I haven’t had much experience of the religious variant, but one of my Muslim female friends, who lives in a provincial town, reported that she had been accosted in the street by someone trying to sign her up for their church, asking her if she believed in Jesus (peace be upon him). It tends to be evangelical Christians who do this, partly because they (unlike other branches of Christianity) regard proselytising as important, but also because other religions either don’t believe in attracting converts (eg. Hinduism) or simply because the UK is a Christian country, by heritage, and other communities don’t really feel that they have the right to spread their religion so aggressively. (Some groups do attract people of their own minority religion at home or in the street, like the Lubavitchers among Jews or the Tablighi Jamaat among Muslims, but they do not approach others, usually.) It is irritating because we should not have to justify our beliefs to a hostile, total stranger. They can also be quite intimidating and often seek out “don’t know” answers. They often promote a harsh, simplified version of the religion.

My view is that one should deal with these people by sticking your palm out towards their faces. They have no right to interrupt you as you go about your business. I particularly resent the charity representatives (mostly, I’m told, out-of-work actors) because I could not afford to sign up for a direct debit as I don’t have the income. Also, some of us have charities we donate money to or give of our time to, so nobody has the right to pressure us to sign up for theirs too; we often just can’t. Also, I don’t want to end up face-palming someone, thinking them to be a charity mugger, and discovering them to be a friend or relative. I do wish they’d find a better way of raising money.

What’s the difference between a one-day niqaab experiment and being a niqaabi? For one thing, a real niqaabi is doing it out of a real sense of religious commitment and gains some degree of strength from that in dealing with whatever strange looks and hostility she may encounter. She most likely lives in a place where there are plenty of niqaabis, so there is strength in numbers, and has friends who also wear niqaab. She has tried a number of different types of veil and has found one which suits her and is comfortable — there are many types, but the “three layer Saudi black niqaab” seems to be the most popular. Someone doing an “experiment” will find that they can’t breathe or see properly through the veil, that they get funny looks and might complain that they can’t express themselves properly.

Similarly, the disability-related experiments fail to represent the real experiences of everyday disabled people, not least because the experimenters jump straight into one aspect of being disabled in a way that nobody with a real disability ever does. Let’s take a wheelchair-user with a spinal cord injury, for example: these days, they will most likely have a lightweight chair which is specially made for their body and which may have been customised somewhat to fit their personality, while an experimenter will be using a clunky hospital chair that is typically used to transport an old person home in a van but not much more. The real wheelchair user will know that they will still have to use the wheelchair the next day, so they will be thinking of ways round the obstacles they encounter (and of fighting any obstacles society may put in their place), not huffing and puffing and then thinking “I can’t wait for tomorrow when I can walk”. But perhaps most importantly, before getting in the chair, the user will have spent weeks or months bedridden or attached to some immobilising device so as to let their injury heal, so compared to what they had before, using a wheelchair may well feel like freedom, which it won’t to someone who’s just walked up to the chair and sat down. Even for someone who is not paralysed but is, say, debilitated by a condition like M.E., a wheelchair may allow them to get out of their house, which they could not otherwise do.

Anyone approached for advice on such an experiment should be told very simply not to do it, and ask someone who wears a niqaab every day (or uses a wheelchair, if that’s the experiment) about their experience. There are many women around who do and many of them are more than willing to tell their stories, which will be so much more representative and meaningful than anything you would learn from a one-day experiment. We’ve all heard of walking a mile in someone’s shoes, but if your feet hurt from doing so, it’s probably because their shoes are not your size.

This article appeared in today’s Daily Mail, and is meant to be in defence of Shirley Chaplin, a nurse in Devon who took her healthcare trust to court to secure her right to wear her cross while caring for patients, as she had done for 30 years until the rules were changed a year or so ago. Nothing wrong with that, on the surface. However, Taj manages to get his agenda of attacking Muslims while pretending to represent “moderate” Islam into the article, as might have been expected, by attacking women who wear the so-called burqa and a new mosque planned in Camberley. (More: Engage.)

His opening claim, that “Christianity is under siege in this country”, on the basis that nurses cannot wear crosses in some NHS hospitals, is palpably ludicrous. However, the historical links between healthcare and Christian institutions are a fact; it’s why nurses’ uniforms have evolved from what looked like nuns’ habits and why they used to be called “sister” (of course, that was when they were all, or nearly all, female); the St John Ambulance organisation also has its roots in a monastic organisation. The excuse given is that patients might grab her necklace; the real reason is probably not even hostility to religion but just that it was another opportunity to make workers a bit more uniform and a bit less individual. (In the mental health sector, suppressing religious symbols might have some justification, since religious symbolism features heavily in some mental illnesses, but that surely isn’t so when treating normal, physical illnesses.)

Hargey claims that there is no conflict between Islam and Christianity, that we come from the same Abrahamic tradition, and uses what he calls the “key verse” in the Qur’an, “the people closest and dearest to Muslims are those who say: ‘We are Christians’”, as proof that Muslims have a duty to defend Christianity when it is under attack. The question should be asked whether these same Christians when they come under attack; would the nurse or the airline attendant suing for the right to wear a cross to work defend the right of a Muslim woman to wear the hijab if it came to it? Some would but, as has been seen in Europe and in some of the attempts to establish a Christian right in the UK, some definitely would not.

He then goes on about “shrill demands for the imposition of the burqa in the Muslim community”, a baseless accusation. Who is demanding the “imposition” of the burqa, or even the niqaab? All that is being asked is that women who choose to wear it, for whatever reason, not be harassed or prevented from going about their business. He claims, “I would not want to see it banned, for that might only heighten the sense of martyrdom and grievance among the zealots, but I certainly believe that mainstream Muslims have a duty to speak out against it”. The Muslims who wear and support niqaab are not “zealots”, and I’ve known plenty of them. While I don’t doubt that there are a few who wear it because people in their family insist, many wear it because they regard niqaab as the completion of hijaab and because the women who were closest among the Sahaba wore it. They are not, by any means, all or even mostly hardline “salafis” or even Deobandis.

He also alleges, “the same argument could be made against minarets, which unlike Ms Chaplin’s crucifix, could also be seen as inflammatory - and for which there is no religious requirement in Islam”. It is true that minarets are a cultural rather than strictly religious tradition, and that the earliest mosques originally did not have them, but the fact remains that when Muslims came to this country, they came from countries where mosques had minarets. Their value in this country, where the call to prayer cannot be given in most places because it would cause a disturbance, is mainly symbolic, but in many places, they have adjusted in size and design to reflect this (the clock-tower minaret at the mosque here in Kingston is one example). They are not “inflammatory”. People have decided to make an issue of them in other countries. That is all the controversy is about.

I agree that there is no real reason to stop this nurse wearing her cross. However, that point could have been made by any Muslim without taking side-swipes at Muslims. It appears that these side-swipes were the real purpose of Hargey’s whole article: to show himself and his small clique in Oxford as representing “real Islam”, as if what is practised by a million and a half Muslims in this country is not. The fact is that Taj Hargey is regarded by any Muslims in this country who have heard of him as a disloyal, unrepresentative nobody who gets airtime because he tells the media what they want to hear.

Later on, I read a guest post on Harry’s Place by the “Protest the Pope Campaign”, which accused the Pope of personally acting to cover up various cases of sexual abuse by priests as a bishop and as a cardinal. This group held a protest outside Westminster Cathedral in London at 12 noon yesterday (Palm Sunday), and claimed that their protest was met by “jeers and support” by the attendees, although “most expressed no opinion either way”. They included a picture of their rally, which showed how tiny it was and who it really represented: “London for a Secular Europe”, the National Secular Society, and OutRage. Click through to their home page, and you can find their list of supporters, which include a rag-bag of the usual anti-religious suspects, including the “Council of ex-Muslims of Britain” and the Iranian exile contingent (One Law for All). The Southall Black Sisters are the nearest thing they have to a group representing abuse survivors.

While I don’t much care for the idea of the Pope being granted a state visit, the honour implicit in it really went away when George Bush jr was given one a few years ago. This campaign would have more credibility if it was supported by groups which really were set up to represent survivors of sexual abuse, not groups whose sole purpose is to bash religion, of whatever sort. I would happily protest against a Papal state visit if it were not dominated by these people. The whole purpose of Harry’s Place is to police the left for ideologically incorrect associations and to police religious organisations for utterances or associations they find distasteful. Secularists in general like finding examples of cruelty in religious institutions (see my review of “Does God Hate Women?” last year for a classic example) but they conveniently forget that cruelty happens everywhere.

It’s true that there was terrible abuse in Catholic-run orphanages and other institutions in Ireland (and elsewhere) in the mid-20th century, but there have been plenty of scandals involving non-religious state care in this country: people (particularly women) kept locked up for no real reason for decades after suffering post-natal depression, for example. The Irish symphisiotomy scandal had much to do with the Catholic hospitals’ anti-contraception ethos, but it was not Catholic hospitals who sterilised supposedly feeble-minded women in the USA and Sweden in the mid-20th century. The reality is that this kind of behaviour thrives when there is unchecked power and no accountability, and it exists in many secular institutions (particularly the medical profession) as well as religious ones.

Oh, and here’s something you won’t read on Harry’s Place: Mohamed Ali Harrath, the CEO of the London-based Islam Channel, who had been arrested in South Africa on the basis of an Interpol Red Notice posted by the Tunisian government, was released after said government failed to produce any evidence for their claims. Harry’s Place has dropped the notice into an entry any time they wanted to smear the channel (like here), and the fact that it comes from a dictatorial government notorious for torture apparently doesn’t matter to them.

I walk through the Old City, pondering my encounter with this strange, kindly man. Something seems to be missing from his story. To stand in front of a rabbi whose father was in the SS and to hear he became a Jew because he doubted the Trinity is absurd. So I telephone Dan Bar-On, a professor of psychology at Ben Gurion University, and a world expert on the psychology of the children of perpetrators. He tells me, flatly, pitilessly: “The motive of the converts is to join the community of the victims. If you become part of the victim community, you get rid of the burden of being part of the perpetrator community.” He interviewed Shear-Yashuv for his book Legacy of Silence. “For me,” he says, “Shear-Yashuv [a rabbi whose father was in the Waffen-SS but has himself served in the Israeli army] represents a person who ran away from the past.”

Speaking as one who has been through a religious conversion myself, I cannot accept that everyone who converted in such circumstances must have done so solely out of guilt for their parents’ actions. Such a motive of disgust for the behaviour of one’s own people and perhaps the sense of disgust at being expected to collude in it or excuse it later may contribute to starting one’s journey, but that does not necessarily mean that conversion itself has an ulterior motive. I cannot speak for any of these individuals, but this article seems to be generalising about the motives of these people and everyone else. It is, of course, quite likely that someone who is unconvinced by the Trinity seeks another religion, whether one’s father was a Nazi war criminal or anyone else; Tanya Gold’s contact, one Dan Bar-On, a professor of psychology at Ben Gurion University in Tel Aviv, dismisses the converts’ “obsessive” talk of the Trinity as their way of rationalising a desire to “join the community of the victim”.

The article does briefly touch on the curious choice of Israel as an emigration destination for ex-German Jews disgusted by their parents’ or grandparents’ actions. It is noted that one emigrant and convert appears to regret her decision as immaturity, and professes shock at the racism she encountered towards the Arabs; she now monitors Israeli soldiers’ behaviour at checkpoints. Another interviewee, a supposed descendent of Hitler’s brother Alois (junior), but who is in fact descended from a woman his illegitimate son married, calls his Israeli son a fascist because of his attitude towards the Arabs.

I am not saying I regard the Israelis as no better than the Nazis - their attitudes and behaviours are more typical of those of white colonials dealing with natives than of Nazis - but it does seem odd that people traumatised by associations with racially-motivated atrocities should think that moving there, of all places, and assisting the Jews in oppressing another people and sharing their contempt for them should serve as some sort of expiation.

Last Thusday, BBC2 aired a bio-pic of Mary Whitehouse, the woman who launched a “Clean Up TV” campaign (which evolved into the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association which is now MediaWatch UK) which lasted several decades and led to the establishment of the 9pm “watershed”, after which they can show sex and violence and swearing. She became a hate figure, not only because many people actually liked the things she was complaining about, or at least did not find every instance of it offensive, but also because she became notorious for complaining about things she had not in fact seen, and for seeking out excuses to be offended.

I found bits of the bio-pic, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, enlightening, and there were highly amusing bits (such as when she and her fellow campaigners initially called their campaign Clean Up National TV), but reading reviews of the programme make me less sure about the programme’s honesty. The director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, who refused to meet Whitehouse, was portrayed as a misogynistic boor, but according to the Guardian’s review, he “had reported the German invasion of Poland to the sleeping Poles and had seen all he ever intended to see of censorship”. There was one scene, near the beginning, where Whitehouse was shown happily cycling through a bucolic English country village past a bruised, battered housewife, and (although this must have been a bit I missed), there were speculations about her supposedly repressed sex life also. The film improbably suggests that Greene resigned in frustration after yet another missive from Whitehouse, but it’s commonly believed that the real cause of his resignation was an internal power struggle. Also, the Pink Floyd song Pigs (Three Different Ones), which explicitly attacks Whitehouse, formed the background music fairly early on in the programme, when Whitehouse was getting hostile letters, but it did not appear on record until 1977, more than ten years after this part of the story.

Yesterday some idiots decided to hold a party on the Underground, to mark the passing of the age when they could drink on the public transport system in London. I didn’t support Boris Johnson as anyone who has been reading me for a while knows, but this is long overdue; I find sitting around people who insist on drinking on the Tube (usually men, usually late at night) threatening and besides, I don’t want any of it on my clothes, thank you very much. I am usually in favour of civil liberties, but people’s right to travel and not feel threatened as they do so is more important.

The other day Tony Blair launched his Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which “aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world” according to its mission statement. I can’t help but be cynical about this whole exercise, as when he was in office, Blair went along with Bush all the way, and the prevailing agenda under Bush is not about uniting the “three Abrahamic faiths” but uniting two of them against a third. I would like to see a campaign aimed at uniting people of faith against oppressive secularism, and opposing ostensibly secularist or nationalist legislation which tramples on the rights of religious minorities while conveniently allowing followers of the majority religion to function unhindered, and if that is what Blair intends to do, all well and good. If it’s another vehicle for Blair to go round the world giving feel-good speeches to select audiences (who won’t ask difficult questions) while making lots of money, it’s not so good.

This week the price of fuel seemed to continue its inexorable rise, with diesel selling for more than £1.30 per litre (yes, litre) in many places in the UK, and truckers were complaining that they could not feed their families because they were spending too much money on fuel. I can’t help but think that the reason fuel is now getting scarce is because it has been wasted; some of these trucks have 14- or even 16-litre engines, not all of them used for moving abnormal loads, and a few years ago Scania discontinued a 14-litre engine in favour of a 16-litre one. An example of wasting fuel is the journey I had to make on Thursday, in which I had to go from Hastings to the Isle of Grain via Ashford, which involved driving for an hour and a half along “main roads” which are actually mostly windy and hilly country lanes (the A259 and A251), just to deliver one plastic sign to a building site in Ashford, which could have been sent by post or by courier. The difference between the two journeys is about 20 miles, completely out of proportion to the volume that had to be delivered (and the van was fully loaded). Companies really need to consider whether it’s necessary to send a van out for tiny deliveries like these.

Until I read the above blog article, I was planning to write an entry about how I supported Lydia Playfoot’s campaign to be able to wear a silver ring to school, as part of one of those no-sex-before-marriage campaigns the Evangelical churches are fond of. While I have my reservations about the SRT and about all those campaigns, I don’t see why wearing a ring to school should be a reason why a girl should be suspended or expelled - uniform or no. I’m also a long-standing opponent of uniforms themselves, because they are often uncomfortable, they make kids stand out to pupils of other schools, because they are expensive, because the claims made for them (like masking social divisions) don’t stand up (as if you can’t identify a child’s social class by where they live and how they talk), and because they exist solely for historical reasons, and several countries (including Canada and much of Europe) do perfectly well without them.

But it turns out that this isn’t a righteous rebellion against the tyranny of school uniforms at all, but what seems to be a publicity stunt. The girl’s mother is actually the SRT’s UK company secretary, and her father is their Parents’ Programme Directory, and both work with SRT UK’s managing director, Andy Robinson, who is also handling media enquiries in conjunction with a Bournemouth-based PR company. (Lydia Playfoot lost her case on Monday.)

This is something br. Mas’ud Khan posted to his website a couple of weeks ago, which I only just got round to looking at for the first time in a while. It gives an inside story into the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in inciting the atrocities their side committed against Muslims, the heroism some of their churchmen and theologians attach to known war criminals, and the Church of England’s silence on the matter while the massacres were taking place. He also exposes the attitude the Serbian clergy have towards western “pseudo-churches”, among whose clergy are people who make “well-meaning visits” during which they “kiss Orthodox cheeks”. I found it significant that the webmaster of a prominent Orthodox Christian website in English is a member of this church, despite having a distinctly un-Serbian name (bio here), and has published and linked several articles and extracts from the inveterate anti-Muslim hatemonger, Srdja (or Serge) Trifkovic, on the site.

Meanwhile, UN prosecutors have accused the former interior minister of Macedonia (another predominantly Orthodox country, adjacent to Serbia) of standing by and watching Albanian civilians being murdered during an uprising in 2001.

Reading the DeenPort discussion thread on this subject, an influential contributor calls this “old news”, as here:

If a cleric is foolish enough to have two-faces, a nice touchy feely public face and a nasty bile spewing private face then whatever befalls him/her is what their own faces have earned them and no amount of “misquoted” or “out of context” will convince me to defend such views and such a person as I know for a fact that such people routinely talk like this in private.

Another contributor accused the programme-makers of sensationalism, noting that the halls in which they spoke were practically empty other than during salat. My own sensationalism charge stems from the continual use of phrases like “brainwashing”, particularly aimed at the University of Madinah. I have not been to the UM myself, but I would not have thought those involved needed much brainwashing. Wahhabism (and Ahl-e-Hadeeth, the branch of it on which this programme concentrated) does not spread like the “Church of Christ” cult with people striking up conversations in the street, but is an established presence in many Muslim communities. One way into it, particularly Ahl-e-Hadeeth, is being born into it, but it also spreads through university Islamic societies and through contacts in inner-city ghettoes. It is well-known that much of the small Afro-Carribean Muslim community in south London belongs to another branch of the sect, which controls Brixton mosque and a network of other mosques across the country.

From my personal encounters with Wahhabis in London, I am certain that part of the appeal is ethnocentric, particularly for converts. However, another part is the fact that it aims to do away with “divisions between Muslims” and with harmful cultural practices. Those who accuse the Wahhabis of doing away with the rich cultural heritage of the Muslim world often forget that this heritage includes not only all that “wonderful music” they’d have us all listen to but also female genital mutilation and the biraderi nonsense found in the Pakistani community here.

Returning to Dispatches, it irked me considerably that images of women in niqab were shown again and again. I’m aware that some Britons are uncomfortable with niqab, but no evidence was shown that those women had anything to do with the preachers who were shouting about dirty kuffar. As I’ve said before, women who wear niqab come from virtually every point on the spectrum of moderation and “fundamentalism”, and not all women attached to political Islamist groups like Hizb-ut-Tahreer wear niqab. In fact, most of the women I’ve seen around HT do not wear it. At the couple of al-Muhajiroun functions I attended (and no, I was never a member), most of the women I saw did not wear niqab.

The programme also showed the preachers discussing what are actually normal Islamic opinions and practices and seemed to suggest that they were morally equivalent. For example, the command to enforce prayer on older children in the family, and to hit them if they refuse, is not limited to the people shown up as extremists in the programme: it comes straight from the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam). In Islam the prayer is an extremely serious matter; in the west, some parents hit their children for things of considerably lesser importance. It’s not illegal for a parent to hit his or her children in the UK. It never has been.

It’s worth pointing out that the group featured only really represents a small segment of the Muslim community, even in Birmingham. One commentator at DeenPort made the point that Ghamkolvia, the Bareilawi mosque, “rules the roost in that part” of Birmingham, which everyone who knows the community knows. People who don’t agree with them don’t go to the talks, don’t buy the tapes and DVDs and generally don’t listen. However, the programme is likely to cast more suspicion over the Muslim community generally, not just the small group involved, while much of the Muslim youth get defensive and accuse Channel 4 of taking their words out of context and the profile of Uncle Tom pseudo-Sufis is raised further; this outcome could have been avoided if they had stuck to the facts, without resorting to inflammatory side facts and juxtapositions.