Syma Mohammed is claiming that Muslim women find it significantly more difficult than men to find a partner, as evidenced (she says) by the disproportionate number of women to men at various Muslim marriage events in the UK. She offers a number of explanations, including the fact that Muslim men can marry “people of the book” but women can’t (they must marry Muslims), and that Muslim men are likely to be able to get a wife from “back home”, while women are unable or unwilling to do this. I do not believe the situation is as rosy for Muslim men looking for wives as she makes out.

For a start, in fact very few practising Muslim men marry non-Muslim women. Many scholars recommend against it, as men are expected to make every effort to ensure that their children are raised as Muslims, and this means they see both their parents praying regularly and neither of them (for example) drinking alcohol. In fact, some even say that it is forbidden in a western context as we do not live in a Muslim country, and so the husband cannot guarantee that the children will be raised Muslim if the marriage breaks up and the mother objects. This cannot account for any significant surplus of unmarried Muslim women.

Second, one cannot entirely rely on the disproportionate number of women at these marriage events as a guide, because men and women may have different reasons for going to them. It could well be that the women who attend want to choose their own spouses because they do not want to rely on their own families to choose one for them, as the author says, because they want someone on her intellectual or achievement level, if not higher, and perhaps someone who might have a different mentality to someone their families might find for them. This is less likely to be a problem for men, who are not expected to obey whoever they marry.

She does not acknowledge that men are often expected to have a home ready for the wife to move into, or at least, have a steady job that can pay for all her needs. In theory, a man is expected to be totally responsible for meeting all the wife’s and children’s needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, although many families now accept that it is impossible to do this on one income in London unless one is very wealthy. In many Muslim countries, men cannot marry until their mid-30s because families demand high dowries for their daughters and, sometimes, gifts for themselves also, as well as an expensive wedding and feast and so on, and this is still true with some Muslim immigrant families here. If a man is finding it difficult to get work (as many men are given the economic climate), he is much less likely to be able to persuade a family to allow their daughter to marry him (and the woman does need the family’s permission).

Finally, converts often find it particularly difficult, because immigrant Muslim families are often wholly unwilling to allow their daughters to marry converts. In some cases, they will entirely refuse someone from outside their ethnic or tribal group; some will assume that someone who has experienced life outside Islam will go back to their old life, and some rejections are simply racist. This is not to say that this is never a problem for female converts, but Muslim concepts of “suitability” often demand that the husband have some advantage over the wife in wealth, profession, family history or whatever as he is the head of the household. A female convert will often express the desire to marry an Arabic-speaking man, which is likely to be greatly easier for her than for a male convert, particularly if the Arab is from one of the old Arab tribes.

None of this is to say that a woman who marries easily is guaranteed a satisfactory marriage, but there are factors which may make it easier for a woman to get married, particularly a convert, than a man. It may be easier for a well-educated Muslim man of immigrant background with a good job and a nice house to get married than a similarly well-placed woman, but it is not easier for men in more reduced circumstances.

This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush attack on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim “migrants” (note: not all — perhaps not even most — Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin in the UK are migrants at all), accusing them of maintaining multiple families through polygamy so as to milk the state for benefits. The trick, supposedly, is to marry one wife under Islamic law (i.e. not officially) and another officially, so that one wife (and her children) gets benefits as a single parent, while another gets social security as a married couple.

Two articles have been published exposing the claims in Flather’s article: this one sheds some light on Flather’s background, while this one at Left Foot Forward notes that although birth rates among those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin in the UK are higher than average, they are “not so much higher as to assert there is a general culture of very large families”; according to a Runnymede Trust report published in 2005, their birth rates were both below 3, and thus “far too close to the replacement rate of 2.1 – or the mythical 2.4 children that was deemed to be the ‘normal family’ for most of the immediate post-war period, to be described as some epidemic of large families among these communities”. Furthermore, the rate had been in steady decline, year on year, since 1983. (Report in PDF here.)

I find its central claim about “migrants” being able to bring wives not officially married into the UK to be suspect. In Pakistan, Shari’ah law is the law as regards marriage; any marriage of Muslims within the Shari’ah (that is, up to four wives) is recognised. This is not the case in the UK, which is what would result in the wife being able to claim benefits as a single mother; but this raises the issue of what basis the wives use to migrate to the UK when they have no legally recognised relationship with any British citizen or resident. The man can only bring one wife, and the first wife (should any jealousy arise) could easily claim that she was the “real wife”, by British legal standards, as she was the first woman he married, as all such marriages are recognised in Pakistan. The marriages would have to be conducted in the UK for the second wife to be the official wife, yet how did either of the wives get to the UK? (I should make it clear that I am aware of similar scams being perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and USA for years and in fact some Muslim speakers and bloggers have condemned it. However, this does not explain how anyone can get a second wife into the country on this basis.)

What irks me most about this article, however, is the suggestion that Flather was “brave” to be making it. It’s not brave for a member of the Establishment to be making broad, unsubstantiated claims about an unpopular minority group in the popular press. Bravery requires that there be some risk of personal harm or loss (such as when an ordinary person speaks out about abuse going on within a powerful organisation), not merely the possibility of public censure. It seems that every time someone makes a public attack on Muslims, however ridiculous or insulting the claims are, the reputation for violence Muslims picked up during the Rushdie era (and that was more than 20 years ago) is exploited, when in fact nobody has ever suffered serious harm in the UK for making this sort of public statement and Flather has no more reason than anyone else who has done this (and there are many) to expect it to happen to her, given her long-standing middle-class status and lack of any real connection to the two communities she attacked. Her attack was not brave; it was cowardly.

The BBC issued an advert asking for “Caucasian” white Muslim women to contribute to a programme about their lives since 9/11. They say:

The BBC World Service, Heart and Soul series, is making a programme on Caucasian Female Muslim converts to Islam over the last 10 years since 9/11. We are looking for Muslim sisters happy to share their own personal experiences of converting into a faith which has been on the political agenda over the past decade. The basis of this programme is to mark 9/11 by celebrating these personal, spiritual journeys. The programme will be broadcast on radio internationally.

I’m not going to publish the contact details, because I am sick of media features on converts to Islam overwhelmingly concentrating on white women. There have been so many such features and so often they come with the subtext of “why would a white, middle-class woman want to be a Muslim?”. It’s as if we did not live in a multicultural society and converts to Islam do not come from all of the various ethnic backgrounds and both sexes — why do they not want to hear from black women converts, for example? There are a huge number of them, particularly in London. When I first converted, I heard the story of a man of Hindu background who converted to Islam and was thrown out of the family home by his father when this was discovered. Why are these stories not worth telling?

The bit about being broadcast “internationally” is a clue — perhaps they think foreign audiences want to hear about “real British people” rather than those of foreign backgrounds (needless to say, it doesn’t matter if you are of a white foreign background). White Muslims are not new; they have existed in Turkey, Syria, Bosnia and many other places for centuries. Although at least one of the two contacts is a Muslim, the same might not be true of the others involved in the programme and so the sneering judgementalism found in other documentaries of this type might be just as obvious in this, so if the open racial bias does not put you off, I would advise extreme caution.

About three years ago, I wrote a response to a new “Islamic marriage contract” which had been issued by the so-called Muslim Parliament (now the Muslim Institute) and a couple of other secular-leaning “Islamic” organisations, and the three names listed as contacts regarding it were Cassandra Balchin, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and Mufti Barkatullah. I contacted the last (whose mobile number was attached to a press release) to make sure that he really did endorse it, expecting him to say no, but it turned out that he in fact did. There are a whole host of reasons why the “contract”, which has been reissued as Tehmina Kazi’s article mentions above, is redundant: it is Islamically invalid, regardless of whether a lone scholar endorses it; it is not written in legal language and is full of irrelevant boilerplate as well as vague undertakings that have no place in a legally binding contract, and so would not stand up in a court of law in the UK; besides this, there are moral objections, such as that, as Dr Tawfique Chaudhury notes, “the contract lowers the status and position of the husband treating him constantly from an angle of mistrust”.

The contract is, from any perspective, full of holes. One would think it had been put out as some sort of discussion document; as a legally-binding contract, either in a Shari’ah court or a British court, it is terribly weak and for purported community leaders to endorse it and claim that it empowers women, or anyone, is totally irresponsible. The collaboration of Barkatullah with Siddiqui and Balchin, neither of whom represent traditional Islam and neither of whom are known for their scholarly credentials, is baffling. As I have said before, Siddiqui’s whole career seems to have been spent with the Muslim Parliament, an outfit which faded from view after siding with Khomeini in the Rushdie affair and having moved more recently to a modernist position, hence their reconciliation with Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, now trustees of the Institute, who excoriated the so-called Parliament as “the Mullah’s supporters’ club” in their book Distorted Imagination. He is a community leader without a community.

As for Barkatullah, one suspects that the secularists who wrote this thought that putting his name on it would stop any traditional Muslims from objecting to it, or worse, enable them to accuse us of going against Islam by attacking this “brilliant Mufti” or whatever, but what they fail to understand is that when a scholar puts his name to something that is plainly un-Islamic, it does not mean that we accept it. It means the scholar is out on a limb, and it may lead to his rejection by the community. It is not the first time Barkatullah has come out with outlandish statements; after Abu Hamza and his friends were driven out of Finsbury Park in 2003, he went on the radio to claim that the mosque would be closed to cleanse it of “physical and spiritual filth”, alleging that the Saudi royal family had been cursed from the minbar in that mosque after having funded its construction. Perhaps he might explain where he got the concept of “spiritual filth” from, or how long any mosque that had been used by the Fatimids to curse the Sahaba, let alone the Saudi royal family, was closed for purification after it came back into Sunni hands. In our conversation in 2008, he claimed that the Hanafi madhhab allows for conditions to be included in marriage contracts and used the hadeeth about “the most deserving of conditions”, when in fact, the only madhhab that makes all conditions binding is the Hanbali, not the Hanafi, and the Hanbali school has almost no followers in the UK. The other schools makes stipulations by the wife binding only if linked to a right to a divorce, or an automatic divorce. He also made out that the overwhelming majority of Muslims (I think he meant in the UK) followed the Hanafi madhhab, as if the minority that do not (which includes the Somalis, Moroccans, east and west Africans and most converts) are insignificant.

This does not mean we should not help women to avoid being exploited or abused, but there are other ways of doing this, such as by educating Muslim women and their families about their rights. If reaching practising, orthodox Muslims is the aim, then it cannot be done without respecting the Shari’ah, let alone linked to a barely-concealed attack on it. Perhaps the latter is in fact more important to some people than the former. This contract is incredibly weak, and anyone (especially any woman) adopting it so as to protect their interests in their marriage may find themselves without any protection.

The “evil man” in question is Dawud Adib, the African-American “salafi” preacher, who delivered a lecture some weeks ago at a “salafi” conference in New Jersey in response to Umar Lee’s series of articles, The Rise and Fall of the Salafi Da’wah in America. The first part of the lecture has been published on YouTube (no picture, just audio with a caption), and lasts more than an hour. Umar Lee published a response in his own video, in which he calls Dawud Adib’s claims “lies” and without foundation, and makes some observations about the history of Adib’s movement and its destructive influence on the Muslim community. (More: Peace, Bruv.)

Dawud Adib is quite vituperative about Umar Lee, calling him a “shaytaan” and, later on, a “criminal”. His main thrust is to prove that the “salafi da’wah” did not start in the USA in the 1990s, as Umar supposedly claims in his series, but was present in the USA as far back as the late 1950s and was present when he (Dawud) converted in the 1970s, and embraced it very quickly. He also states that there were “salafi” conferences in the 1980s, albeit addressed by people he would no longer call “salafis” because they have fallen out in a big way, such as Ja’far Shaikh Idris, Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Khaaliq, Idris Palmer and others. Actually, Umar Lee did not say that there had been no “salafi” presence before the 1990s; what he said that, as a mass movement among working-class and particularly African Americans, that is when it was first seen.

It begs the question of why Dawud Adib has waited this long to deliver a lecture of more than an hour at a “salafi” conference in response to Umar’s articles. He could have responded in writing, in public or otherwise, in 2007 when the series was first published. Do they have nothing better to do at a “salafi” conference, like teaching something to do with Islam itself for example? It makes them look rather a petty-minded group of people, still stuck in the conflicts of the late 1990s and still looking for people to refute. He doesn’t actually attempt to refute the factual claims Umar makes; indeed he laughably alleges that Umar must have got his facts from “the feds”, when the articles are hardly meticulously detailed — the section on New Jersey would only come to a couple of pages of A4 — and could have come from talking to anyone who had been in the places mentioned; the “inquisition” which Adib’s group conducted was partly conducted over the Internet, and anyone could view the two sites which promoted much of it, which are both still going.

Adib also falls into the typical “salafi” practice of using verses and hadeeths which clearly refer to non-Muslims and hypocrites and interpreting them as referring to Muslims they disagree with; so, the Prophet’s (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) prayer to “keep my heart firm on your [Allah’s] religion” is interpreted as meaning “on our tiny little micro-sect” and the speech is peppered with repetitions of that prayer next to refererences to various people that have fallen out with his clique, and the minority among the Saudi ulama who support them, over the years. A hadith which refers to people with “upside-down hearts”, referring to the hypocrites (i.e. people who pose as Muslims when they are not), is interpreted as meaning people who have left his sub-division of “salafiyya”. And so on.

It’s pathetic. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remember going to mawlids in and around London and hearing at least one lecture at each of them about why we should be celebrating the mawlid, in one case shouted (as if the imam was talking to opponents of the mawlid), when everyone present had come to do just that, and I remember the tedium of hearing a variant on that lecture year after year. So many “salafi” websites still have refutation material featured very prominently, often more so than anything else — TROID, for example, has “manhaj” as the third item in their menu, and much of the material is directed against other “salafis”. It’s a depressing sight, when other Muslims moved on years ago.

One of the articles mentioned that the tests were justified on the basis of “dark age prejudices” about Asian women: two Australian legal scholars, Dr Marinella Marmo and Dr Evan Smith, say that the women were presumed to be “submissive, meek and tradition-bound” and always virgins before marriage. They also point out that the tests were of no use, because not every woman has a hymen (and it is often perforated before marriage, particularly if they marry at 35). The assumption was therefore that if a woman was a real bride, she would be a virgin. However, it is not reported that these kinds of tests happened anywhere else, even though women from other non-white parts of the Commonwealth, such as Nigeria, came to join settled spouses.

Could it have been, regardless of the excuses offered, that the tests were nothing more than gratuitous sexual abuse, perhaps intended to make immigration to the UK as unpleasant as possible? One recalls that Enoch Powell’s notorious speech specifically mentioned the inflow of thousands of dependents, not immigrant workers. Immigration officials knew that, in general, there is a much stronger taboo about extramarital or premarital sex in South Asian society and that men and women do not touch each other unless they are married or closely related. They knew, then, that the woman would enter her marriage having suffered a traumatic and humiliating experience which they would be unable to tell anyone for fear of rejection or, in some cases, violence. It is odd that no more stringent investigation, with a view to prosecuting those responsible if they are still alive, has taken place.

G2 carried the above article, and it featured a number of Muslim women who claim they are challenging stereotypes and extremism; they include Tehmina Kazi (who has commented here in the past) from the so-called British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Sara Khan of Inspire, Houriya Ahmed who was with the Centre for Social Cohesion until recently, and one Rabia Mirza who is involved with an outfit called Cheerleaders Against Everything which has “informal links” with both the BMSD and the English Defence League. (Having looked at CAE’s Facebook page, it’s not a Muslim group; she just happens to be involved in it.)

If you saw the print edition, you might have noticed that neither of the two women were wearing hijab, and that’s where their claim to be “challenging stereotypes” starts to come down, because stereotypes about Muslim women usually involve those who do wear hijab. There actually are nowhere near as many barriers to Muslim women who refuse the hijaab, or who come from families where it’s not worn anyway, achieving in mainstream society as there are for those who do wear it. Significantly, of the “record number” of Muslim MPs that were elected at the last general election, none of the females wore hijaab and all of the males were clean-shaven.

Then there’s the problem with the groups they represent. British Muslims for Secular Democracy uses the non-Muslim definition of a Muslim — namely, someone who looks like a Muslim, has a Muslim name and claims (however dishonestly) to be one. Two of their trustees are Taj Hargey and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whose status I have discussed here in the past. Alibhai-Brown is a particularly poisonous character, notorious for her broad-brush character assassinations of Muslim women in the popular press. Sara Khan’s group “Inspire” (note: the site has sound which plays automatically) is barely less problematic; it is currently organising an event at City Hall in London, entitled “Speaking in God’s name: Re-examining Gender in Islam”, whose publicity reads:

Unfortunately some of those who deny women their rights claim to do so in God’s Name. For too long these ultra-conservative views in the UK have remained unchanged and unchallenged - until now.

The line-up of speakers includes only one person who could be called a scholar in the traditional Islamic sense; the rest are activists of one sort of another, and are expected to present standard secularist, anti-orthodox views laced with generalised attacks on traditional scholarship and a few stereotypes of their own (such as that classical scholars were all or nearly all men, which was not true, particularly in the very early days which is when most of the work of deciding what was or wasn’t the Shari’ah was done). Although there are no speakers known for extreme hostility for genuine Islam or Muslims (like Hargey or Alibhai-Brown), they do have Amina Wadud, who gave one of her “woman-led Friday prayers” at Hargey’s institution in Oxford. It is significant that no scholar and nobody from any major Muslim organisation in the UK has been invited, so it is not a dialogue with conservative Islam, or even Islam as normally practised in the UK, but merely about it, in the court of a mayor with a long history of hostility towards Islam. It’s a case of “about us, without us”.

They also make some specious claims about female “extremism”, such as that there is a “lack of Islamic literature for female followers and provision for women at mosques” which is why people like Roshonara Choudhary, who stabbed the MP Stephen Timms last year, had to learn their faith from the Internet. There is actually no shortage of such literature — you only have to pay a visit to any Islamic bookshop — and it is not just women who learn about Islam from the Internet; there are many cases of male extremists “self-radicalising” by reading material online, but there are also a lot of quite worthy Islamic forums online, as well as Islamic resources such as question-and-answer websites. As for good-quality Islamic teaching, particularly in English, there is a shortage of that for everyone, particularly adults and converts.

However, my biggest criticism of them is that they are not breaking any ground for Muslim women who wish to follow the deen in its fullness, and that includes wearing the hijaab. It has always been possible for someone with brown skin to tell a right-wing, white-dominated think-tank what its leaders want to hear, and get a job, and there have always been men and women of various ethnicities working in the race relations and equality sector. Neither is there any dispute about the right of a Muslim woman to wear hijab and be a housewife or full-time mother or run a sewing business at home. What’s at stake is the right to wear hijaab and do a normal job, and when these women take off their hijabs and talk about stereotypes about extremism and hijab in the same article, it does the women who practise the deen properly no favours.

The fact is that I have nothing to do with the Islamic Awakening board, am not a member of it and never have been. I followed the story of Usama Hasan’s pronouncement at Kashif Aziz’s blog, Peace, Bruv, and made my first comment on it on DeenPort last Friday and then posted my reaction to his clarification on my blog last Saturday. I’ve never been to Leyton mosque, even when I used to make regular trips to east London (which is a long time ago), and wasn’t at the meeting where he made his inflammatory statements. However, I’ve read some of his interviews in the media, and it is clear that he has been drifting away from what anyone would recognise as mainstream Islamic opinion for a long time, long before this. Those who have opposed him in the recent evolution controversy have also noted some of the things he has said about the status of the hijab, for example.

The claim that any pronouncement of kufr (unbelief) or apostasy is tantamount to a death threat is simply wrong. Anyone who listened to Abdullah Faisal’s taped lectures from the 1990s will hear several individuals named and called kafirs, mostly black American "salafi" preachers such as Abu Usaamah (who presently works as an imam in Birmingham) and Dawud Adib, for defending the legitimacy of the Saudi regime and opposing terrorist attacks on such institutions as the Egyptian army. In one tape, Faisal asks his listeners, "what shall we do with this man", and he makes them repeat "kill him!" three times before saying "I think that makes sense". Yet the person named has not been murdered. He also explicitly called Bareilawis (the majority of Pakistani Muslims) kafirs, but we have not seen Faisal’s followers going around killing Bareilawis.

I do not know who, if anyone, is threatening Usama Hasan’s life. I certainly am not, and I haven’t told anyone to harm him, and I am not in contact with the sort of people who would (and I seriously doubt they read this blog regularly — they know I have a long-standing antagonism towards "salafis"). The issue is that Usama Hasan should not be an imam, regardless of his current status, and if it were not for being Suhaib Hasan’s son, would have been removed from any position of influence the same day he made the statements that caused all the fuss. Nobody needs to get hurt over this; what needs to happen is for Usama Hasan to resign, or be sacked. Of course, as a British citizen he does have the right to freedom of conscience, but that means nobody has the right to harm him for exercising it; it does not mean he has the right to stay an imam if his community no longer wants him.

It just so happens that Usama Hasan was associated with a “salafi” mosque in Leyton, but this would have been just as controversial if it had been said in any mosque. Muslims simply don’t believe in the evolution of the human species, end of story. A sample of what was said at the event where these statements were made in January is posted here; some of his other statements were made in an interview on the BBC Hardtalk programme in 2007 and in an email sent to a mailing list called Abjadiyya, in which he describes women wearing niqaab and men who grow their beards as looking, respectively, like “ninjas and clowns”. These statements are reproduced in this PDF which has the important conclusion:

Usama Hasan’s contemptuous attitude towards Masjid al-Tawheed congregation, by considering them descendants of apes, ninjas and clowns, calls for the congregation to be more vocal and proactive in taking the authority of the mosque back from Usama and those who back him, for a mosque is a house of Allah, and a community centre, and not a family business.

Yesterday, he posted a notice on his blog retracting a number of the statements he made about the matter of the “parentage” of Adam, peace be upon him, but did not resist the temptation to get a dig in at his opponents:

Neither does it excuse those who have continued their mediaevalist, hair-splitting theological and jurisprudential discussions whilst remaining silent about the clear incitement to murder uttered by some in their midst. “Slaughter the people, but worry about killing mosquitos.”

This last comment refers to the behaviour of certain sectarians in the early days of Islam who were so pious as to have asked as to whether killing a mosquito would nullify their pilgrimage, but were associated with various killings and massacres of other Muslims over usually very minor disagreements. He accuses people of threatening his life; that is the hallmark of the Quilliam group, who are fond of portraying themselves to the mass media as boldly speaking out against extremism when nobody else will (it is a standard tactic of anyone who wants to portray themselves as lone defenders of truth; the death threats do not have to be real). One recalls Hassan Butt, who admitted inflicting stab wounds on himself and attributing it to a “Muslim extremist” who was angry at him for turning against them, when in fact he had made up much of his story about his “adventures” with al-Qa’ida in Pakistan.

Usama Hasan’s actions require a mea culpa, an unconditional retraction and repentance, without any parting shot at anyone, and without it, Muslims should not accept him. While anyone threatening him was in the wrong, it is he who was in the wrong by making statements which are incompatible with Islam and then expecting to remain in a position of authority at a mosque of any stripe. In fact, this action allows him to cast himself to his non-Muslim admirers (like Johann Hari) as a kind of Muslim Galileo, forced to retract beliefs he “knew” to be true by obscurantist religious authorities. He is nothing of the sort; he was facing nothing more than the loss of a job which he and his few supporters seem to have regarded himself as entitled to by birth, but which his beliefs made untenable. He was not facing the chopping block.

If Usama Hasan is sincere, he should accept that he has burned too many bridges with the Muslim community at large, that people are not comfortable praying in a group led by him, that many people no longer trust him, and he should step down immediately. After all, when I converted to Islam myself, I did not become an imam; I became an ordinary Muslim, and this is what he should have to accept, and his supporters should as well. To reiterate, a mosque is not a family business, and nobody is entitled to leadership because of who their father is.

We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.

These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.

So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat.

As mentioned in a previous entry, the situation is a little more complicated than just Pakistani men grooming white girls anyway (as the authors of the original report — PDF here — have said publically), but the idea that a whole culture is contributing to the activities of these gangs seems somewhat dubious. It’s not whole communities, it’s particular gangs of men who are involved in other crime besides this kind of grooming, and when young men are “buzzing with testosterone”, they do not form organised gangs of this kind of structure. A young woman who had been targeted in this way spoke on a BBC panel discussion programme this morning, and said that she was initially befriended by younger teenage boys, and got passed up via a group of older teenagers to the men in their late 20s and early 30s who carried out the sexual assaults. So, the guys who are “buzzing” don’t get the sex. They act as apprentices and dogsbodies, much as younger recruits do in gangs the world over.

It may be true that there are men in these communities who are seeking sexual encounters with young white girls because they cannot conduct relationships with those of their own background, because the girls are unavailable and they themselves are promised in marriage to someone from the village back home (although this is less true now than it used to be, and people are more willing to insist on finding a spouse themselves, particularly if they go to college). Even if one may object to the attitude that the young white girls are “easy” compared to Pakistani ones, it is still not the same as forming gangs to groom and rape girls.

Also mentioned on the panel discussion was that Jack Straw might have been trying to influence a by-election in Oldham where there are a lot of Bangladeshis. What was left out was the resonance that portraying Pakistani men as sexual predators might have for Bangladeshi voters (in short, during the Bangladesh war of independence, a huge number of women in what was to become Bangladesh were raped by Pakistani soldiers). Straw’s last pronouncement on issues related to Muslims were disastrous, leading to a huge press campaign against Muslim women who wear the niqaab. Neither his voting record with regard to Bush and Blair’s wars, nor that incident, cost him his seat. Assuming he intends to contest the seat again, I wonder if this bit of race-baiting will cost him his Gujarati Muslim votes in Blackburn. (More: Osama Saeed.)

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.