attention to the use of prostitutes as a proof of male potency and the hypocrisy of married men who lock their wives up at home allegedly to protect their decency and shield them from the predatory gaze of other males before heading off to the brothel.  Amongst orthodox Muslims men have the freedom to do whatever they like, they are entitled to take pleasure from sexual congress, whereas a woman’s role is to be available, arouse her husband and supply the clan with male heirs, enduring her reproductive burden without any cravings or enjoyment of her own.  That intercourse leaves the believer somehow dirty and impure is revealed by the injunction to wash immediately after the act (when the man is considered ritually unclean).  For Ateş, sexuality needs to be liberated from the influence of religion, which would benefit both men and women alike.

She goes on to tackle the obsession with virginity bordering on the manic that ruins the lives of young women (touching upon sensitive issues such as the frequency of recourse to anal sex in order to preserve chastity and the rising demand for hymen reconstruction operations prior to marriage), segregation of the sexes, male sexuality as portrayed by the sacred texts, polygamy, “temporary marriages” (outlawed in certain Muslim countries as a form of prostitution, the duration of which can vary from an hour to several years, and which can offer a means of gaining sexual experience before marriage and an opportunity for single and divorced women to engage in legitimate sexual contact), attitudes towards homosexuality, sexual abuse of children and the image of women as potential whores and seductresses.  On that latter question, Ateş does not gloss over the fact that inculcated sexism spills over the community divide: “German [woman] teachers and many German women in general are confronted again and again with the sexist image of women harboured by Muslim youths and men.  And this sexism differs from that of native German men in that it is accompanied by a certain racism.  When challenged about their brusque treatment of native German women most of these youths and men reply: ‘They are only Germans, after all.  They are all whores in any case’.

I get the impression that the causes of the contempt evinced towards Western women by Muslim youths and men in the form of sexual insults and terms of abuse have not yet been given an appropriate airing within the integration debate.  We do talk about the insults experienced by women in part, but we do not speak openly about the origin of the contempt of the free Western way of life.

Offence given to Muslims, such as in the caricature dispute, for example, and the insults meted out to Muslim women who are looked at with suspicion and disapproved of because of their headscarves are dealt with frequently, however.  The insults and offence given to German women, secularists and atheists by contrast are discreetly passed over and we speak even less about the religious and cultural-specific dimensions of this contempt.  I am even repeatedly accused of going so far as to ethnicise sexism.  You do have to ask yourself, however, why you hear phrases in Turkish or German such as ‘I’ll fuck your mother’s cunt’ spoken on the Metro or in the playgrounds by Turkish boys who are often not older than about six, whereas you at most overhear the like from German children when they have become integrated in their neighbourhoods into the community of Turkish, Kurdish or Arab children.  I believe that quite a few people make life easier for themselves in the course of the integration debate when they put the blame exclusively on the social problems of these children and youths and fail to take account of their religious and cultural character.  Only an open and honest discussion unimpeded by false taboos and mental blocks can lead to a dialogue from which solutions can emerge” (pp188-9).

The freedom to practice one’s religion is a fundamental right in Europe and guaranteed by the German Constitution.  What is understood by such freedom, however, is one thing in the Western, Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment tradition and quite another in the Islamic world.  Whereas for the former, tolerance, sensitivity and respect for other faiths take centre stage, in Muslim societies pushing for absolute precedence to be given to one’s own religion is the norm.  Ateş describes this as absolutism and sees in it a defining trait of Islam rather than simply the reflex of a minority subsumed, but not integrated, within a wider society.  She roundly rejects accusations from certain Islamic associations of growing Islamophobia in Germany.  On the contrary, Islam is benefiting from uncritical preferential treatment compared with other religions, with the state responding to the problems of parallel societies and lack of integration by enhancing the faith’s institutional status (although, as she immediately comments, it is surely well nigh impossible to institutionalise a religion that itself knows no institutions).  Political parties and churches have created posts for Islamic affairs specialists, lessons on Islam are in the process of being built into the school curriculum, the German public service broadcaster ZDF has created an Internet portal that showcases a different Muslim every Friday and there have been calls to set aside one or more important dates in the Muslim calendar as public holidays nationally.  Ateş asks the pertinent question as to why the idea of Jewish public holidays has never been mooted, or even a day on which the nation could contemplate the immense sufferings visited upon the Jews by the Nazi regime, discerning in the special treatment granted to Islam a capitulation to the fundamentalists, an appeasement in the face of terror threats.

Worryingly, this preferential treatment is being carried over to the realm of jurisprudence where even the most abstruse interpretations of the Koran are accepted.  Ateş makes reference to a case which gained notoriety in spring of last year when a plaintiff of North African origin petitioned for an early divorce on grounds that she was being battered by her husband.  She had already been given sole right of occupancy of the marital home and a restraining order had been issued against her abusive spouse.  Her application for an accelerated divorce was turned down by the woman judge, however, who quoted the husband’s right of physical chastisement according to the Koran and added that any woman who entered into matrimony with a Muslim man must be aware of what she was letting herself in for.  Identical rights and laws should appertain to all, irrespective of religious affiliation: “I can discern a dangerous development in Germany whereby, under the guise of freedom of religion and worship, Islamic law and, with it, an authoritarian, archaic-patriarchal parallel society is being established with the seal of approval as it were of the courts, which is diametrically opposed to the modern, enlightened principles of the rule of law and will erode the latter step by step.

State neutrality towards religions should not be allowed to go so far as to accept breaches of fundamental and human rights in the name of freedom of religion and worship.  Every religion should be subject to an audit to determine the extent to which it upholds the Constitution.  Clear limits should be placed on the freedom to practice and spread one’s faith where they impinge on fundamental rights.

Native Germans cannot simply turn round and say that forced marriages, honour killings, violence against women and girls, exemption from lessons at school or even the slaughter of animals are just Islamic customs and traditions, which are none of their business.  Because these traditions and customs are being practiced in German society and the people who practice them and those who suffer from them are for the most part German citizens.  The in many ways misconceived tolerance of German society promotes and bolsters in an extreme manner the parallel societies that already exist as well as encouraging the stream of adherents into fundamentalist faith communities” (pp202-3).

We feminists have precious little to congratulate ourselves on: “It may well be the case that native German men do not necessarily have to develop a great interest in the sexual liberation of Muslim women.  What about the native German feminists, who, for example, see in the headscarf a symbol of emancipation, regard most forced marriages as arranged marriages and are every bit as reluctant as their fellow male multiculturalists to take note of the oppressed sexuality of women in Islam?  What kind of barrier exists in the minds of these women, who are able to criticise the Catholic church again and again for its inimical attitude towards sexuality and women only to defend Islam in the same breath?  What about sexual self-determination, which they fought for so bitterly?  Does it really only apply to sexually liberated Christian women?  Is it not misogynistic to the umpteenth degree to put up with the oppression of women on the pretext of freedom of religion?” (pp189-90).

Phyllis Chesler also exhorts us to reexamine our attitudes: “In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal, but formerly colonised cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people: Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and Hindus, to the forces of reactionary Islamism.

Because feminist academies are now so heavily influenced by left ways of thinking, many now believe that speaking out against headscarves, face veils, the chador, arranged and child marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female genital mutilation is either ‘imperialist’ or ‘crusade-ist’” (op. cit., p2).

And: “I did not foresee the extent to which feminists – who, philosophically, are universalists and therefore interventionists – would, paradoxically, become both multiculturalists and isolationists.  Such cultural relativism (in the presumed service of antiracism) is perhaps the greatest failing of the feminist establishment” (op. cit., pp2-3).

Apathy does not become us: “Islamic terrorism is threatening to destroy what feminists and other forces for democracy have accomplished thus far.  But even as Western feminists decry sexist oppression everywhere (and they do, they do), their own doctrine of multicultural relativism allows them to have one standard for western women and another, much lower, standard for women who live under Islam.  In my view, such multicultural relativism is an ingeniously disguised form of racism and sexism.  The presumed compassion involved in viewing the veil as a free choice or polygamy as a colourful cultural custom is, I believe, tragically misguided and a betrayal of feminist principles” (Chesler, op. cit., p36).

Ateş’ invaluable contribution to the debate should function as both clarion call and admonition.  No longer should we turn a blind eye to the injustices being committed in our midst.

All translations copyright © The Chameleon, 2007

[According to Jonathan’s template]

The back-lit dial of the church tower clock glows blearily through the early morning mist and the neighbours’ dogs bark at every snow-muffled footstep inaudible to their owners, bayed warnings reaching a crescendo of fury as the post van labours up the slope. The motion sensors blink orange, registering my progress across the room to the kitchen for my second mug of the morning.

Perhaps our answers would all be the same, headline-inspired remedies for famine, climate change and war. Injustice as palpably obvious as the solutions remain elusive to politicians for whom any residue of compassion is summoned only to be strategically deployed when prompted by the polls. Their lip-service holds no greater meaning (and is, I suspect, less sincere) than that of the simpering beauty queen, in anticipation of her crown, who reels off how she would right the world’s wrongs, whilst the audience politely applauds: she is a good girl, in spite of her perfect proportions and artificially whitened teeth, her primped locks she cares, look at the tears smudging her mascara. She stands there in all her bathing-suited glory, measured up by their gaze, her skin unblemished, her limbs graceful, her awkwardness charmingly virginal, the symbol of unsullied youth, of hope, of feminine virtue (mouthing parroted platitudes whilst immaculately groomed), poised to accept victory graciously and modestly, to be paraded, to cut shopping mall ribbons, to sink into regret once the camera flashes have ceased blinding her. Of course she will never wield power beyond the transitory ability to incite envy and manipulate desire.

Perhaps ambition should be whittled down to the achievable in an effort to preserve substance rather than mimic those ritualistic pronouncements our professional declaimers indulge in to salve the collective conscience. Realism or capitulation? The abandonment of ideals?

1. A change in attitudes towards rape in the spirit of the proposed reforms. At present, when the case is pared down to his word against hers, the myths permeating our culture too often mean that he is given the benefit of the doubt. He may have been emboldened by groping dozens of little girls with impunity, or have learned that the threat of retribution alone can suffice to silence, wielding his target’s shame against her as she torments herself with her naivety, agonises over her foolishness at wearing a skimpy dress or how her polite refusal could have been read as a come-on. The jury will learn nothing of his past predatory behaviour even where accusations have been officially recorded. Instead the victim herself will be placed under relentless scrutiny in the courtroom, her credibility on trial, every flicker of emotion (or absence of such) (mis-)interpreted. Better to be reminded of the wide range of coping mechanisms and responses to trauma by an expert than for a woman to be disbelieved because of a lack of bruises that would “prove” she had put up a fight. To be assaulted by the man closest to you, the most likely scenario, involves a betrayal of such magnitude that physical incapacitation might match her emotional numbness; in order to survive she might endure his viciousness with deadly calm rather than risk further injury by screaming or flailing around.

As for the issue of alcohol and consent, two incidents stick in my mind. A weekend break in a four-star hotel in the capital including a visit to my favourite Thai restaurant. Even a double portion of the dessert (banana cooked in coconut milk and sprinkled with sesame seeds) failed to lessen the effects of two (shared) bottles of Pinotage and I plunged into a deep slumber as soon as my head touched the pillow. The next morning my then addiction informed me with relish that, whilst dead to my surroundings, he could have done anything he wanted, the giddy sense of absolute power (thankfully) sufficing for him. As our relationship gradually deteriorated this laudable restraint evaporated.

In the bar after the night shift in exile, colleagues eager to wind down and blunt the adrenalin’s edge with the establishment’s array of flavoured vodkas. Her self-destructive streak manifested itself in excessive alcohol consumption. This was common knowledge amongst us and we protected her from the inevitable reprisals by concealing her occasional lateness. He was mercilessly plying her with drinks in a blatant effort to bludgeon her into oblivion at one remove, to step in gallantly and offer to accompany her back to her room. He knew that I was fully aware of his intentions and he challenged me to stop him with a supercilious sneer. Half slumped over the beer mats, she raised her head in slow motion at the sound of my voice, her eyes strangely distant even as she recognised me. Before he guided her away with a possessive arm around her shoulder she kissed me on the lips. Whence the pleasure of such non-intimacy might be derived escapes me. She would have shown all the responsiveness of a corpse before rigor had fully set in. What also strikes me is the vehemence with which those not otherwise vociferous in their espousal of women’s rights object to the idea that a woman might not be in a fit state to give her consent after a dozen vodka chasers which he so graciously purchased in exchange for her sexual favours (unstated assumption on his part). All of a sudden women attain the adult status they are customarily denied by those who claim we should not worry our pretty little heads about anything but functioning as brood mares. Is it because sweeping away her “inhibitions” on a tide of Bacardi Breezers is too common a “seduction” technique? Might it be that he fears the kind of appraisal he routinely carries out whenever a woman walks by? That sobriety’s cold assessment might find him wanting? That she might actually have the temerity to spurn his advances if not half cut?

2. I would like feminism’s emancipatory agenda to be taken more seriously, for the tired cliché of the dungaree-wearing, bra-eschewing, man-despising termagant to be finally laid to rest. This is probably too much to ask for, given that the mainstream media find feminists too convenient a scapegoat for all of the alleged ills poisoning relations between men and women, for all of society’s woes. According to our detractors we want to purge all the fun out of life, classify harmless flirting as sexual harassment and so on. Portraying us all as ugly, strident, humourless nuisances hardly constitutes a serious engagement with our arguments, denies us any semblance of individuality and is, quite frankly, insulting (notice how the derogatory imagery deployed to persuade us to fall into line implicitly denigrates all conduct not centred directly on pleasing men, it is our appearance that counts, or rather is discounted because convention dictates that we constantly monitor how we present ourselves to – at the very least – avoid offending the male gaze). Not that I personally wear skirts as a general rule, only ever sensible shoes and the sole occasion on which I have worn make-up in the last two decades was on my wedding day. And yes, when I am slobbing around at home, I don’t generally bother to dress, let alone put on a bra. And, given that I am a (UK) size 22, I definitely do not conform to the ideals of slender beauty peddled by magazines.

Primitive though it is, the playground bully-style rhetoric alluded to above has proven remarkably resilient as well as effective, playing as it does on anxieties arising from our socialisation (oriented towards satisfying the demands of the male once again). If any doubt still lingers in your mind, just think of how many women are desperate to shake off the merest suspicion of sympathy for the sisterhood, prefacing their (often staunchly feminist) opinions with: “Well, I’m not a feminist, but…”

Biological difference should never be proffered to justify inferior social status or to deprive of opportunity. The oldest excuse for the subordination of women has been our role in reproduction. Until we have full control over our bodies we will not enjoy full autonomy. This means not being prevented by doctors, political or religious authorities from having abortions performed at any stage. It is arrant nonsense to claim that women take the decision to terminate lightly or frivolously, particularly given the massive cultural pressure for women to bear children (we are still said to be “incomplete” without offspring) and the immense burden of disapproval (stigma) surrounding abortion. Pretending otherwise is sheer hypocrisy. If the pregnancy results from unprotected sex then surely this should lead us to address why young girls do not feel empowered enough to insist on a condom in spite of his (selfishly motivated) pleas to the contrary rather than punishing them for the after-effects. Yes, ultimately, he could employ force, penetrate without a sheath and she could probably do little to stop him. Yes, we women are not exactly equipped culturally to turn him down. The embarrassment factor that leaves the inexperienced tongue-tied and unsure of themselves can only be tackled by eliminating the behind-the-bikesheds snigger element from sex education.

That we have not yet won the battle for full self-determination is illustrated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently winding its way through Parliament. Even though it is not specifically focused on abortion, those who would seek to restrict our access to it wish to use it to lower the limit from 24 to 20 or even 13 weeks and to introduce a “cooling off period” as well as compulsory counselling for all women considering the step. Instead of focusing on instilling a greater sense of responsibility in men when it comes to contraception the self-appointed moral guardians prefer punishing women for their “promiscuity” to causing the slightest inconvenience or loss of sensitivity to Him. They give precedence to the unformed and still only putatively human embryo, not yet in-corporat-ed (either literally or metaphorically) into society, over one of its productive members. Women will continue to have abortions regardless of the law, whether the would-be womb-policers like it or not. We already know that all such legislation will achieve will be a higher death toll from unsanitary back-street terminations, maimed girls and greater human misery. Instead what we should be doing is passing laws to ensure that doctors who refuse to perform abortions on moral or religious grounds are struck off or as a bare minimum obliged to refer their patient to a colleague not beset by such qualms without judgemental comment or delay.

3. I would dearly love the Left to confront the consequences of multiculturalism rather than abdicating responsibility wholesale and immediately branding anyone who points to possible detrimental effects as racists, which only serves to stifle debate (and fuel legitimate resentment amongst those who do not subscribe to the prevailing orthodoxy). I wholeheartedly agree with Susan Moller Okin, Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli about the dangers of parallel societies and the immeasurable damage done to women in the name of cultural difference. Where the subordination and oppression of half of humanity is cold-bloodedly promulgated by decree tolerance must surely reach its limits. One (secular) law should apply to all citizens without exception. Making standards of protection contingent upon ethnic group membership institutionalises racism as opposed to eradicating it, condemning women to second-class status without appeal.

4. The scriptures of the monotheistic religions are certainly inimical to equality between the sexes. God has spoken and His word cannot be contradicted. I can still recall the most from my Christian fundamentalist days the most generous slant on the creation myth. Eve was fashioned from Adam’s rib. Not from his head that she might rule over him, nor from his feet that he might trample on her, but from his side that she might be his companion and from close to his heart that he might cherish her. Today’s Church may well have strayed far from the rampant misogyny of passages labelling us as whited sepulchres and relegating us purely to the domestic sphere as the incubators of future male leaders, to the extent that in certain denominations the ordination of women is permitted. Perhaps my antipathy towards any and all religion is merely an extreme reaction to the corrosive and detrimental impact of obedience to a highly literal reading of the Bible during my formative years. Nevertheless I stand by my assertion that feminism and religious faith are incompatible. Jesus may have taught that all are of equal worth in the eyes of His Father, but historically the Church has blithely ignored His gospel. Religious belief has become the last refuge of those who actively seek to promote and practice open discrimination on grounds of gender and sexual preference, the only argument that can avert the ubiquitous charges of racism or be wielded to silence opponents. Faith, after all, defies reason.

In certain instances religion can be a force for good, providing comfort in the face of imminent death, easing the pain of utter futility. The prospect of the nothingness that follows once the electrical impulses of our brains have been extinguished can be terrifying and our societies are founded on suppressing the knowledge of our mortality. The hardest part of my Mother’s passing was the absolute certainty that I would never see her again, never hear her voice, never communicate with her, never be reunited in a happier hereafter.

What about some of the other objections to jettisoning a prop which humanity ought to have outgrown? How many atheists run soup kitchens? (Is it true altruism that hopes for heavenly reward, however?) Look at all the achievements religion has inspired in the realms of art, literature and architecture. True enough, but the harm done by religion far outweighs the good. At best its fantasy of a compensatory afterlife fosters complacency. Rather than tackling the injustices of the here and now tradition is revered and the flock is exhorted to meek observance of the laws rather than challenging them. Heaven is a distraction that saps reforming energies, notions of righteousness and sin promote callousness and paralysing indifference (the poor deserve the penury they wallow in). I would like to see the influence of religion diminish, unlikely though that may be in the present climate.

5. I would also like to see university tuition fees abolished and the return of the grants system in the interests of restoring enhanced social mobility. With my working-class background I would never as a teenager have entertained the idea of higher education had it been linked to the millstone of long-term debt.

By instinct, yet also on the basis of my experience, I believe that the state has a duty to intervene to create opportunity for less privileged citizens. This is far too interventionist for many and is where I part company with Liberals (ironically on a policy issue where we are in complete accord). The traditional liberal concept of equality is gender blind with the male as the taken-for-granted default and is completely divorced from cultural reality. It dismisses the feminist perspective that the mere fact of being born female in itself entails culturally sanctioned disadvantage (“career woman” still carries negative connotations to take but the simplest example). If we only apply ourselves with sufficient diligence our upward climb will be assured. As the doctrine accords us all equal worth as human beings we are all assumed to enjoy equal entitlement and equal opportunities. History demonstrates however that this is palpably false. We do not live in a classless society for a start.

It is also important to recognise that even an omnipotent state cannot remove all traces of inequality and here my views once again converge with a more liberal stance: state interference should be restricted to the minimum necessary to attain the objective of as much equality as can reasonably be expected. One man’s connections might be deemed as having greater value than another (wo)man’s qualifications no matter how much legislation is adopted. It would be disingenuous to maintain that there is no pecking order amongst universities or that such snobbery is not deeply entrenched. This brings us on to the trickier matters, such as whether there is much point awarding (and here I am being quite consciously polemical and sexist) Tracey from Scunthorpe a degree in hairdressing from Redbrick Uni (formerly Redbrick Polytechnic) to meet a target of half of the population being in possession of a diploma when her particular certificate is not worth the paper it is printed on compared with Russell’s double-first in classics and mathematics (quite apart from the fact that she is highly unlikely to delude herself that it would help her land a job in the BBC beyond in the make-up department, whereas he might easily end up fronting a late-evening news programme grilling politicians because that nice chap he went out drinking with in his undergraduate days recommended him).

6. If I were obscenely rich, enough to be able to dedicate my days to writing rather than subject myself to the frustrations of remunerated employment (and once I had spent several months playing online), after setting up multiple bursaries for the talented yet less well-to-do at the secondary school and universities I have attended I would commission various works. This would include more than one film. Success across genres has proven elusive especially for those directors who have looked to computer games as a source text as opposed to literature. They may look glossy and be loaded with state-of-the-art effects, yet ultimately remain hollow with their superficial characterisations and almost total absence of plot. StarCraft, with its unusual depth of storyline, its epic sweep, the tragedy and intrigues might well survive the transition if sensitively handled. I would be willing to put up the money for a try. And if, say, an artist of the calibre of Ridley Scott (the game does owe a debt to Alien after all) were willing. And whilst I was at it, I would probably fund a struggling composer to write a Protoss symphony too.

7. Having been jolted out of contemplation mode by one a moment ago, I would certainly ban all junk/cold calls soliciting money. The fixed line has only been installed for a few days, yet my ears have just been assailed by a recording of a 10-year-old (very clever – it is infinitely harder to hang up on an innocent child than a double glazing salesman) tugging on the heartstrings to elicit donations for a hospital. If you wish to increase the number of operations next year, please press one…In the particular hell that awaits me, I will doubtless be riddled with gangrene and tumours with no surgeons available to offer me relief.

8. So many stray thoughts, so little scope…if only Labour would shed its recently acquired Thatcherist and authoritarian impulses; if only a truly viable alternative to Labour and Tory would emerge (one that enough people would actually vote for – I am not taking a gratuitous swipe at the Liberals, the Greens or even the SNP here); if only government would cease patronising the electorate and curb its desire to keep us all under constant surveillance, preaching to us about our lifestyles whilst merrily disregarding its own recommendations (I do reside in a country that has been without a national government for several months now and if the papers and TV channels did not harp on endlessly about an unprecedented constitutional crisis you would never notice). If only, if only…

I would like to tag Natalie, Gordon, Richard, Tumbleweed and Invader Stu.

 

["This is where Gyurcsány belongs"]

[A response to Oliver Kamm's ill-informed denunciation of political bloggers]

I find Mr Kamm’s argumentation somewhat myopic and mean-spirited. It has become fashionable for mainstream journalists (or those who aspire to the category) to snipe at bloggers, accusing us of various shortcomings, from narcissism (when such output is made available in the traditional medium of the printed volume, it is referred to as “autobiography”), to a lack of originality, or, as Mr Kamm phrases it, being “purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide”.

The latter contention betrays a rather unsavoury elitism as well as blithely ignoring the constraints within which bloggers operate (more of which in a moment).

I suspect that, these days, very few individuals purchase newspapers for their actual news content, which is more quickly and readily available on television and the internet. Newspapers cannot compete in terms of instantaneousness (admittedly, many subscribe to online editions, but these generally have the same format as the printed versions and therefore are a day late in comparison with, say, the BBC. This implies that many buy papers for their comment (and analysis) content (and, as time is a finite resource, in all likelihood buy the organ – deliberate singular – most likely to reflect their own sympathies, in other words, “the conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected”, the very source of their appeal and motivation for parting with cash).

The authors of comment pieces/regular columns in the most venerable papers possess a certain authority, cultural capital, if you will. They function as “manufacturers of public opinion”. Hardly surprising that they attract the attention of the “great unwashed” of the blogosphere, since by definition they are claiming superior insight, whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not. Taking them on and exposing the flaws in their writings or simply demolishing their views could be considered a rite of passage.

What rankles, I imagine, is that the bloggers are often devastatingly accurate in their criticisms without necessarily having received any formal training in the art of commercial journalism. Nobody is infallible and it cannot be pleasant to be reminded publicly of one’s shortcomings, but peer review or the sanctification of print does not automatically imply that your output is of inherently higher quality. It would be disingenuous and plain dishonest to maintain otherwise. Bloggers do not appreciate pomposity or being patronised.

In a blatant manifestation of snobbery, Mr Kamm lumps together all bloggers, as if we were a homogenous bunch of semi-articulate whingers, whereas many of us are more highly academically qualified than the targets of our ire. We simply didn’t go down the journalism route. Is that any reason to stifle debate? More pertinently, is that any reason for us to stifle our derision where it is obviously merited? Our creativity is irrepressible and refuses to be beaten down or belittled by individuals whose sense of entitlement derives from institutional recognition alone.

To conclude, a word on constraints. Far too many bloggers have been sacked for their online activity (to the extent that a new verb has been invented to encompass the phenomenon, “to dooce”). Anonymity is fragile, perhaps too much so for many to venture into the fray. I, for one, engage in self-censorship, voluntary muzzling myself, in order to protect my capacity to earn (without which I could not blog).

Compared with journalists, bloggers suffer both a recognition (as opposed to credibility) and a resources deficit, the second of which is by far the more pernicious. We are limited by income (which, with the exception of a happy few, does not come from writing, although to say so does not obliquely vindicate Mr Kamm: popularity is an elusive and capricious good and, to invoke the analogy of the best-seller, is, in itself no mark of calibre) and the amount of time left over from the day job which we can devote to our pursuit.

True, journalists had to serve an extended apprenticeship with long stints of unremunerated labour (which acts as a barrier to all but those with sufficient means to sustain themselves until success beckons, actual talent not being a factor, a sad state of affairs that even the newspapers recognised and indeed lamented in a flurry of breast-beating articles about the chronic lack of social mobility in today’s Britain in June 2006), but, once embraced into the professional ranks, they can invoke the prestige of the publication with which they are affiliated and bask in the satisfaction of its almost magical, door-opening properties. Once they have gained a certain standing, even prominent figures think twice about refusing an interview.

The real difference between bloggers and the newspaper commentariat is that, to modify Mr Kamm’s definition, the latter constitute “a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands and are rewarded (financially and with status) for their musings”.

[Some other responses to Kamm:

Tim Worstall

Mr Eugenides

Reactionary Snob

Pommygranate]

In these days of voter apathy and eroded social solidarity, politicians seem to believe that the last vestiges of their beleaguered credibility rely on preaching the gospel of cost-cutting (which is one of the reasons why reports on their expenses, voted through pay rises and more than generous pension entitlements never fail to make them squirm). Tellingly, the vocabulary they employ draws on the imagery of dieting: slim or trim down, removing flab, becoming lean and mean. More and more the value of human life is portrayed as depending on whether the individual in question contributes to or constitutes a drain on collective resources (by which I am referring primarily to the health care systems, since the physical survival of every last one of us, fat or thin, inevitably relies on consumption). We have drifted into the era of the bean-counter where “rationalisation” and “efficiency” rule and there is no room for compassion, for ordinary frailty, for variety of experience, where the elite playfully cast off the constraints of convention leaving the rest of us trapped within boundaries more hopelessly than before, where mobility is held up as the greatest good, masking the depressing fact that fewer and fewer are able to benefit from it.

It is no coincidence that euthanasia and denial of treatment to prematurely born children have become the latest hot topics on the liberal agenda. After all, killing off the terminally ill or ultra-dependent at either end of the life course would save enough to warm the cockles of any accountant’s heart. Dominic Lawson (The Independent, 14^th November 2006) eloquently cautions us about the dangers of being seduced by budget-pruning rhetoric dressed up as the epitome of disinterested rationality in Doctors, disabled children and euthanasia: “There seems to be a great confusion about what constitutes ‘a very ill child’. Many of the conditions which are frequently spoken of as illnesses are nothing of the sort. A person born with a severe physical handicap is not physically sick. A person with a mental handicap does not have a mental illness. In neither case is there anything to be cured.

A baby born with Down’s syndrome is not ‘suffering’ from anything. Accordingly, it could never correctly be described as a compassionate act to do anything to bring about the end of such a life. At the risk of sounding harsh, I think it is necessary to state clearly that those who wish to make it easier to destroy such lives are not thinking about the interests of the child: they are thinking about the interests of the parents.

The more interesting question is: how clearly are parents in such a situation able to assess their own future? As I know myself, when you are told that your newborn child has some kind of genetic abnormality, you are in no condition to make any sort of decision, still less one involving life and death. Most prospective parents have a horror of having a child with Down’s syndrome: but there are few, who, having had such a child, are not fiercely protective and loving”.

The anti-democratic rot has already set in when it comes to health care, however. Smokers struggling for their every breath are greeted with a shrug of indifference and a smug “Well, we did warn you and yet you kept on lighting up with your filthy yellow-stained fingers forty times a day”. Do not delude yourself: after the nicotine-puffers and alcohol-swiggers we are next in line to be sent packing on the grounds that our woes were self-inflicted. Your passion and vibrancy, your fury and creativity count for nothing. You are a statistic (an abstraction as worthy of pity as the random passers-by Harry Lime sneers at from his vantage point on the Riesenrad in The Third Man, as opposed to a real individual in flesh and blood glory, complete with foibles, blemishes and all), a burden, a nuisance, a throwback, a roly-poly degenerate, an uncomfortable reminder of the propensity of the human body to lay down reserves for times of hardship in the midst of unprecedented abundance.

We are already subject to a sustained attack in the realm of non-essential therapy. Maxine Frith reveals that beyond the much-publicised waiting lists for hip operations, rationing is the order of the day (The Independent, 9th October 2006), in Almost all NHS trusts fail on IVF pledge: “The financial crisis in the health service means that many trusts are cutting back even further on IVF provision, denying thousands of couples the chance of a family and resulting in a postcode lottery of care.

At least four PCTs have suspended all fertility treatment provision in the past six months, while others have cut back on the number of cycles and many have introduced restrictive criteria that make more couples ineligible.

Some trusts now have waiting lists of five years for treatment, by which time the success rates for many women will have plummeted because of their age”.

Decisions are taken on the basis of how neatly the recipient fits into a pattern of social “desirability”: “The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) ruled in 2004 that all PCTs should offer three cycles of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to couples [note that the author does not specify whether these are nuclear-families-in-waiting – we are invited to fill in the gap, however, and assume that they are].

Nice set a small number of eligibility criteria, including that women should be between 23 and 39, and couples should have either a proven fertility problem or have been trying to conceive for three years”.

The gulf between the Government’s vision of what should be on offer and the reality yawns wide: “Four trusts have suspended treatment since May because of budget cutbacks and new patients in their areas cannot be referred for or receive treatment (…)

Two thirds of trusts – 68 per cent – offer just one IVF cycle per couple and 17 per cent provide funds for two cycles. Just six PCTs offer three cycles, but these trusts also have some of the longest waiting times for new patients. Only three of the trusts not yet providing three cycles said they had plans to reach the standard, and two of those did not intend to achieve it before 2010”.

Returning to the standardised eligibility criteria for a moment, who is likely to fall into the category of having “a proven fertility problem”? According to a piece in the Daily Mail (4th September 2006, unattributed), Fat men ‘are 10% less fertile’: “Men’s fertility is ‘significantly reduced’ if they are overweight, research revealed yesterday.

Carrying just an extra stone and a half can cut the chances of being able to father a child by 10 per cent, scientists found.

And being obese halves the odds, according to a study of 1,468 couples in Iowa and North Carolina published in the journal Epidemiology.

Last week it was suggested that obese women should be denied IVF treatment because they have less chance of conceiving. But these findings reveal that men’s fertility is also affected by extra weight – which it is thought affects sperm quality and causes hormone problems.

Adjusting the figures for other factors, such as smoking and alcohol consumption, the scientists concluded that ‘the men’s Body Mass Index was an independent risk factor for infertility’”.

Julie Wheldon (Daily Mail, 6^th October 2006) picked up on the theme in Obesity could be the biggest threat to female fertility: “Obesity in women is threatening to cause a fertility crisis, doctors warned yesterday.

More than half of women attending fertility clinics are overweight but often unaware of the damage it is doing to their reproductive health, said experts.

With obesity rates forecast to rise to 70 per cent within a decade, doctors warned that the problem is a greater threat to fertility than the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia or conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome.

Not only are severely overweight women more likely to struggle to conceive, they are more prone to complications in pregnancy and having babies with birth defects.

Professor Adam Balen of the Leeds Reproductive Medicine Unit said typically more than 50 per cent of women attending UK fertility clinics are overweight.

By comparison around one in three are there because of damage to their fallopian tubes – often triggered by chlamydia.

‘The overall percentage of women who attend infertility clinics with obesity is certainly greater than the number who have tubal damage due to chlamydia,’ he said.

‘The issue of obesity is of major significance to infertility clinics’.

More than half of all women are classed as overweight, a figure which experts say could rise to 70 per cent within ten years. Obesity levels are also soaring among the young, with 27 per cent of girls and 22 per cent of boys overweight.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is so worried about obesity it has devoted a special issue of its journal BJOG [British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology] to the problem.

Editor Philip Steer, of Imperial College London, said many women and even doctors do not fully understand the impact of weight on reproductive health.

‘Maternal obesity needs to be recognised as a serious and growing health problem,’ he added.

The journal revealed how obesity increases the severity of polycystic ovary syndrome, which can make it hard for a woman to conceive.

Obese women who do conceive are more likely to have pre-eclampsia, suffer a miscarriage or require a caesarean than those of normal weight.

In addition their babies face a greater risk of birth defects and having obesity problems themselves as they grow.

The RCOG said yesterday it is convening an expert group to discuss how best to manage the problem.

Professor Balen, who edited the special edition and is also part of the expert group, said: ‘We need to be tackling the problems of obesity in childhood in order to reverse the trend that is leading to increasing rates of infertility and health risks in pregnancy to both mother and baby’.

This summer the British fertility Society was heavily criticised for suggesting that obese women should not receive IVF treatment on the NHS.

It said they should not be granted funding unless they have made efforts to lose weight.

The society also advised that women classed as severely obese should not get funding at all until they have reduced their weight.

Critics claimed this was ‘unjustified discrimination’.

Last week, a study suggested that women who fail to shed even a little weight gained in pregnancy face a higher risk of birth complications with their next baby”.

In other words, it is precisely the least fertile segment of the population that faces the prospect of being turned away (ostensibly) on grounds of a reduced likelihood of success. If we were considered to have any intrinsic worth this would not be allowed to happen. Instead, our feelings and aspirations are casually and callously brushed aside in a calculation that is entirely blind to the wish to lavish love on a wanted child. The medical establishment has done its level best to undermine our self-confidence, to browbeat us into conformity with the slenderness ideal with its ever-lengthening list of fat-related complaints and conditions (which most of us can recite effortlessly, having been reminded of them by a Greek chorus of friends and relatives, exasperation quivering in their voices as they bewail our impending doom in the guise of caring as well as by the media and the diet vultures circling relentlessly above). Our presumed ignorance and bloody-mindedness have kept us from shedding the pounds. Ostracism and ridicule have not eradicated us. Now the social deviance (literally) embodied in fatness is being classified as a genetic defect.

Consider the following report by Jonathan Thompson and Renee Knight (The Independent on Sunday, 5^th November 2006), Eggs for sale, The booming business of sharing your fertility: “Victoria describes herself as ‘fun loving, generous and considerate’. The 29-year-old blonde is ‘naturally slim with good bone structure’, and an accomplished ballet dancer.

Danielle, 26, has wavy chestnut-coloured hair and blue eyes. A teacher by profession, she is ‘tall, athletic and outgoing’, and also a part-time model.

These are not adverts on internet dating sites. Victoria and Danielle are just two of a rapidly growing number of young British women rushing to cash in on the latest way to make money: the egg donation business.

The sale of eggs is illegal in this country, but in America, the industry is worth an estimated $4.5bn (£2.4bn). Donors with the right physical, personal and intellectual attributes can attract fees of up to $35,000 for their eggs, with some in the industry claiming that as much as $50,000 has changed hands. Prices are rising, too: in New York, average eggs are fetching $8,000. About 15 years ago, the comparable figure was closer to $1,000”.

What I find offensive here is not the sale of ova, but the stress on appearance with the implicit suggestion that intelligence and creativity are still unimportant attributes for a woman (presumably residing exclusively in the thrashing-tailed sperm) and, more particularly, that slimness is the would-be donors’ greatest asset, their strongest selling point.

Of course, unadulterated snobbery is also a factor. We can’t have the lower orders turning their much-reviled fecundity to pecuniary advantage, now, can we?: “‘In Britain, we have a culture of altruistic donation,’ said John Paul Maytum, a spokesman for the HFEA [Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority]. ‘There is always a concern when you start paying large amounts of money for eggs, because it will change people’s motives for wanting to donate. If payment is attracting people desperate for money, it also raises questions about the quality of the eggs’” [according to this stunningly elitist logic the inferiority of the poor sullies their very genes, any well-meaning initiatives to improve their wretched lot are a complete waste of time and effort as fecklessness, indolence and underachievement are transmitted from one generation of wasters to the next; no talent can ever reside in such tainted matter, there is no point in wasting opportunity on scum, their plight is deserved, their natural inheritance].

The short insert demonstrated most clearly just how unwanted we are (along the lines of no one in their right minds would want a fat child, especially not if they are shelling out good money for a designer baby), We need to check your weight first: “Eggdonor.com is one of a number of US websites advertising eggs for sale to infertile couples, including eggs from British women. Prices can reach up to $35,000 for donors with desirable physical characteristics, good medical histories and proven academic records. Prospective buyers are shown recent pictures of the donors, as well as images of them as babies and adolescents. They also analyse everything from their height and weight to details of their grandparents”.

I am no peddler of simplistic conspiracy theories to the effect that the accumulation of fat is set to be deliberately and maliciously eliminated from the gene pool (even if it were possible to engineer out such a deeply ingrained trait to which we owe our survival as a species), but we are treated as pariahs in the reproduction stakes as it is (to be flippant for a second, if the chances of conceiving indeed drop in proportion to padded curvaceousness then give me the cream bun and fish supper method any day rather than the noxious chemical preparations we are encouraged to swallow without a second thought) – we might know we are sexy as we slip into our glad rags and more so than the gaunt clothes horses with their dangling arms and washboard ribs, but who lets us be? Our voluptuousness was once revered and worshipped. These days the Venus of Willendorf provokes shudders of revulsion. We are not heading for genocide, but are sliding into even less tolerance in a context that bristles with hostility as it is. Where finger-wagging prejudice is able to set the public policy agenda limiting our access to IVF, more aggressive interventionist steps could follow.

Perhaps we will be segregated from the “normals” or forcibly enrolled in fat camps on starvation programmes. The barbed words of one colleague still ring in my ears over a decade after they first tore into me. I issued the customary protestations about having normal blood pressure and low cholesterol (both of which still hold true) and that I was perfectly comfortable with my size. Her retort: “Yes, but we have to look at you”. The powers that be are contemplating the removal of “yob neighbours”, those who have attracted persistent complaints concerning anti-social behaviour into “sin bins”. The qualm-free sacrifice of the human rights of “underclass” families not prepared to buckle down and accept their lowly station through gritted teeth for the sake of upholding the rights to a quiet life on the part of the rest, a cheap solution compared with tackling poverty, chronic inequality, deprivation and the absence of genuine opportunities and prospects that lie at the root of such sullen and futile rebellion (we can’t alienate the middle-classes by putting up the council tax yet again, after all). Once the principle of ghetto-creation for the undesirables has gained acceptance, the definition of undesirable can be expanded at will. “But they are so gross, so ugly with their bulging bellies. They spill over the arm rests on the plane, they glisten with sweat whenever the sun so much as peeps out from behind the clouds, I can’t bear the sight of them, besides, they lower the tone of the neighbourhood and bring down the property value, couldn’t you just get rid of them?” Fat catchers patrolling the streets to round up those who have not yet been relocated and have broken the curfew (daylight hours, when our allegedly lumbering gait might cause distress, “Pass me the smelling salts, Archibald, I’ve just spotted a slob!”). Perhaps in the end the diet industry will save us. After all, if skinniness were the norm outside of glamorous celebrity enclaves where would its profits come from? Fattening us up again?

Mind you, we are slowly but surely gaining the upper hand in terms of sheer numbers (not that I am naïve enough to think that being in the majority counts for much, as indicated by the frustrations of womanhood in a world where maleness is still the default option with all the privileges such an exalted, power-saturated state of being brings in its wake), as Sarah Boseley (The Guardian, 11^th October 2006) shows in her Fears for the future as figures reveal Britons are the fattest people in Europe: “Britons are the fattest men and women of Europe, beating Slovakia and Greece by a small margin and with every likelihood that the next generation will hang on to the title, if current trends continue.

Being overweight or obese is now the norm in the UK, with figures released by the government yesterday showing that two-thirds of men and almost 60% of women are unhealthily heavy. We are also passing on the problem to our children: if nothing changes, nearly a third of boys and girls under 11 will be overweight or obese by 2010”.

She continues: “The figures from the OECD, comparing the UK with 21 other European countries, emerged in a government document detailing the state of the nation’s health, what has been achieved, and targets for the future.

Offsetting such success stories as the drop in cancer and heart disease deaths are the worrying upward trends in obesity and diabetes, mental ill-health and alcohol-related disease.

Caroline Flint, the public health minister, said that the UK led Europe in obesity for a combination of reasons, some of which were cultural and associated with shopping and family habits.

‘It has built up over time,’ she said. ‘In the last 10 years or so, things seem to have got worse. It is partly what we eat but also what we do in terms of physical activity. It is complex. It is part of the way we live our lives and we have to think of 21^st-century solutions’.

The government has set itself the target of halting the year on year rise in obesity among children under 11 by 2010. But it does not set a similar target for stopping the weight gain in adults, aiming instead to encourage people to ‘want to change their lifestyles and take responsibility for their health’.

Ms Flint said it was not part of her job to tell people what to do.

Instead, the government is looking towards incentives, such as a voucher scheme offering money off fruit and vegetables being tried out in Cornwall, and more subliminal approaches.

Next spring it will launch an obesity ‘social marketing strategy’, based on the most effective ways of targeting messages to particular groups.

The result of one such piece of research was anti-smoking adverts warning young people that the cigarette habit would leave them looking wrinkled and damage their sex drive.

She expressed hopes that supermarkets would help the crusade, showing parents how to prepare exotic fruits and vegetables in-store and allowing children to try them: ‘Parents are worrying about buying food in case the children aren’t going to like it. We have to be better at listening to people rather than assuming we know what they need’”.

What bemuses me about the idea of squandering money on an awareness-raising deterrent campaign is the underlying assumption that we are not being chivvied, bullied and bombarded from all sides with messages about jeopardising our well-being for the sake of the transitory melting sensation of chocolate on the tongue as it is. Only a thin person in a cushioned environment without a single fat acquaintance (who has been called names throughout childhood and whose hard-won, minimal confidence has been punctured repeatedly in adulthood by casual remarks) could imagine that an extra portion of moral blackmail might sway the recalcitrant pie-guzzler into casting those crusts aside. Here sheer, mind-boggling ignorance combines with prejudice to dream up a plan that will only increase our humiliation, pain, suffering, anxiety and self-recriminating guilt whilst further exonerating those who derive their kicks from picking on us by pretending that fat is a lifestyle pathology, the physical manifestation of a moral flaw (lack of willpower and discipline), heaping all the blame on the individual and blithely glossing over every other contributory factor (I do not subscribe to the fat spells misery and disaster ideology).

Martin Hickman highlighted the schizophrenic attitude of the British when it comes to eating in ‘Crazy’ relationship with food is killing us, says FSA (The Independent, 11^th October 2006): “British people eat the worst food in Europe, the head of a Government watchdog warns today.

(…) Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, placed the UK at the bottom of European countries on nutrition and warned that all parts of society were eating badly.

She said a ‘troubled’ relationship with food caused mass obesity in the general population and made young girls consider going on diets. ‘It’s crazy,’ she said.

Yesterday the Government revealed Britain to be the fattest nation in Europe, with two-thirds of men and 60 per cent of women overweight or obese. Ministers said obesity would be the priority in public health and promised to launch a new strategy next year.

In an interview marking her first year in office, Dame Deirdre – who is locked in a battle with the food industry over processed food labelling – said: ‘I think the evidence to me suggests that the UK has really quite poor nutritional status.

‘And although it is particularly prevalent in the lower socio-economic groups, actually the higher socio-economic groups cannot kid themselves it is the only place where it happens.

‘So it is a broad society problem and the interesting thing is you can look at children as young as six or seven and see that they have a very strange relationship with food’.

The multinational food giants and Britain’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, are boycotting the FSA’s ‘traffic light’ labelling scheme in favour of daily percentages for salt, fat and sugar, even though independent surveys suggest the agency’s system is the easiest to understand.

‘The most obvious symptom of our nutritional status is obesity,’ explained Dame Deirdre.

‘It’s not the only thing – there are equal problems of under nourishment in some areas – but the most obvious problem is obesity coupled with things like high salt in the diet. And the rate of increase appears to be exponential – rather like it is in the US.

‘Although other countries in Europe are catching us up or at least showing a trend growing the same way, we nonetheless remain right at the bottom in terms of poor nutrition and obesity’.

She said the country’s difficult relationship with food extended to children.

‘You have got really young girls worried about being overweight – children as young as seven saying they want to put themselves on a diet. It’s crazy’.

Campaigners estimate that bad diet kills as many as 60,000 Britons each year – not far off the 80,000 deaths from cancer and 15 times the number killed on the roads.

Launching the Government’s Health Profile of England yesterday, Caroline Flint, the Public health Minister, said: ‘The rapid increase in adult and child obesity over the past decade is storing up very serious health problems for the future’. Although surveys in the past year suggest that Britons are improving their diet, the last official research in 2001 found that most people eat 2.8 of the recommended five daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day.

Only half the households surveyed by the FSA in 2005 were cooking with raw ingredients every day. About six million people never or almost never cook fresh food”.

The leader in the same edition, A problem consuming Britain attempts to stir us out of our presumed complacency: “National self-image can be a deceptive thing. Economists tell us that Britain is in a healthy state compared with the rest of Europe. And we are used to hearing about the vibrancy of our cultural life. Yet when it comes to our physical health, the official data released yesterday shows that Britain is actually in a rather poor condition. As the head of the Food Standards Agency points out, we are now the sick man of Europe”.

The article comes full circle by citing the cost argument: “The Prime Minister was right yesterday to stress the importance of establishing the principle of ‘preventive’ health care here if we are to see any improvement. We cannot continue to regard the NHS as a ‘national illness service’ [what the bloody hell is it for, then, if not to treat the sick??]. The Department of Health predicts that 13 million people in England will be obese by 2010. With obesity-related illnesses already costing the nation some £3.5bn a year, this could eventually bankrupt the NHS. The success of the Cuban health service [which may work wonders, yet operates within an authoritarian society, which our Labour masters eye with evident envy, the more dictatorial aspects of which they attempt to emulate wherever possible] shows that when doctors focus not just on a patient’s ailments, but on their general lifestyle, the results can be astonishing.

But the real test for the Government lies in whether it can persuade Britons to eat more healthily. There has been some success. The quality of school meals has shown an improvement after the introduction of new guidelines. But the objectives laid out in the Government’s health White Paper of two years ago look distant. Many deprived areas are still fresh-food deserts. And the Government’s proposed ‘traffic-light’ system for food labelling has been rejected by the food industry.

The Government cannot force people to eat more healthily, but it can do a lot more to encourage it. And a good deal more than our national self-image is riding on the success of such efforts”.

That the stakes are indeed high is made clear by the Daily Mail in Epidemic of obesity ‘could ruin economy’ (10^th November 2006, unattributed): “The obesity crisis sweeping Britain could damage the economy, researchers warn.

They say Britain became one of the most powerful countries in the world because of the health of its citizens.

But this could all be changed if talented professionals die early or retire because of sickness [once again a giveaway; only when fat threatens the “contributory classes” as opposed to the “scrounger classes” does it become a cause for concern worthy of pumping research funding into].

Professor Martin McKee said: ‘The Treasury has identified the cost of obesity to the NHS as a major problem but our research shows how much healthy people contribute to the health of the economy.

‘They remain in the workforce longer and are more productive while they are at work [note how other forms of moral pollution cluster around the “original sin” of fatness with overweight workers automatically branded as less productive, presumably due to the related evil of laziness].

‘This is vital as the overall age of the population rises and people are encouraged to retire later.

‘It is a waste of money investing in training people if they die at 35 [an unsubstantiated and wildly exaggerated figure surely, especially since another investigation into life expectancy that recently hit the headlines put Glasgow at the top of the early mortality league table with a life expectancy of 66 for men, putting the male residents of the city on a par with Albanians] or retire in their 50s because of ill health’.

The team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, examined the link between health and wealth in rich countries, and found healthier people have higher earnings”.

This compounds the impression that we fat are not just punishing ourselves and ruining our own lives, but acting selfishly, nay, sociopathically by wrecking our nation’s prosperity: “About 30 per cent of financial growth in the United Kingdom between 1790 and 1980 can be attributed to better health and dietary intake.

Professor McKee said: ‘The overwhelming conclusion is that good health has benefits beyond the individual.

‘The true purpose of economic activity is to maximise social welfare and not simply to produce more goods and services.

‘Since better health is an important component of social welfare, its value ought to be included in measures of economic progress.

‘This has been done successfully in the United States. Similar moves in Europe could provide a new perspective on the investments made through their welfare states’”.

Shyama Perera in Thin people call fat people bad. So melt me down and save everyone a fortune (The Independent, 10^th September 2006) assesses the psychological impact of the fat-disparagement bonanza: “Current policy initiatives to objectivise the fat are doing well. Despite my own gargantuan proportions I find myself tutting over every instance of muffin top among the young, and mature women with heavier thighs than Cherie Blair are immediately assigned a contempt rating.

My girlfriends report that they too have joined the witch-hunt – if only to offset their own lifelong anxieties about size by legitimately pointing the finger at someone who’s even bigger.

Where in the past it was unacceptable to pick on fat kids [an amnesty I ever noticed], the socially dysfunctional, or redundant mining communities fuelling sedentary lives with burgers and fries, one can now vilify them with the establishment’s seal of approval”.

She veers uneasily between orthodoxy and sympathy throughout: “How ironic that revulsion at a burqa and the doctrine it represents is outlawed in this country, but revulsion at the meaning inherent in a waist measurement is positively encouraged. Fattie-baiting is spreading across health departments like the Toronto Blessing. Fat people cost you money – fat people threaten your health.

On that basis, it is now acceptable to refuse them operations, IVF and any manner of medical condition they are deemed to have contributed to by dint of greed. Tonsillitis, Mr Jones? Too much passing traffic, that’s your problem.

Are these health policies new? No, they’re not. Doctors routinely refuse treatment where it compromises them, endangers the patient, or has low success rates within a particular demographic, whatever that demographic may be.

As for assertions about cost, the British Association for Parental and Enteral Nutrition reported last December that malnutrition costs the NHS £7.3bn a year. That’s twice the bill for obesity. If we then place obesity in context alongside vices of choice – binge drinking, drug addiction, smoking, keep fit (sic), and unprotected sex – the figures are even less scary.

Does that mean obesity’s OK? Of course it isn’t! It’s obvious even to a fool that excess weight puts the organs and joints under serious pressure, jeopardising the likelihood of a long and healthy life. It’s vital, then, that we’re given models for healthy and moderate eating.

The issue is this: the fat are being turned into crass objects of ridicule when they are an inevitable by-product of massive social and industrial change.

In the past 40 years, England has evolved from an active, manufacturing society to being computerised, service-led, and sedentary. Women have abandoned the kitchen and joined men in commuter hell. We work the longest hours in Europe. It’s a different way of being. While we’re acclimatising, there isn’t always space for menu-planning and elective exercise. It’s quicker and easier to buy Big Macs or to order a takeaway than it is to go to Asda, transport food home, and cook from scratch.

Meanwhile our children are locked away for fear of stranger danger. Football is banned in the street. Youth clubs have closed. Superstores have replaced playing fields. Inevitably, MySpace, MSN and PlayStations have taken over as leisure activities. We are a society in the throes of a major cultural revolution.

Within that setting, our behaviours may not be wise, but neither are they unreasonable. That’s why righteous protestations and pontifications that find fat people wanting will not only fail, but they will also backfire on those who moot them.

Finger pointing doesn’t work. Painting ‘Burgers Kill’ on fast-food boxes, or ‘Eating Chocolate Could Seriously Damage Your Health’ on every bar of Green & Blacks, will serve only to highlight human weakness, not to lessen it. Alongside those pariahs huddled in doorways over fags, a toke, or a bottle of meths, will we now find the overweight sharing pie and chips?

So why, when 47 per cent of women are a size 16 and over, and one in three men will be clinically obese by 2010, are health chiefs being pejorative instead of seeking solutions that appeal?

Firstly, the fat are an easy target within an cash-strapped NHS struggling to offer even basic healthcare. Secondly, drawing attention to people on the basis of size draws attention away from differences in race or religion: it’s a fairer form of discrimination. The obese have become a useful totem of societal ills – they take up too much room; they’re badly dressed; they shine on hot days and they’re ugly.

This is dangerous ground. Obesity is a general problem. Even posh mums are pushed for solutions when it comes to the frappucino generation – we can all think of examples. I wonder how they feel, being told that they’re a drain on society and bound to die blind of diabetes. It’s not the greatest call to arms. And it’s why health chiefs should think very carefully about the way they’re conducting current campaigns. By alienating the young, they risk doing more harm than good.

The Jamie Oliver approach of getting stuck in at the deep end is a positive one – leading by example and through celebration. His condemnation of lunchbox junk is expressed as caring, not as ridicule. ‘My dream is for our children to be able to cook their children a lovely roast,’ he says.

Our children may have as little time and inclination to cook as their parents, but Oliver’s approach is better than the fast food and M&S cook-chill example shown to my generation.

In the meantime, we have crossed a policy line that makes both fat and thin uncomfortable. Condemnatory pronouncements smack of fascism. Thin people good, fat people bad. Melt them down and save a fortune.

It’s not a new idea of course. The system already exists, administered by Bupa. It is everything Labour hates.

If I were a Tory I’d say this to voters: a teacher aged 50 needs a £6,000 hip replacement. She’s turned down because she’s too fat. On the same day, a new immigrant with HIV signs up for a lifetime of anti-viral drugs costing six figures. Both knowingly risked their health. Both are needy. Only one has put time and money into this community. We’d treat both, because they’re equal in our eyes. Labour didn’t.

Labour heartlands tend to be heavy on the heavy, as the survey on Britain’s fattest towns revealed. If the Government isn’t careful, it may not end up with fat bellies, but there’ll be a few fat lips”.

Her conclusion is just: we must mobilise our political weight before we are ground into total capitulation beneath the twin millstones of disapproval and shame, apologising for the crime of our existence, agreeing with our detractors as they herd us into the operating theatres for lipo-sculpting, excising our bounteousness like a cancer.

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]

President László Sólyom’s address to the European Parliament [English in the original unless otherwise indicated]

Mister President,

Members of the European Parliament,

Representatives of the Council and the Commission,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Hungary and the World celebrate together the 50^th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution and freedom fight.  It is encouraging and elevating to feel that there is one event of commemoration with which everyone can identify.  There are no differences of opinion, no reservations.  Everyone pays tribute to the memory of the Hungarian heroes of 1956.  Now, after 50 years, with a historic perspective, and after the fall of the Soviet communist regime we can clearly see the historic importance of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Freedom Fight.

But this is also an event when the world celebrates itself – and it has every reason to do so.  We can re-experience together the former enthusiasm with which peoples took sides with the Hungarian revolution.  The World can now celebrate its generous sacrifice: Austria, which had just been liberated, opened its borders for the 160,000 Hungarian refugees.  The blood donations in Poland to help to rescue the wounded of the freedom fight, tens of thousands of Hungarian refugees found a new home in the various countries around the world.

But the real reason for this commemoration and joy is that this joint celebration is taking place in a Hungary that is independent, sovereign and democratic, where there is rule of law, and where the country could become a member of international organisations such as the European Union of its own free will.  In the end, the objectives of the revolution have been realised.  The fact that our historic course has taken this path has been influenced by the major role played in it by the countries of the World, and Hungary itself.  The communist world was not able to recover from the shock until the very end of its existence.  And the honest thinkers did away with their illusion pertaining to the Soviet Union and the communist system.

It is to the credit of 1956 that the world looks upon Hungary with a positive mind.  The heroic struggle of the Hungarian freedom fighters against Soviet predominance has earned Hungary recognition and appreciation everywhere up to the present day.

It has become a custom, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, to present the Hungarian Revolution as a mortal blow to the Soviet world system.  That is not how anyone saw it during the early years of military compulsion and of the terror dispensed by the Kádár system.  At most, 1956 questioned communist ideology and presented a dilemma to the left-wing, pro-Soviet section of the intelligentsia in Western Europe, by making them face facts.  These attitudes can still be seen as a measure of intellectual sincerity.  But politically, the Soviet Union had learnt that it could assert itself in the region without hindrance or constraint: the Western powers had no direct security or economic interests there.

There was an ambivalence between the real political intentions and propaganda of the Great Powers, and thereby the ambivalence in the expectations of the Hungarian people.  Neither the American nor the French or the British governments intended to intervene, or even query the integrity of the Soviet sphere of influence – they made this clear to the Soviet leadership in October.  But they left the Hungarian government isolated and uninformed and the freedom fighters and population under a misapprehension, for the propaganda of the state-sponsored Western radio stations urged them to trust in the arrival of liberating assistance.

The Communists could build the Berlin Wall in 1961 and use military intervention to crush the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968.  What caused it to relinquish its sphere of influence in the Baltic and Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse itself was not 1956, but inherent systemic weaknesses and the Soviet Union’s inability to compete either economically or in the arms race.

From another point of view, the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for independence provided the first and weightiest evidence of the instability of the Communist regimes in the central European states, which possessed different historical, political, and cultural traditions from those of the Soviet Union.  These states had traditions of democracy.  National independence had become something of almost intrinsic value.  The struggles in Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland again, headed by the Solidarity trade union organisation from 1989 onwards, were concurrently for basic democratic freedoms and for a curb on Soviet influence.  These events and struggles led to the democratic transitions in central Europe in 1989-90.

A common feature of the 1956 revolution and the change of regime in 1989 is that considering their essence, both rejected party-state communism.  Faithfulness to the 1956 revolution and the legitimacy of our claims to it depend on whether we allow the line between our free Hungary today and the Hungary we had before 1989 to blur.

The parallel lesson of 1956 and 1989 is that in both cases, history surpassed the aspirations that wanted more freedom within a socialist system.  The greatness of Imre Nagy lies in the fact that he recognised that.  He stepped out of his communist past; he stepped out of the soviet world system.  He remained a left-wing politician, and he undertook a historic role, he accepted the fate that the revolutionary Hungarian nation offered him.  And he would rather die than retreat.

[In German, translation by Chameleon]

On 22^nd October, the eve of the Revolution, heads of state, prime ministers and other distinguished guests attended the commemoration ceremony at the Budapest Opera House.  The guests included representatives of the countries, which welcomed many Hungarian refugees during the turbulent days of the Revolution.

By the end of 1956, over 153,000 Hungarians had fled to Austria.  Later they were joined by 30,000 more.  Austria selflessly provided for their food, accommodation and care and organised the international aid effort, which quickly proved indispensable.  Support extended to include counselling, legal aid, helping the refugees to find work and even involved teaching for the children of school age and spiritual pastoral care.  Austria also paved the way for emigration to third countries.  One tenth of the Hungarian refugees elected to stay in Austria nevertheless, a country, which has always felt a strong sense of kinship with the Hungarians.

The succour offered by Austria did not stop at helping the refugees.  This neighbouring country did not just monitor the events closely because of its geographical proximity, but evinced a deep feeling of empathy towards Hungary.  Only shortly beforehand had the occupying troops left the country; only shortly beforehand had the Red Army withdrawn from Vienna.  Here people had firsthand knowledge of what life in a country deprived of freedom was like; here people had experienced firsthand what the absence of self-determination means in practice in their day-to-day lives, how this absence permeates and has a baleful influence on every aspect of existence.

We also owe a particular debt of gratitude to the Federal Republic of Germany.  On 2^nd November 1956, the first Hungarian refugees arrived in Germany.  When the government realised how great the influx of refugees was, it decided to grant ten per cent of them asylum, although on 7^th November it has initially only intended to accept 3,000 refugees.  In spite of the fact that it already had to shoulder a heavy burden of giving shelter those who had fled from or been driven out of the Eastern federal States, which had placed a strain on the German welfare system, the Hungarians were greeted with great sympathy.  The German Red Cross donated a total of 30 million DM to support the refugees.  20,000 Hungarian refugees found a new home in Germany; 1,200 students were able to integrate into the German university system and in Kastl a bilingual grammar school was set up.

On behalf of the Hungarian people, I would like to thank you for all of these acts of generosity.

[In Hungarian, translated by Chameleon]

In celebrating 1956, we must immortalise the elemental and pure joy engendered by the liberation.  This is what radiates out of every one of the remaining photographs, and from every reel of film on which the faces of the demonstrators of 23^rd October 1956 can be seen.  Everyone who recalls the events speaks of these joyful faces.

Let us listen to the words of the famous author Géza Ottlik: ‘No feat of the poetic imagination, no heart throbbing with revolutionary fervour, not even the insight of genius can suffice to allow anyone who was not there from beginning to end to grasp what it was really like.  I could not have imagined beforehand either the elation with which people walked through the streets of Budapest, because I had never experienced its like.  I simply did not have the faintest idea that such happiness existed.  Nobody holds his own wretched life – which has perhaps become too wretched – dearer than the abstract honour of his homeland.  Let him look upon the faces and see the calm sense of relief upon them!  Because the crucial truth is this: it is neither plucky determination nor heroic recklessness or foolhardiness that shines in their eyes, but joyful relief.

‘People – in groups or alone – are advancing on the tanks, on the cannons and machine guns trained on them with this profound and joyful inner tranquillity.  Nothing is more precious to them than the human dignity they have regained’.

[This space has been bookmarked for one of a series of commemorative pieces celebrating the Hungarian Revolution of1956. At present I am taking a brief break having spent the entire summer and every spare weekend for the last two years translating the memoirs of an important historical figure due to be published next year once I complete the introduction and footnotes. I expect to resume around 6th November]