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]

Welcome to the unrepentant unbelievers edition of the Britblog Roundup – be warned that for the delicate soul of tender disposition the stench of a whited sepulchre, the whiff of eternal damnation might prove distressing, but it’s a risk I am willing to take…

Religion

Unity of Ministry of Truth in Picking Fleas comprehensively and brilliantly demolishes the essay by Dr Graham Tomlin, Dean of St Mellitus College, London, penned in an effort to refute The God Delusion.  Although Unity systematically works his way through the text, we shall focus on one example, more than adequate to reveal how the Dean is punching above his weight.  Unity clarifies: "Dawkins’ argument vis-a-vis morality is not that Christianity fails to supply a tidy list of do’s and don’ts but that our evolved moral sense is not dependent on Christianity, or any other religion.  The question he addresses is that of whether we can be moral without the need for the belief that a big old sky fairy is looking over our shoulders every waking second of the day – he thinks we can and so have many other eminent philosophers, not least amongst whom were Hume and Kant.

As such, the point about the seeming ubiquity of certain moral principles, particularly the universality of the ‘Golden Rule’, is that this is evidence that the foundations of the ethic of reciprocity are to be found in our evolution as a species and not in the maundering of the priestly caste of any individual religion or even religion, collectively.  Within social animals, of which we are but one of many, reciprocation and reciprocal altruism confers certain survival advantages over and above pure self-interest – natural selection favour those who cooperate – within certain limits – to ensure the survival of their genes to future generations, which makes the Golden Rule no more than an intellectual codification of an evolutionary principle and its ubiquity across human societies nothing more than a function of the fact that we all belong to the same species and, if you go back far enough, share common origins and ancestors".

Unity surmises that the loud bleating amongst the flock of the faithful may have more to it than a simple defence of their good shepherd: "Ultimately, what has got some religionists so rattled about Dawkins and the so-called ‘New Atheists’ is not that they challenge the the existence of god – that is ultimately an intellectual debate – but that he and others are implicitly, and in some cases, explicitly, challenging the privileged position and status of religion as an institution and socio-political entity.

It’s not god, or the belief in god that Tomlin and others are trying to protect when they’re attacking Dawkins, it’s their hallowed place on the secular public teat on which religion has been suckling and has grown fat for centuries.

What Dawkins is threatening here is the automatic seats in the UK’s House of Lords given to the Church of England, the state funding for faith schools and the mandatory requirement placed on all state schools, even secular ones, to provide acts of ‘broadly Christian’ worship and religious education.  It’s the undue and undeserved claim to deference that religion demands under the guide of ‘respect’ and the legislative cop-outs they demand in order to defend their presumed ‘right’ to discriminate and promulgate bigotry and homophobia".

As a former born-again fundamentalist (now fully recovered), the root of my opposition to the monotheistic religions is that they mandate the wholesale subordination and denial of full humanity to women as the "inferior" in the male/female binary.  To me, religion is all about keeping things the way they are and women in their place.  The first step towards emancipation is to debunk the priesthood’s claim to authority and status.  Without the backing of a god they have no foundation for their power, no justification for interfering in people’s lives, prescribing conduct and spreading guilt and misery (not that I have much time for their secular equivalent, psychotherapists, either – the aim of both professions is to help their charges come to terms with the source of their unhappiness rather than changing social attitudes or combating injustice, brainwashing them into reconciling themselves to their lot).

Tomlin’s piece ends with a rhetorical flourish: "God is searching for us and is there to be found but only by those who risk everything to do so.  Those who do find him find love, adventure and satisfaction beyond what they imagined possible".

Nonsense!  For women, submitting to the will of god means servitude without appeal or respite, erosion of confidence, surrender of autonomy and placing oneself completely at the mercy of a man who enjoys the right to unquestioning obedience, a retreat to enforced domesticity.  Baking flapjacks for the prayer group meeting with more than just buns of sugar and dough in the oven (because, after all, it was so ordained that our chief value should be as incubators as opposed to intellects)…always with a cheerful smile for complaint would be sinful, a blasphemous rejection of god’s divine plan and boundless wisdom.

Lest you dismiss my words as an isolated voice crying in the wilderness, I commend A.C. Grayling’s meditation in The Guardian on how Tradition and religion forge shackles of oppression for women: "I leave to you the task of totting up the other ways in which piety makes war on women in different parts and traditions of Islam, and not even very extreme Islam at that, ranging from honour killings to female circumcision and vaginal infibulation.

Indeed I leave to you the not very congenial task of totting up the ways in which more enthusiastic forms of religion in general, not just Islam but Roman Catholicism, puritanical forms of Protestantism, and orthodox Judaism, have treated women: all the way from closeting them, covering them up, and silencing them, to sewing up their vaginas: it is a ghastly litany of oppression, all the less excusable because discrimination against women which began in these ways persists in our society in modified forms: the fact that a woman earns about 70% of what an equally qualified and experienced mad does is a residue in our own society of the attitude which in today’s sharia law states that a woman is worth half a man".

Cath Elliott, likewise in The Guardian, concurs that selling your soul to an allegedly benign deity is a bad deal for women in I’m not praying: (…) the term ‘Christian feminist’ is an oxymoron; it’s a glaring contradiction in terms on a par with ‘compassionate conservative’ and ‘pro-life anti-abortionist’.

Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality, but it’s certainly not alone in this.  Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression.  It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.

Since men first conceived of the notion of a single omnipotent creator, that divine being has taken the form of a man: no matter what name he answers to, be it Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, or just plain God, what’s not in doubt is that he’s a he.  His teachings and his various holy books reinforce the message that this life exists for men, while the best women can hope for is some kind of reward in the next one; as long as we do as we’re told of course, without questioning our lords and masters, and as long as we manage to remain pure of heart and mind while we prostrate ourselves at their feet".

This may be slightly inaccurate, in the sense that whereas it rings true for monotheistic religions, there are others, which worship goddesses.  However, even the polytheistic faiths position male gods as supreme, with their consorts and spouses employing their feminine wiles to subvert the authority of their masters.

Elliott continues: "In any society where religion dominates it is women who pay the price: we can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether or not any particular religion sanctions so-called honour crimes for example, but what’s unarguable is that men’s interpretation of religion, and the patriarchal values that religion instils, has led to the murders of countless women.  Similarly, it’s in the name of religion that girls are denied an education; in the name of religion that more than half a million women die every year because they cannot access safe abortions; in the name of religion that Aids continues its unrelenting progress across Africa, and in the name of religion that women throughout the world remain subjugated, impoverished and denied individual agency".

The effects of religion are almost entirely pernicious: it dulls our revolutionary fervour, conning us into putting up with things no matter how intolerable.  One objection might be to recount how religion can have positive social effects by inspiring charity and self-sacrifice: the soup kitchens and other good works.  This compassion is proffered in exchange for spiritual Brownie points to escape being roasted on a spit.  Good deeds put you in God’s good books and keep you out of hell: the motives behind them are purely selfish, in other words.  I grant that this does not detract from the immediately beneficial impact on the needy, but the recipients have to swallow the gospel along with their doorsteps of bread.

Looking back over my own experience to account for the attraction to religion, as a teenage swot, I was a pariah, an outcast, desperate to fit in.  Religion offers a balm to ease the pain of the sheer wretchedness of existence, especially for those near the bottom of the pile.  It can function as a frustration-abatement/containment mechanism.  Often our capacity for self-reflection can torment us, appear as a curse and we seek the temporary numbing relief of alcohol, drugs, or the opiate of the people.  The real miracle is the tenacity of religion, which may be attributed to our inherent futility, the transitoriness of our individual being, which may be too unpalatable, unbearable for us to confront.  Religion is our comfort blanket as we shiver in the coldness of the infinite indifference of the cosmos.  And it offers the ultimate revenge fantasy: those who prosper now will burn in hell.  Similarly, whilst there is no justice in the here and now, there might be in the hereafter.

Religion permeates and simultaneously corrupts perceptions in a subtle cognitive warp as explored and catalogued by Pierre Bourdieu during his fieldwork in Kabylia: "We find in fact in the political sphere the same division of labour which entrusts religion – public, official, solemn, and collective – to the men, and magic – secret, clandestine, and private – to the women.  In this competition the men have the whole official institution on their side, starting with the mythico-ritual representations and representations of kinship which, by reducing the opposition between the official and the private to the opposition between the outside and the inside, hence the male and the female, establish a systematic hierarchisation, condemning women’s interventions to a shameful, secret, or, at best, unofficial existence.  Even when women do wield the real power, as is often the case in matrimonial matters, they can exercise it fully only on condition that they leave the appearance of power, that is, its official manifestation, to the men; to have any power at all, women must make do with the unofficial power of the eminence grise, a dominated power which is opposed to official power in that it can operate only by proxy, under the cover of an official authority, as well as to the subversive refusal of the rule-breaker, in that it still serves the authority it uses" (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p41).

Returning to Unity by way of conclusion: "That’s what atheism is – growing up and becoming a fully autonomous, independent human being capable of making their own moral choices and their own decisions about what is right and what is wrong without recourse to fairy tales, bogeymen or sky fairies".

The Heresiarch of Heresy Corner in Not-so-sparkling Jewel surveys the response to Sherry Jones’ bodice-ripper sanitised of vivid descriptions of sexual encounters (paradoxical though that may sound upon first hearing) effort based on the life of Aisha, The Jewel of Medina: "Having read the opening chapter when it appeared online in August I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece: simultaneously turgid and flowery, it suggested that Jones’ ambition greatly exceeded her ability as a writer.  It was her intention, she told Asra Nomani of the Wall Street Journal, ‘to honour Aisha and all the wives of Mohammed by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored – silenced – by historians’.  An aim either worth or cringe-makingly ingratiating, according to taste, but one that ought to have rung alarm bells for anyone who cares about fiction.  Novels written with a purely didactic intent are rarely very good".

An excerpt courtesy of The Times should suffice to illustrate its literary merits or lack thereof: "The author avoids graphic sex scenes between the two.  But A’isha says: ‘This was the beginning of something new, something terrible.  Soon I would by lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me.  he would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it?  It’s always painful the first time’.  After consummating her marriage to the Prophet, she says: ‘The pain of consummation soon melted away.  Muhammad was so gentle.  I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting.  To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life’".

These passages prompted Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her review, The Fire-Bombed Book, to write: "Ms Jones does not condemn Mohammed for having sex with Aisha at the age of nine.  The sex scene is not described graphically and its conclusion for Aisha is described by Ms Jones as something Aisha always wanted.  All the behaviour considered immoral and misogynistic in the modern day Western attitudes that offends Muslims are repeated in the novel and affirmed.  Rather than being a challenge to Islam, The Jewel of Medina is a pro-Islamic, pro-Mohammed novel and could easily serve as propaganda material for any Muslim organisation promoting the idea that Muslim women must not only accept the position that Islam ascribes to them but should also view that inferior position as a gift from God.

From my perspective, Ms Jones’ novel does not come close toward helping Muslim women imagine that there is a reality beyond subjugation.  The main lesson for a Muslim woman to take from Aisha the heroine of The Jewel is that it is best to spire to becoming the head of the concubines, or the hatun, and in that dubious position to remind herself that her job is to support Muhammad’s decisions, not to doubt them.  Obedience as a lesson is not something Muslim girls need to read about in novels; it is a concept they have to live with every day.

Where Ms Jones succeeds – and, it seems, unwittingly – is to show the problem Islam perpetually has with fiction.  It is not enough to be positive about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), i.e. to stick to the Islamic account of events surrounding the prophet’s life.  It is not enough to express oneself in the same tone of deference that Muslims do when talking or writing about their religion.

What it confirms is that Muslims believe that Muslims and infidels both must place Islam’s main characters out of bounds for fiction, for literature in general, and for cinema, except as a means of dawa or to spread the faith".

The Heresiarch endorses her criticisms: "A novel about Aisha need not be inflammatory; but a novel about Aisha that was any good would almost by definition be highly controversial.  It would have to tackle the question head-on: not because Aisha’s extreme youth is definitively established (though it is likely) but because it is a matter that continues to have the most serious ramifications for children today.  Across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Morocco, even in Britain, underage and sometimes prepubescent girls are married, usually without their consent (if consent were even possible); and often these marriages are then consummated".

He expresses his regret at a missed opportunity: "Premature marriage takes a heavy toll in terms of female sexual health, psychological damage and limited life-chances.  Yet there’s another story to be told, too: one that takes into account that early marriage was a feature of many societies throughout much of human history, Christian as well as Muslim and neither.  Even in Western Europe, where people have always tended to marry relatively late, aristocratic brides were not uncommonly in their early teens.  These women were not all suffering victims; as widows, still relatively young and vigorous, they might be powerful and rich.  Aisha herself, by all accounts, was such a widow.

The story of Aisha sits at the intersection of two sacred modern taboos: the Western construction of pedophilia as a supercrime, and the almost equally totemic belief in multicultural respect.  A novel that took her life as material for a truly fearless examination of these issues would probably outrage everybody.  It would be dangerous.  It would be great.  But it wouldn’t be anything like The Jewel of Medina". 

Abortion

"There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia.  She stands at the front of the room, in her khaki dress, a pointer in her hand.  Pulled down in front of the blackboard, where once there would have been a map, is a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.

Of course, some women believed there would be no future, they thought the world would explode.  That was the excuse they used, says Aunt Lydia.  They said there was no sense in breeding.  Aunt Lydia’s nostrils narrow: such wickedness.  They were lazy women, she says.  They were sluts"

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London, Vintage, 1996, p123)

We begin with Unity once again, this time at Liberal Conspiracy in Sins of Omission: "The major problem facing the anti-abortion lobby is that, for all their efforts to poison the public debate in support of their prohibitionist agenda, public support for the principle that women have the right to access safe, legal abortions services remains rock solid at around 65-70% in any reputable poll.  If nothing else, the British public understand that the alternative to legal abortion is not no abortions but a return to unsafe backstreet abortions with their attendant horrors.

The ‘moral’ argument for prohibition has been lost and lost decisively and it’s because of that, that anti-abortionists have turned, instead, to a stream of extremely specious and sophistic arguments about the supposed ‘rights’ of the foetus and to the wholesale misrepresentation and bastardisation of medical and scientific knowledge about pregnancy, foetal development and abortion".

Religion steps into the fray to intercede for unborn innocents, conveniently overlooking in their froth of far from righteous indignation the toll that would be extracted from women.  This is religion at its ugliest and most sanctimonious.  In their deluded romanticism about saving "babies", its practitioners would reverse the progress of the last 50 years at a stroke…The latest line of attack on women’s control of their own bodies adopted by Christian Action Research and Education (CARE, an inappropriate acronym if ever there was one), an organisation apparently adept at infiltrating the corridors of power by furnishing MPs with interns, has been to draw a spurious comparison between the campaign of those who oppose abortion with those who fought to emancipate slaves.

Unity lays bare both the historical inaccuracy and brazen dishonesty of such claims: "Drawing spurious parallels to the abolition of slavery is not only a deeply offensive tactic to adopt, but also a desperate attempt by CARE to clothe its position in a false and wholly synthetic brand of moral rectitude in the hope of deflecting attention away from the moral choice that otherwise underpins public support for legal abortion – the clear understanding that the real alternative to legal abortion is not no abortions but a return to unsafe backstreet abortions with all their attendant horrors.

That said, if we are to cast this debate in the language of human and civil rights then, in addition to reflecting on the fact that women were treated in law as something less than fully human for far longer than even those men who were born or taken into slavery prior to successes of the abolitionists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the fundamental question one has to address is whether or not you believe that women are independent, autonomous, sentient human beings who possess the full capacity to make and exercise moral and ethical choices over their own lives".

The 22nd October is the next crucial date in the battle over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Harpymarx reminds us of what is at stake in Liberalise abortion rights: support a woman’s right to choose: "I ended up chatting to an Irish woman who was a member of Alliance for Choice.

She was over here, as part of a 40-woman team to support the amendment to extend abortion rights to the north of Ireland.  Forty being politically symbolic as 40 women each week leave the north to obtain an abortion elsewhere.

And that costs between £600 to £2,000.  Access to abortion is very much a class issue and if you can’t get the money then a woman is pushed into a desperate situation that includes backstreet abortions.  Women also end up buying RU486 aka the abortion pill over the web, taking pot luck as they don’t know what they are buying.  desperate circumstances bring desperate measures".

Alliance for Choice publish personal testimonies, in which religious scruples feature as a recurrent theme, as Ms. C’s story shows: "When I was aged 25 and my daughter Caroline was almost eight, I went for a pregnancy test at the LIFE offices.  My distress at the positive test was so great, the counsellor took some time to calm me down.  I explained that Caroline has severe autism and challenging behaviour.  Another child would mean that Caroline would end up in care and I wasn’t having that.

The counsellor said that maybe God was sending me this child ‘to make up for Caroline.  This insult to my darling daughter summed up the ‘pro-life’ attitude for me.  getting respite care for a few days to allow me to go to England was very difficult, although all my friends rallied round with money, so that part wasn’t too bad.

Five years on, Caroline is still at home with me and her behaviour is greatly improved.  If I had continued with that pregnancy, I have no doubt that she would be in care and much, much worse in her behaviour and abilities".

Then there is Ms. A: "It was 1993 and my youngest child was 8 years old when I found myself pregnant again.  My marriage had broken up a few years before and my husband had left me to raise our five children alone with no support, financial or emotional.  I had returned to education as a mature student and I was in the final year of my degree.

All the struggling to keep up with home and University was about to pay off.  I was just months away from my final exams.  When I told the man I was seeing that I was pregnant, he just didn’t want to know.  he had children of his own from a previous relationship and wouldn’t be around to help, no matter what I decided to do.

Even though I was raised a Catholic and I didn’t agree with abortion, when I was faced with these circumstances, I felt I had no other choice.  It took five weeks from when I decided to have a termination to raise the money to travel over.  I borrowed some money from friends, lying to some and trusting others with my secret.  I had to use the phone-bill money as well, so we got cut off just before I left for London.  Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so I don’t understand why I couldn’t have the abortion there".

How humiliating for these women to be forced to resort to deceit, to beg for the fare across to England for a procedure, which ought to be self-evident.  It sickens me to the core.  These women are doing their utmost to haul themselves out of welfare dependency, hardly the feckless, fickle little tarts of myth.  If they had succumbed to pressure and carried the foetus to term, they would clearly have been condemning themselves and their offspring to poverty and misery.  Not one of them took the decision lightly.

Penny Red in Stand up for women in Northern Ireland! reports on a Parliament rally convened to support Diane Abbott’s amendment to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.   She quotes Goretti Horgan, of Alliance for Choice: "’The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain,’ said Ms Horgan.  ‘The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks.  However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable.  This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse,’ says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.

‘If you’re afraid of falling into some colonialist mindset by overriding Stormont, please, forget it – we need our human rights,’ said Dr Audrey Simpson of the Northern Irish Family Planning Association, reminding those present that when the Bill was last on the table in May, Northern Irish MPs had ‘no qualms’ in voting to cut the time limit from 24 to 12 weeks for English, Welsh and Scottish women".

The campaigners underline the urgency of the issue: "It’s also the last chance Northern Irish women will have to fight for their rights to legal abortion for a very long time: soon, criminal law will be devolved to Stormont, after which ‘we won’t see positive change for generations,’ said Annie Campbell" (also from Alliance for Choice.

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog in British Women (and Men) – Your Help Needed Now also picks up on the theme of deprivation: "Abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland unless the mother’s life is at risk.  There is no exception made for rape or incest victims.  6217 women who gave addresses in Ireland had an abortion in Britain last year, others travel to Holland or Belgium and some have been known to order abortion-inducing medicines online, which is dangerous both because not all websites selling such things are safe and also because women convicted of causing an abortion in Northern Ireland can face long prison terms.  Since 1967 five women are known to have died as a result of backstreet abortions in Northern Ireland.  This means of course that the system effectively just penalises those women without the financial means to go overseas for their termination".

She then deals with some of the protests against supporting liberalisation, the first of which, unsurprisingly, is religiously induced inhibition: "I can’t support abortion because of my religion.  The nearest the bible comes to mentioning abortion is in Isaiah where it says if two men are fighting and a woman is hit causing her to miscarry the man who hit the woman must pay a fine to the woman’s husband.  I’m not sure that’s the law we need but it would actually be better than the one we’ve got.  Anyway the bible says you shouldn’t blaspheme, eat shellfish or share a bed with your husband during your period.  Should we pass these as laws and enforce them with lengthy prison sentences?  Do we want a country where people of non-Christian faiths and of no religion are forced to practice fundamentalist Christianity by law?  Even when they are pregnant following incestuous rape?  Really?"

She then moves on to another popular cop-out: "The HFE Bill isn’t the right place to amend abortion law.  The 1967 abortion law is significantly out of date.  Not only with the exception made for Northern Ireland but also the requirement in the rest of the UK for two doctors’ signatures (you don’t even need two doctors’ signatures for triple heart bypass surgery), that nurses can’t prescribe abortion pills (though they can prescribe many much more complicated drug treatments and if the law was changed in this area many women would have much less distance to travel to access abortion services) and the law which says that medical abortion cannot be completed at home (women have to take the pills in a clinic and either wait there around four hours until the induced miscarriage starts or risk heading home knowing bleeding could start at any time".

To avoid creating the (mistaken) impression that I am only giving room to commentators from outside Northern Ireland (I would be the last to indulge in such unwarranted discrimination, however, I am almost completely dependent on nominations – what the weekly host is not informed of they are not necessarily aware of), I turn to an update by Brian Walker of Slugger O’Toole, Abortion reform latest, where the comments are enlightening, Goretti Horgan’s in particular: "It’s true that the government do not support extension of the Abortion Act to NI; however, it’s been Labour Party policy going back to the 1980s and in opposition they all voted to extend.  Now there is a large pro-choice majority in the House of Commons and it could pass even with all the Labour frontbenchers voting against (or more likely abstaining).  Anyone who saw Hazel Blears’ discomfiture when asked about her voting intentions on Hearts and Minds can see the problem facing many Labour MPs, especially women like Blears, Harman, Hewitt etc. who made their names as women’s rights activists and are now being asked to say they believe a woman’s right to choose is a fundamental right for women in Scotland, England and Wales but not NI.  Some will abstain and that may lose us the vote, but it is a free vote and many will vote with their consciences despite what Gordon Brown is saying to them. The key will be hearing from women and men here who explain the extent to which the political parties do NOT represent us on this issue.  At least 800,000 women from here have had abortions in Britain.  Surveys suggest that each involves up to 5 other people in making the decision.  Do the maths, that’s a lot of people in a region that has only 1.7 million people".

Politics

Chris Dillow, of Stumbling and Mumbling in Politics for the immature, ponders the implications Ruth Kelly’s decision not to stand at the next elections, what she has in common with Sarah Palin and on how politics is no longer the pinnacle of aspiration, but a mere springboard to an even more lucrative career: "Until around the 1980s-90s, people commonly worked in law, industry or business and only began political life at around the age that Ruth is ending hers.  Whereas politics was once the culmination of one’s career, Ruth’s move suggests it is the start of one.

This reversal betokens a big change in what are regarded as political skills.  There was a time when it was thought that politics required the sort of characteristics that only come to most of us with maturity: judgement and cool-headedness.

Today, though, these skills matter less.  Instead, what matters is simply who one is.  Which is where Sarah Palin comes in.  It’s increasingly obvious that she has no obvious ability.  Instead, she was picked to be vice-presidential candidate simply for who she is (or appears to be) – because it was thought that she would appeal to the right demographic.

Politicians are selected in the same way that manufactured pop bands are – for their media-friendliness, and ability to recite others’ words, more than any great skill they have".

I wonder how Anne Widdecombe fits in here?  As the eccentric and waspish spinster aunt type?

Chris links to an article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Mad Dog Palin, an excerpt of which I cannot resist reproducing here: "’She totally reminds me of my cousin!’ the delegate screeched.  ‘She’s a real woman!  The real thing!’

I stared at her open-mouthed.  In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare.  here’s the thing about Americans.  You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket.  And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her.  Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States.  As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.  But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask in return for the total surrender of our political power.  Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way.  All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation".

Harpymarx of the eponymous blog sounds the alarm over Lone parents: further attacks by new Labour: "More sanctions, more conditionality, more misery and more poverty from NL [New Labour].  And as I wrote before that if NL was at all serious about supporting lone parents then universal free childcare would be at the top of the agenda along with decent jobs and training.  It’s not.  Instead it is about coercion and penalties".

Simon Duncan and Rosalind Edwards in Lone Mothers, Paid Work and Gendered Moral Rationalities (Houndmills, Palgrave-Macmillan, 1999) summarise how the Left and Right have converged on a punitive approach to single mothers in the context of "a British and North American debate that has become polarised between Fabian social policy and conservative new right views of lone motherhood.  Despite their political differences, both tend to see lone mothers as a socially homogenous, categorical group, and both see the national state as the dominant social actor.  Arguably, the current ‘New Deal’ for lone parents in Britain, as proposed by the newly ascendant ‘New Labour’, is using fashionable communitarian ideas as a vehicle to draw on both.  Both sets of views assume a particular notion of personal motivation, based on a neo-classical concept of individual economic rationality.  In turn, this assumption supports a socially simplistic stimulus-response model of the relationship between human behaviour and social policy.  It is assumed that if the national social policy stimulus is changed, lone mothers will respond by changing their behaviour in an appropriate and uniform way.  Thus mainstream social policy analysts propose welfare reform to alleviate the personal constraints on economically rational behaviour.  Changes to the tax and benefits systems should ensure that lone mothers are better off in paid work than they are living on benefits, and publicly funded day care provision should be increased to remove a fundamental block to lone mothers’ uptake of paid work.  The conservative new right also proposes changes in policy, seeking to remove the social threat they see in lone motherhood by removing state support to lone mothers.  A reduction of benefits to lone mothers, for example, will force them into paid work, or dissuade them from divorcing or separating, or even from having children in the first place.  In this way both views lead to a form of social engineering.  Through this debate lone motherhood also has taken a political significance far wider than the policy issues directly raised, particularly in Britain and the USA.  It has become a symbol, and a means of political mobilisation, for rival discourses about the nature of the family and the welfare state.  However, if the underlying assumptions of these views are incorrect – that personal motivation is a matter of economic self-interest and that national states are the only important actor – then these policies are unlikely to have the desired effects.  At best it will be a case of social engineering forcing people, unwillingly and hence inefficiently, into someone else’s categorical box" (pp1-2).

To ascend to and remain in power, New Labour have been forced to perform a balancing act between pleasing their natural constituency and the imperative to woo and appease the middle-classes: "While the New Labour leadership does not demonise lone motherhood, and ‘is not against those who do marry’, it remains convinced that marriage is the ideal state and that living with two biological parents is the best for children.  It is also the best way of dealing with the contradiction between the supposed parenting deficit and the ascribed duty of all adults below pensionable age to take on paid work.  For the two parent family allows specialisation by breadwinning fathers and domestic mothers where the latter, implicitly, are excused from the moral duty to have paid work (…) this policy of neo-classical marriage trading models does little to address gender divisions of labour.  Lone motherhood, in contrast, epitomises the contradiction between paid work and parenting, while the complexities of step-parenting and all the other ‘new family forms’ just complicate matters.  In addition, unemployed lone mothers (like the disabled) continue to eat up a large part of the social security budget as well as reducing potential tax income.  Harriet Harman (1996), at time of writing both Minister for Social Security and, somewhat paradoxically it seems, Minister for Women, has quoted figures of £10,000 per lone mother per annum.  This is a particularly potent threat where New Labour now claims to be the natural, low tax party of ‘middle England’.  Parenting by both biological parents is therefore the best and most efficient family form in linking social morality, social cohesion and economic efficiency" (Duncan and Edwards, pp 285-6).

Whilst on the subject of social meddling, the Heresiarch in Smoking out Smokers explores his ambivalence at new proposals to clamp down on puffing on the evil weed, in connection with a new report Beyond Smoking Kills, more specifically, to quote the press release from Ash aimed at deterring young people from picking up the habit and placing even tighter restrictions on marketing.  For example: "New research from the University of Nottingham, also published in the report, shows that tobacco branding and packaging sends misleading ’smoke signals’ to young people.  Although it has been illegal for manufacturers to use trademarks, text or any sign to suggest that one tobacco product is less harmful than another since 2003, this research shows that products bearing the word ’smooth’ or using lighter coloured branding mislead young people into thinking that these products are less harmful to their health.

The research also reveals that young people are between 3 and 4 times less likely to pick a plain pack as a branded one if they were trying smoking for the first time, supporting calls for plain packaging and countering industry claims that plain packs would be more attractive to young people".

The strategic choice of adjectives with soothing connotations allay fears of the reality of the hacking cough.  Young people are in denial about the dangers of smoking, clutching at straws and the wily manufacturers are all too aware of this propensity.  As for the packs themselves, plain equates with austere, which goes against the grain of the aspiration to exclusivity and luxury.  Teenagers are well-trained fledgling consumers and it is hardly surprising that they might wish to turn their backs on packaging redolent of supermarket brands that "only" the poor buy because they cannot afford to choose any "better".  So far, so innocuous.  I sympathise with the smokers who buy "light" brands, intimately familiar with the psychology of my own particular destructive passion, cakes, chocolate, basically almost any variety of fatty foods.  I don’t want to be constantly chided that they are bad for me.  Besides, until calamity actually strikes, it is not worth worrying about.  The more I am nagged , the more likely I am to comfort myself for all the dire afflictions awaiting me by gobbling a few more squares of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, to hell with the transfats.  The knowledge in itself cannot suffice to dissuade, cannot really compete with the intense physical craving, with the pleasure.  In a poignant and melancholy evocation of enslavement to the habit, Clive James, in Smoking, my lost love, recalls: "I tried nicotine patches and kept sticking them on until they joined up at the edges.  I looked like the flesh-pink version of the jade warrior.  There is a book out now which teaches that every cigarette you have from your second cigarette onwards does nothing for you except raise your nicotine level up to what it was.  Possibly so, but in my case it also satisfied a deep longing, the memory of which lingers like lost love.

Reflect on the frivolity of your desires all you wish, but you will never conquer them unless you first admit their urgency".

In an article in The Guardian, tellingly entitled For once, freedom is not the issue, member of the executive board that drew up the report, Peter Kellner, discusses one of the more radical intrusions put forward: "One of our most striking findings is that as many as 77% of the public would support a ban on smoking in cars carrying children under 18.  Only 11% oppose this.  For the great majority of people, the health of children outweighs the freedom of adults to do what they want in their own private space.  Even among smokers, supporters of a ban outnumber opponents by almost two-to-one (48% support, 27% oppose).

As a young journalist in the 1970s I recall covering the fierce debate over whether the wearing of seatbelts should be compulsory.  The ‘freedom’ lobby lost that battle and, more recently, we have had restrictions on the use of mobile phones by drivers.  Now we find overwhelming support for further curbs on what we can do in our cars – only this time the cause, children’s health, has nothing to do with road safety".

What is a car but a home on wheels, an enclosed private space on public roads?  The boundary between public and private will have been breached if the government is permitted to regulate what we do in our vehicles.

As a result of my Mother’s smoking, I suffered from severe bronchitis as a child, terrified to surrender to sleep as I wheezed, the effort of each breath leaving me completely exhausted, sweating and shivering with cold at same time.  In the end my Mother succumbed to emphysema and heart condition well before her time.  Throughout my childhood, the price of delighting in adult company was to be suffocated in a foul fug.  My brother smokes and I don’t.  I was distancing myself from my Mother, perhaps, instinctively rejecting every aspect of her in order to escape her fate.  My exposure to tobacco smoke, far from enticing me into adopting the smoking habit, disgusted me.   Whereas my brother left school without any qualifications, I have post-doctoral academic research and teaching experience.  My brother belongs to the so-called underclass, whilst I am in a reasonably well-paid job.  We had the same parents and the same upbringing (although, as a boy, he was allowed greater freedoms), but our respective trajectories could hardly be more divergent.  Again, I am fairly certain that gender looms large here: I longed to escape and there was only one route available, namely education.  Gaining financial independence was the key to fulfillment.  I mention all this not to boast, but because our example tends to corroborate research results, as noted by John Henley in The Guardian in All puffed out?: "According to Professor Martin Jarvis, a psychologist at University College London and a leading specialist in the field of smoking and health inequality, this is not a question solely of income: every indicator of a lower socio-economic status is likely, independent of each of the others, to predict a higher rate of smoking.  If your educational level is below the average, you are more likely to smoke.  If you live in rented or overcrowded accommodation, you are more likely to smoke.  Ditto if you do not have access to a car, are unemployed, or on state income benefit".

There can be no doubt that smoking is becoming stigmatised through association with low income groups in a moralising climate where looking after yourself becomes a badge of class status.

Handing over to the Heresiarch: "As the proportion of smokers in the population drops, so the antipathy they arouse in non-smokers rises.  They are becoming an unpopular minority; and while restrictions on smoking have thus far concentrated on removing the intrusive impact of the smoker on the non-smoker, as smoking retreats ever further from the public sphere its remaining practitioners may expect to be the subject of more, not less, disapproval.

Here I should admit to feeling somewhat conflicted when it comes to bans on smoking.  I do not smoke, and I never have, bar the odd after-dinner cigar in my student days (is that still allowed?)  And, from a selfish point of view, I welcome the ban on smoking in public places.  A world without smoking is a far nicer place: it smells nicer, it looks cleaner, and it is undoubtedly healthier.  Smoking is not a ‘pure’ issue of health, because it is demonstrably anti-social.  It is extremely unpleasant (whether or not passive smoking is as dangerous as made out) to be a non-smoker in a smoke-filled environment.  Smoke, as the song says, gets in your eyes.  It also gets in your nostrils, in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin, down your throat.  To be free of it is a blessed relief.

My only personal regret, in fact, is that the ban doesn’t go far enough.  the prohibition of indoor smoking merely shifts the problem out of doors.  On a hot, still summer’s day the stale smell of smoke hangs around in parks and on street corners.  Cigarette ends litter the pavement far more than they ever used to.  True, I miss the colourful and imaginative adverts for tobacco; by and large, however, the total elimination of smoking would make my life even better.

On the other hand everything in me revolts against the self-righteous preachiness of the anti-tobacco lobby, their patronising and totalitarian bossiness, their air of paternalistic concern.  And I want to defend the right of people to kill themselves after their own fashion if that is what they so desire.  Most of all, though, I object to the fetishisation of health, the extent to which personal health is surreptitiously equated to personal morality.  As health becomes a secular religion, with doctors and state nannies its priests, smokers are cast as sinners – who must be reformed, re-educated, taught the error of their ways".

New Labour is convinced that "character, as well as behaviour, can be altered by state intervention from above" (Duncan and Edwards, p286), so the party’s appetite for finger-wagging is insatiable.  What we are witnessing at the moment is the politicisation of health.  What it is really all about is funding the NHS: it is so much easier to badger and bully the public than to risk incurring their wrath at an election by introducing a compulsory health insurance scheme along continental lines.  Thus the government dons a mask of false concern, as prevention is cheaper than cure.  We fatties will be the next in line.  Perhaps we can look forward to being deported to fat camps (as if denial of surgery on the NHS were not penalty enough).  We will be sentenced to a diet of rice crackers or Ryvita until those stubborn and unsightly spare tyres melt away.  The nightmare scenario of nurses with tape measures accosting passers-by has already materialised in Scotland, as if in a culture so obsessed with weight and slenderness anyone with a bit of padding could be unaware of the health risks (ignoring for a moment the pressure brought to bear by the multi-billion dollar diet industry).  It isn’t because we don’t know or are too stupid to know, as argued above.

The founding father of the Roundup Tim Worstall in a Spectator piece, Liberal and Liberals, echoes the slippery slope sentiments: "As to a smoking in a car with children in it?  It is necessary to show that harm is actually done before even an attempt can be made to justify it.  (I can already see where they’ll go next.  If you can’t smoke in your car with the kids then why can you do so in your house?)  That’s actually really something of a problem.  For when the UN did the Mother of All Studies on the effects of passive smoking a decade back they found only one statistically valid finding about child exposure to second hand smoke.  That it protected them in later life from lung cancer".

His fears are justified.  Not so long ago Professor Neil McKeganey, head of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, cheerfully advocated breaching the sanctity of one’s own four walls with the same argument advanced by ASH, urging that CCTV cameras be installed in the homes of drug addicts: "’What price should we put on our privacy?’ said Mr McKeganey.  ‘The question is whether we are prepared to say the principle of the privacy of family life is more important than that of child protection.  If we accept that privacy is the most important principle then there will be many more tragic cases.

‘I am aware that this will be controversial but believe the debate needs to be had.  We have become used to the proliferation of CCTV cameras within public spaces.  We have also become used to the idea that those cameras are an effective tool in crime prevention.  What we have not considered though is their possible use in private spaces’".

ARCH (Action on Rights for Children) blog is rightly up in arms at the latest in a series of Database debacles, this time by the Ministry of Defence’s main IT contractor, entailing the loss of a portable hard drive containing the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of those serving in the army, navy and RAF.  In a nutshell, such bungling beggars belief.  As if this were not bad enough, the authors are incensed about: "(…) the 600,000 potential recruits that particularly worry us.  Presumably a fair number of those are still in their teens and won’t discover for a while yet whether this latest data debacle has made them sitting ducks for identity fraud.

For several years now, the US media has been reporting the increasing use by fraudsters of children’s identities.  The Federal Trade Commission points out that they are ‘perfect targets’ because they have clean credit histories, and are unlikely to know what has happened until they open a bank account or apply for credit".

Inevitably, the storms battering the world economy were bound to blow their way through the Roundup.  Bill Jones of Skipper Blog in a concise and eminently readable Credit-Crunch for Dummies-style Who is to Blame for the Crisis? handily identifies the culprits so that we know who to blindfold and shove in front of the firing squads come the revolution: "(…) bankers became transfixed by the ridiculous sums they could make if they acquired sufficient business for their firms.  Close scrutiny and caution – once the hallmarks of bankers – gave way to a desperate desire to acquire that parking space beneath the skyscraper HQ in Wall St or Canary Wharf, for the new Ferrari.  The super-rich thought nothing about spending £100m on new yachts or even private submarines to swank their way around the world’s pleasure spots during vacations or a hugely early retirement, funded by all those bonuses, companies bought and sold".

Or, ahem, on mature reflection, perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty after all: However, there is a problemette here.  There is another group of people responsible and this is a huge one: all those people who exploited cheap money by loading up with chronic debt, which they now find they cannot sustain by further borrowing.  we are all complicit, to a degree, in what has happened and, I’d guess, will have to return to a much more sobre and cautious way of spending from here on.  If you need a mortgage, you might even have to spend an awkward hour or so in the bank manager’s office, as my generation had to back in the 1960s and 70s".

Lynne Featherstone of Lynne’s Parliament and Haringey Diary (winner of the Best Blog, People’s Choice, accolade at the Gender Balance Blog Awards) laments lack of transparency pertaining to the fate of £37 million in Haringey’s Icelandic Money: "I am concerned that no information as to the details of what is included in the investments is being allowed to me or Robert Gorrie (Liberal Democrat Council Group leader).  All the Chief Exec will say is that the problem is ‘manageable’ and that the Local Government Association is acting for all involved councils".

Adrian McEwen of McFilter wonders whether something he spotted in Liverpool might not just have captured the prevailing mood to perfection in A Sign for the Times?

The perfect antidote to all the doom, gloom and despair surrounding the evil effects of the spectacular economic nosedive, is furnished by Justin McKeating of Chicken Yoghurt in the highly amusing Time for some real intervention in the markets, in which he proposes some truly radical measures to gently encourage the stock markets to rally: "If the FTSE share index is not up by 200 points at 1pm, he [the Prime Minister] will promise, five upmarket cars will be chosen at random from underground car parks in the City and fed into the mobile car crushers.  At the same time, the artillery teams will reduce five randomly chosen houses in the broker belt to rubble".

Blogging

Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire draws attention to a snippet of radio of more than passing interest to bloggers, which might otherwise have been consigned to the archives unnoticed in Tom Harris MP Exit Interview: Spending More Time with his Blog.  In it the former Rail Minister alludes to his most notorious post (which, by one of those odd coincidences that make our lives more intriguing, I dealt with in Britblog Roundup 175) and touches upon the dilemma of the extent of self-censorship (which he euphemistically refers to as "discipline") the ministerial role brings with it, whether departing from the stricture of regurgitating bland pap might earn an MP a reputation as a maverick and jeopardise their subsequent advancement: "Interviewer: But there is a wider point about all this, isn’t there?  How much can a politician say?  Here you are, writing your opinions on every subject under the sun in your blog.  Is that almost a self-destructive act now for a politician?

Harris: It possibly is, and I’ll be disappointed if that turns out to be the case.  I mean, I think we need to look again at the way we communicate with the public.  I don’t think the public are remotely impressed, in fact I would say the opposite is the case, by ministers who sound as if all they are doing is reciting a Labour Party briefing paper,  That has no resonance with anyone at all.  You know people want to be reassured that the politicians are normal people, with normal doubts and normal thought processes.  If by writing about my love of karaoke, or my doubts about whether or not I should buy my teenage son Grand Theft Auto IV, if writing about that sort of thing has somehow blotted my copybook with Number 10 – and I’m not saying that that has actually happened – but if that were to happen now or in the future I think that’s a very, very sad day for politics".

Yes, given the sheer vacuousness and self-serving, semi-articulate nature of most of the bilge churned out by politicians masquerading as bloggers, which in my view is entirely parasitical on the medium, I would be forced to agree with Mr Harris’ conclusion.

By way of an aside, at his blog, transport aficionado Christian Wolmar greets the choice of Harris’ successor with resounding approval in Adonis knows his trains: "His two passions are schools and railways, and this is his dream job (…) it is good news that there is someone in the post with a big brain and an ability to think outside the box".

Indeed, it is reassuring to think that an office holder might actually have a genuine interest in their portfolio, enthusiasm an added bonus, as opposed to grabbing whatever happens to be up for grabs to advance their career.

It is gratifying to have some good news for a change, rather than reciting a dreary litany of bullying and censorship attempts…Slugger O’Toole, whose Mick Fealty is the latest addition to the stable of Britblog Roundup hosts, has made blogging history by organising a ceremony (sponsored amongst others by Channel Four, how heartening to see evidence, beyond BBC Radio Five Live’s excellent Pods and Blogs broadcast, that the relationship between the mainstream media and the blogosphere does not by definition have to be poisonous, antagonistic and characterised exclusively by mutual recriminations and sneering-matches, but that collaboration bringing benefits to both sides is possible with a little goodwill) accompanying the inaugural Slugger Awards (the full list of laureates including links here), Promoting a conversational politics in Northern Ireland.

Another positive aspect of the Awards is that they prove political bloggers are not just snarling Rottweilers ready at a second’s notice to rip the throats out of their targets, but are magnanimous enough to give credit where it is due.  Grannymar, who did a superb job photographing the event, usefully explains the significance of the blog for those readers who might not be familiar with it in I was out last night: "Slugger O’Toole has been following Northern Ireland politics since June 2002.  It is the oldest political blog in and about Northern Ireland and is read by Journalists, Political professionals and bloggers with 23,000 unique visitors every month.  Founded by Mick Fealty, it now has a team of regular bloggers contributing to the site.  Slugger O’Toole is a place where the Blogosphere and the main Stream media merge".

Alan in Belfast of the eponymous blog, in The Slugger Awards – for the wee guy and the big names, likewise puts the awards into their wider context: "Northern Ireland’s been a den of online political conversation, debate and bad-tempered argument for a long time.  It’s out of that foundation of dial-up message boards that Slugger was born all those years ago.  It’s produced a space where people already engaged by political goings-on at a local or national level can voice their opinions against the melee of other informed individuals – including those with vastly different views.

Getting the politically informed to talk to each other is a good first step in Northern Ireland, a land where you’re taught from an early age not to talk to strangers about politics or religion.  Sometimes feels that as a consequence of that human advice, God blesses us with unusually notable weather to give us something to chat about!

But Slugger’s become an online watering hole where the less informed and less engaged can hazard an opinion too.  A place where you’ll not get cut down too quickly, and where it’s possible to have an opinion without having to swear allegiance to a particular party.  With a range of contributors, there’s a spectrum of commentary, and plenty of the post authors pitch in below the line in the stream of consciousness comments too".

For a fuller flavour of the atmosphere, Davy Sims of The Original Sims kindly chips in with a podcast.

Many congratulations to everyone at Slugger O’Toole on the flawless execution of a truly excellent initiative!

Miscellaneous

Gwen of High on Rebellion in If we’re all working class, then really none of us are working class, provides a lucid analysis of an elusive and contentious concept.  For an idea that is so difficult to pin down in a watertight definition, we are all quite content to judge a person’s class instantly, using indicators such as body shape and dress before they even open their mouths.  Class, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  Culture may well be an equally elusive concept, but no definition can lay claim to credibility without it (in Formations of Class and Gender, London, Sage, 1997, for example, Beverley Skeggs concentrates on one particular cultural asset: "Respectability is one of the most ubiquitous signifiers of class.  It informs how we speak, who we speak to, how we classify others, what we study and how we know who we are (or are not).  Respectability is usually the concern of those who are not seen to have it.  Respectability would not be of concern here, if the working classes (Black and White) had not consistently been classified as dangerous, polluting, threatening, revolutionary, pathological and without respect.  It would not be something to desire, to prove and to achieve, if it had not been seen to be a property of ‘others’, those who were valued and legitimated", p1).  Ever more subtle gradations of occupation inform the official system for determining social class for the purposes of the census, but non-academic examinations always include an inventory of outward indicators, which will date with dizzying rapidity (I recommend Jilly Cooper’s hilarious Class, London, Mandarin, 1997, with such one-liners as "The wages of synthetic fibres is social death", p52).  This is quite deliberate, as it prevents those without the time, money or cultural resources from keeping up.  This is not mere whimsy, but the enforcement of distance, the  retrenchment of privilege.

Gwen ventures her own insights: "For me, class is about a combination of things – the amount of money a person earns, the amount of money their parents earn(ed), the amount of options they have at a given time, the choices they are able to make, and envision making and generally the lifestyle they are able to lead.  I know that a lot of this is pretty intangible and nebulous, but so is the concept of class".

She then enumerates glaring defects of the classical Marxist approach to class: "So, by my definition your average university lecturer is at least middle-class.  They earn a higher-than-average wage, they’re very well educated and have options as a result of this, and most of the lecturers I know own their own house and their own car and lead comfortable lives.  They may have debt from acquiring their PhD, but they will be able to pay it off without it seriously infringing on their lifestyle.  This is obviously not universal – a single parent, for example, at a low-paying university may not have a middle-class standard of living.  But on average, a university lecturer is middle-class.

However, the radical left in the UK tends to use the orthodox Marxist definition of class, which measure your class by your relationship to the means of production.  So lecturers are working class because they don’t own/run the university.  When my Dad was working as a salesman he was working-class but when my parents ran their own business, we were petit bourgeoisie, even though we actually had more money and more financial stability when my dad was working for someone else.  The people with whom I was talking tried to explain this as an issue of solidarity – there is no solidarity among the petit bourgeoisie.  But, actually, my parents continued to be decent people who treated their employees well when they ran their own business, whereas some of the other salespeople at the company for which my Dad worked were completely unethical and had no issues with exploiting anyone they could.  And it’s not just my parents – my experience of working for small businesses has been positive, whereas my line managers when I worked for a call centre (theoretically, my fellow workers) were very happy horribly exploiting me.

I don’t think the traditional Marxist definition is very useful today, because it erases the genuine economic privilege held by a lot of people who don’t own the means of production.  There is no comparison between lecturers and call-centre workers.  Solidarity is not going to spontaneously appear between those two groups.  Furthermore, it’s not clear that those two groups HAVE much in common.  Is a middle-class lecturer going to vote to increase her taxes to provide cheap housing for a call-centre worker?  We know for a fact that a lot of them don’t".

Accent and dialect present a particular challenge to even the most highly skilled and highly trained linguists.  In a certain institution, new recruit interpreters who had emerged from their universities a little too cocky and overly eager to show off their technical bravado to their senior colleagues were required to undergo the ordeal of the Wee Hughie M initiation test.  A wonderful character with the rich tones of the damp and fertile soil of his homeland, he would furrow the brows of the neophytes with talk of "Sweet a Donny" (suite á donner), leaving the whippersnappers suitably humbled after their salto mortale left them splattered in the sawdust of the ring (there is no safety net in interpreting). Wee Hughie’s most notorious speech concerned the working conditions of tattie howkers in Plenary.  Cue queues of desperate Greeks and Portuguese outside the English booth.  These reminiscences bring me on to Misssy M of The Misssy M Missives‘ delightful account of a Scottish rite of passage in Out in the Fields: "For those of you not aware of country ways (arrr!) and perhaps from non-potato growing regions of the planet (where do you get your chips?), the idea of a holiday in honour of the potato might seem a little strange.  And if that were the truth, then yes, it would be a little strange.  Kind of like Hawaii having a week off to celebrate the pineapple, or Germany having a local holiday in honour of the cabbage.  But the Tattie Holidays are the opposite of what you might think.  Yes, they are holidays from school, but they are holidays in which the children were traditionally released from the classroom in order to bring in the potato harvest".

Swiss Toni of Swiss Toni’s Place expresses his admiration for members of the teaching profession in could that someone be mack the knife? in which he relates an episode in the local primary school where he assist pupils with their reading once a week: "As you’d expect, the kids were teasing each other when they mis-read or stumbled over a word.  It wasn’t nasty at all and was done in good humour by all of them – it was just gentle ribbing.  I was slightly taken aback, though, when the little boy suddenly blurted out: ‘You’d better watch it.  I’ve got a knife and I’m not afraid to use it’.  he didn’t have a knife, of course.  He was six years old and it was said in exactly the same jokey tone as all of the other mild insults they had been hurling at each other all morning.  I don’t think he even knew what he was saying, and I doubt he knew what it meant.  Even so, the fact that he had clearly picked this phrase up from somewhere suddenly made all that recent press coverage about knife crime in schools feel very real".

In a revealing anecdote about how many of us are so numbed by routine that we cease to interact with our surroundings, Susanne Lamido of Suzblog discusses London’s 24 hour bus strike: "Couldn’t believe my eyes when at the local 390 bus stop people in suits were standing there like lemons waiting for a bus obviously to get them to work".  The cause of her amazement becomes clear when you glance at the accompanying photograph of the poster at the stop, which could only have been more conspicuous if it had been in neon.  In spite of being bombarded constantly with information there would appear to be certain rituals (catching the bus) so taken for granted that they become a reflex.

Philip Wilkinson of the magpie’s shining hoard that is English Buildings mourns for an innocence that has evaporated and a world that has vanished in The Map That Came to Life: "On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child.  Written by H.J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted.  It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them.  Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way.  The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us.

In some ways the world of The Map That Came to Life does not exist today.  These two children set off on a walk across unfamiliar country with only their map for guidance.  They talk to strangers – who give them fascinating nuggets of local information rather than luring them into dark corners.  Their dog spends most of its time off its lead, rivers and lakes hold no terrors for them, and, of course, this being 1948, they are not much troubled by traffic".

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England was also inspired by The Map That Came to Life to embark upon a highly enjoyable meandering from the textbook, through the Ladybird series and a contemplation of radical nostalgia to the difference between the conservative temperament and the Conservative Party.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by cabalamat at Amused Cynicism.  For everything you ever wanted to know about the Britblog Roundup, but were too steeped in your reticent acculturation to ask, please consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

As ever, all nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com