Kate Melville weeps for the hijab- and niqab-wearing Muslim women who have no freedom of movement and step out into traffic because they can’t hear what’s going on around them. Presumably she weeps equally for the legions of women tottering around the streets in four-inch stiletto heels, pencil skirts and with headphones clamped to their ears?

(And that’s not even the Muslim response.)

Contrary to Ziauddin Sardar’s claim (“Who are the British Asians?”, 29 September), Asians did once have a composite identity, which was a powerful constituent of Britain’s anti-racist movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

Two events broke it asunder: the invasion of the Golden Temple at Amritsar by the Indian army in 1984, and the disturbances after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988. These events alienated Asians, not only from the indigenous population, but also from each other, leading them to seek their identities in religion rather than ethnicity.

New Labour’s flirtation with religious groups, its state funding of faith schools and provision of generous grants for the opening of religious institutions merely accelerated the process of deracination. No wonder that today, young Asians in Britain see themselves not as members of one racial group, but merely as Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus.

I am sure there are more than just two incidents which drove a wedge between the different Asian religious communities in the UK. It should not be news to anyone that the different Asian ethnic and religious communities in India are not altogether at peace with each other: there are Hindu and Tamil nationalists today and there were Sikh nationalists, who boarded trains and massacred people, and blew up planes in the sky. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, and the accompanying campaign of mob actions, would have driven a bigger wedge between Muslims and Hindus than the Amritsar massacre would between Sikhs and Hindus; the action was by the Indian state, under secularist control.

“India” is a product of the British colonial era; it did not exist as an independent state until the 1940s. Before the British period, there had been the Moghul empire, which did not control the Dravidian south of India; there were also various other states including Muslim kingdoms independent of the Moghul north. Although the Hindu religious traditions and Sanskrit-based culture and influence on language are found throughout, they are also found in Indonesia and elsewhere in south-east Asia, where the languages are as divergent from Hindi or Gujarati as Tamil is - that is to say, more divergent than English language and culture is from German, and the British and Germans were at war with each other twice in the last century.

As for Asian solidarity, it is a product of the racism of the 1960s and 1970s; as it weakened as Asians became settled in the UK, the need for it lessened and the differences between the various religious and ethnic communities came nearer to the surface. However, there are still those who want to go back to the “good old days”, which in fact were not very good at all if you were being beaten up in the streets for being a “Paki” or having your private parts inspected at the airport to see if you were a virgin, when the National Front were looking at a 15% share of the vote. What was different was that the ethnic minorities’ agenda was dictated by the leaders of the anti-racist movement, who tended to be secular leftists. This is not to say that they did not do a good job at the time, but times have moved on.

Of course, things have happened in the Subcontinent that drive wedges into religious communities, sometimes along ethnic lines, as well as the other way round - the Bangladesh war of independence being a typical example, which still breeds resentment between Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to this day. However, that was an exception, and it demonstrates the danger of nationalism: a group of Muslims believed that they had the right to dominate over another in their own country, imposing their language even though it was entirely foreign to the region, in much the same way as they had experienced at the hands of the British, and were resisted by those natives.

Racial solidarity, when it is not driven by necessity, is a tool of racism and oppression. The athletes who gave “black power” salutes at the 1968 Olympics are hailed as heroes, but when Robert Mugabe denounces British imperialism today, he receives no such sympathy, because he is using it to hold on to power after he has ruined his country, for blacks as well as whites. In the past, it was necessary because the Asians (and blacks) were facing an effort by white racists, and even mainstream politicians, to drive them out of the country. That is not happening to anything like the same extent today; the chief target of hatred by the same people who used to lead attacks on blacks and Asians is now Muslims, mainly (but not only) Asian Muslims, and these people also sometimes embrace elements in the Hindu and Sikh populations. These are the “good” Asians (or Indians, as they sometimes call them, reserving “Asian” for use on Muslims). If you try telling this to some people whose conditioning was in the 1970s or 1980s, they will not believe you.

The other day, I was having an online conversation with a Somali woman who, on a previous occasion, had told me that she supports the likes of “Ed” Husain and Maajid Nawaz. This time, we were talking about interracial marriages, and why a number of those I had spoken to about this subject were Somali. The truth is that physical attraction has a lot to do with it, but I also said that they were not stuck-up like a lot of Asians are (as you will find a lot of Asians unwilling to marry their daughters to converts, especially black converts). She replied that Asians were not stuck-up, but that they preserved their culture, which is a good thing. I do not object to immigrant-descended communities preserving some aspects of their culture such as their cuisine and clothing, but I do believe that Muslims should not let culture be a source of division because, to paraphrase John Major, such disunity is “a luxury we cannot afford” as a small and threatened minority. She told me that she did not believe there was such a thing as the Muslim community, nor was she part of it; she was a Somali.

Perhaps such attitudes are understandable coming from a member of an ethnic group which is almost entirely Muslim; this is not true for Asians, who are not united by language, cuisine, clothing, religion, or anything else except a common British colonial heritage. It is even less true for converts. If, as is the case for some converts, your own family turn against you and kick you out of your home when you convert, what use is a mere “ethnic” commonality, particularly when it is as amorphous as what supposedly unites “Asians”, when twenty years of “Asian” anti-racist solidarity did not much lessen the hold of the castes and biraderies? Besides, Muslim da’wah (propagation) literature plays up the importance in Islam of religious solidarity, the lack of importance for nation or tribe and the sinfulness of holding to family, tribe or nation when they are in the wrong, all of which is supported by the Qur’an and various hadeeths. This is what converts often expect when they come into the deen, and yet they soon find examples of chauvinism and cliqueishness which had died out in their own communities some time ago.

We know that religious solidarity does not exist in other religious communities, particularly Christians. We know about white Protestant Americans terrorising black Protestant Americans, about Catholic and Protestant Germans terrorising Catholic Poles, and about Greek Orthodox Christians blockading their fellow believers in Macedonia in the 1990s, in order to force them to give up the name they had chosen for their country in the 1990s, which they believed rightfully belonged to them alone. While I do not dispute that Muslims have common interests with non-believers of similar ethnic background, this is no substitute for shared beliefs and values and we should not let secularists nostalgic for the 1970s divide us by stuffing us into the same ethnic pigeon-hole as those who might be our enemies; rather we should break down barriers and open up to each other, speak the same language if we can, and live up to the image given in the da’wah material.

Or, to use the actual headline, “This pansy-ass limey Brit won’t butt out — the US election is our business”: a response by Jonathan Freedland, who wrote this article three weeks ago in the Guardian, to the abusive and bigoted responses which followed. You can see my comment on both here, but here’s some of what Freedland received in his email:

In their thousands, Americans wrote to tell me they read my words not as a simple prediction of the consequences of an American decision broadly to maintain the Bush-Cheney approach — but as some kind of threat. I was not merely commenting on the US election, they said, but intervening in it, seeking to blackmail American voters with the threat of global ostracism (as if I’m in a position to issue such a threat).

The counterblasts featured all the usual themes familiar to any columnist or blogger who wades into this terrain. America had saved Europe’s “ass” twice before — and we would doubtless come bleating for help again when we inevitably sought rescue from the Muslim hordes imposing sharia law on London, Paris and Berlin. We can’t defend ourselves, of course, because we are limp-wristed “Euroweenies”, effeminate socialists whose own decline robs us of the right to say anything about the United States, which remains the greatest nation on earth.

Britain specifically forfeited the right to meddle in US affairs more than two centuries ago, when it lost the War of Independence. Besides, Obama is a Marxist, so Europe is welcome to him. One Bill07407 managed to capture the flavour of this virtual avalanche — including the curiously homoerotic undercurrent that runs through much rightwing American invective — with this effort: “If you want Comrade Obama we will gladly ship him over after he loses in a landslide. Meanwhile you can kiss my ass. I bet you would enjoy it faggot.” Equally reflective, this from bioguy777: “I love it! A pansy-ass limey Brit begs the US to do his bidding while his own country slips further towards total Islamic rule. We’re electing McCain, and the rest of the world can piss up a rope if they don’t like it. 1776, BITCH!”

His response is that the election is not just Americans’ business, because its result affects everybody: the wars in which other countries participate are started in the USA, the “credit crunch” and the difficulties it has caused in Europe were partly the fault of American financiers’ sloppy practices, and there is a global environmental emergency to which the USA is a substantial contributor. Personally, I don’t agree with his conclusion that the USA was ever supposed to be some sort of example to the world - there was always a whole lot of humbug in all the talk of freedom which overlooked the presence of millions of Black slaves - but I do share his objection to being rudely told to butt out when our country is supposed to be their ally and when it helped them out on several recent occasions.

The Spectator (a right-of-centre British political magazine, formerly edited by Boris Johnson) has printed a letter from me in the current edition, written in reply to Rod Liddle who alleged that there is nothing in the Qur’an telling women to wear hijab (so as to legitimise denying women the right to wear it). This is quite a surprise, because not only have they never published a letter from me before, but on one occasion I got a letter telling me that my “poem” had been rejected. Perhaps I should have resubmitted that particular letter in iambic pentameter, but it’s too late now.

Meanwhile, Rod Liddle himself has his usual weekly diatribe, and this time (in five pages [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], which is how the Spectator often renders rather short articles like this - is this just a stupid web application or is it just to push more adverts?) he’s defending Harry Cummins, the nutcase who wrote four articles for the Sunday Telegraph in July 2004 under the pseudonym “Will Cummins”. I wrote in reply to his rantings here.

Liddle tells us that Cummins has been bombarding a lot of people in the media with an email demanding, among other things, a right of reply from the Guardian, which was prominent in raising concern about his articles which led to him getting the sack from the British Council. Liddle reckons that the Guardian’s “fairness” and “democratic” nature militate against Cummins getting a fair hearing from them, that the gist of his complaints about Islam were correct, that his views are now commonplace and even official, that he wasn’t racist despite being called one by a load of imbeciles although he “has a tendency to overstate the case on occasion”.

All four articles are still available on the Telegraph’s website ([1], [2], [3], [4]), and Liddle hasn’t quoted as much as a word from any of them. Cummins’ entire contribution to human literature at that point seems to have consisted of those four articles, virulent outpourings of hostility to Islam and Muslims. The fact that such material could be printed in a “respectable” Sunday newspaper is shocking, as did the fact that it went on for four weeks and did not lead to the sacking of the paper’s editor, Dominic Lawson (he did later resign, and is now a columnist at the Independent). They contain an awful lot of plainly false assertions, among them that Christians are the rightful inhabitants of almost every Muslim land; in fact, the Muslims in those lands today are largely descended from the Christians who lived there before. In this article, he alleges that the policies being advanced by Michael Howard’s Conservatives did “not even appeal to the local Janjaweed”, an obvious reference to Muslims in general as nothing like the actual Janjaweed (Arab Muslims who rape and murder black African Muslims in Darfur) exists anywhere in the UK; it is a bit like referring to Americans (or white people) generally as KKK or to Germans generally as Nazis. And in this article, he compares Muslim immigrants to Jewish settlers and the poor oppressed whitefolks to Palestinians; he also compares Muslims to dogs.

Some would say that this is Cummins’s right to express these views as we live in a free country; the fact is, though, that Cummins got space in a major newspaper to express his extreme views, has not been prosecuted for his writings, and the editor who published them neither lost his liberty nor his job. Cummins did lose his job, and perhaps he has spent the last four years contesting his dismissal by the usual channels. What job he had, and why the British Council deemed him unfit for it, remains unknown, to me at least. Perhaps the British Council, which has a major presence in the Muslim world, wanted to protect its reputation (and this was well before the Danish cartoons affair and the resulting embassy burnings). However, Cummins is no martyr or victim; his words would not have been printed if certain other minorities had been maligned in the way Muslims were, and the resulting outcry (which included replies in the Telegraph itself as well as the Guardian) demonstrates that there was resistance in the British media to a major newspaper being used to peddle such poison.

What if the “official” account of what happened on 9/11 is false? What if, in fact, it’s a lie, and a big one at that, complete with corporate/media/propaganda cover-up? Without backing from the media the story wouldn’t fly. What would that make this “war on terror”? A fraud? Since when do steel buildings freefall to the ground, like the World Trade Centre? Ever watched the video of it coming down? They didn’t play it much on CNN or NBC. Ever wonder why? Because it’s the smoking gun of the whole thing. It’s proof because it’s an obvious controlled demolition, which we all know takes weeks of planning, hence, foreknowledge of the attack, which means, an inside job.

The collapse of the towers was played, over and over again, on British TV, and it seemed obvious that a building would come down if a part was blown away far enough from the top, causing the top few storeys to crash down because what was holding them up had weakened from the heat and been taken away altogether by the impact. However, precisely because controlled demolitions take time and are invariably done after all the fixtures and fittings have been removed, and because there are not so many people in the controlled demolition industry that the government could find enough of them willing to take out two large buildings and neither tip off the WTC management, someone close to the workers or the local media in advance nor to talk to anyone about it afterwards, it is simply not possible for it to have been a controlled demolition.

Nicole Ivanoff, a Labour candidate for what looks like a safe Tory council seat in Lancashire in June 2004 (you can read a brief biography here; this letter from the Lancashire Evening Telegraph claims that Ivanoff praised the French government’s “integration” policy), claims that it makes her blood boil to see “women who cover their hair with scarves, their faces with veils, their bodies in shapeless garments for so-called religious reasons”:

If the leaders of British Muslim communities fail to grasp how sad and angry most of us women in this country feel when we think about the way a large proportion of Muslim women are treated by their men, they will never understand why it is so hard for us to remain tolerant or respectful of their religion and way of life.

I suspect that, like Deborah Orr from last Saturday, Ivanoff has not bothered to ask women who cover their face why they do it and on whose instigation. It does happen that some women do it under pressure from male (and female) family members, but others do it on their own instigation against the wishes of their family. I have had personal correspondence with Muslim women of various backgrounds who veil their faces and whose mothers and sisters do not.

Not only does she make assumptions about Muslim women; she also makes a few about her own kind. “Us women”? How many have you asked, outside your own cosy little Labour party circle, Nicole?

No doubt a minority of Muslim women do defend their decision to hide face and body in the name of their faith. But there are hundreds of different interpretations of the Koran. There are hundreds of different ways Muslim women express their faith and live their lives. Millions across the world wear modern clothes and go about the business of building a life as independent, free women.

And millions also lead independent professional lives dressed as Muslim women, in the west and in the Muslim world. It is only a barrier to women doing this when secularists who hate the sight of a Muslim woman (or religious extremists) decide to make it an obstruction, as they have in France and Turkey. There may be hundreds of ways a devious person can twist the words of the Qur’an and the Hadeeth (yes, there is another source of Islam), but the words say one thing and there are only a handful of valid interpretations - that is, there are only so many ways an honest person can interpret their meaning. An honest person cannot interpret them to mean a woman can wear what she likes, the direction people like Ivanoff want to take us.

By being “understanding”, “respectful” or “tolerant” of any woman who hides her hair, covers her face or wraps her body in black because that is what the men in her life or her religious leaders demand of her, are we not saying to our Muslim sisters, “We don’t care about you, your liberation is not our business, you are no sister of mine, go back to your own country”?

How is it that tolerating someone’s way of life in this country amounts to telling them to go back where they came from? Does she not realise that their own country is in many cases this one? This woman’s capacity for logical thought has clearly deserted her on this issue. Perhaps a Muslim woman or two should write back to the Independent and tell this woman exactly what she needs to hear: that they don’t care what she thinks, that their “liberation” is none of her business, that they are no sister of hers, and that she should go back to Russia or Ukraine or wherever her ancestors came from? (I’m not best placed to say this, as a man, and don’t feel under any pressure, ladies …)

I can’t find anything reliable on MJ Adderley, the author of the second letter; Adderley seems a common name in his part of the north-west and the only returns on “MJ Adderley” are from a single genealogy site. He, or she, brings up the old saw about trust and security, calling the garment “the most sinister garment since the IRA balaclava”. The niqab, in one form or another, pre-dates the IRA, never mind their balaclavas, by millenia. What a ridiculous statement! “Unless I can see someone full-face I cannot begin to trust them and I will not speak to them,” Adderley opines. Well, women who cover their faces are allowed to uncover them when carrying out business which requires recognition, although a lot probably don’t realise this. If Adderley is a woman, then according to most authorities a woman need not cover her face in all-female company.

It is ridiculous also because the IRA wore balaclavas for disguise and were criminals and terrorists, which most women in niqab are not. Despite the well-known issue of the identity disguise provided by “hoodies”, which is less than that provided by niqab, the controversy has never extended to niqab because women in niqab are not associated with crime or trouble. They are associated with religious women minding their own business, which is why people interested in security hardly ever make an issue of it. It is not deemed a security risk in the countries where is is customary, even though these are often security-obsessed dictatorial or near-dictatorial régimes with secret police forces. So the people who “play the security card” do so out of ignorance or malice (a case in point being the Pakistani apostate blogger with whom I had a brief argument on the issue a few months back, who insisted that it was still a security risk even after I told him it had never been associated with terrorism in this country, and where I did know of it being an issue - in Kenya - it was to do with crime, not terrorism).

Adderley continues:

I think of all those British women who suffered for women’s rights over the past century and I grieve that we have made so little impact on these younger women who appear to live in their own time zone, in a foreign state, and certainly not ours. These are not Britons.

Again, tired stereotypes and false connections. Actually, the number who “suffered for women’s rights” are not that many and mostly campaigned for the right to vote - and a lot of those who cover their faces do vote (though some don’t, but then, the same is true of those who don’t veil their faces as well). A fair percentage of these women were born here, speak English as a first and possibly sole language and received their Islamic education, including perhaps the impetus to wear niqab, in English. They may have a Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnicity, but they would not fit in in either of these countries. Their culture may be different in most respects from (most) white Britons, but they have no country on this earth other than this one.

Before I finish, I should point out that a lot of the women who dress this way do not wear shapeless or sack-like clothes at all; usually their garments roughly describe their figure. I’ve seen plenty of slim women whose figures are not greatly disguised, even if they wear the black coat/scarf/niqab kit (which, by the way, a lot actually don’t). If she looks big, it’s not a disguised figure caused by wearing voluminous garments: she probably is big. Some women are, you know. It is depressing that stereotypes of “oppressed veiled women” are still being peddled in supposedly respectable broadsheets after all these years, when a lot of the worst oppression takes place in families which lack education either religious or secular, and in which women don’t wear the headscarf, let alone the niqab.

First of all, she simply has no reason to be offended. Most of the women who dress like this cause no harm to anyone. They do not shout in the street or make a nuisance of themselves. They are not the people who make train and bus travellers feel threatened by their behaviour. Put quite simply, they mind their own business. Why on earth can’t Deborah Orr do the same?

Of course, people causing offence by the way they dress is nothing new, and the vast majority of the guilty parties show vastly too much flesh in the street; they even go to Muslim countries like Morocco and do the same (or worse) there. People display their midriffs (and sometimes a bit more), their cleavage, their butt cracks; they sometimes wear (or wore, as this particular fashion has largely died out over the last year or so) thongs which come up higher than their trousers with tops which don’t quite cover the area, or tops with a bit scooped out to show a bit of cleavage. Nowadays it’s not just young women who do this; it’s also middle-aged women who are supposed to be setting an example (some of them are actually in professions that are supposed to be respectable).

But my biggest objection to this article is that it makes the tired old association between hijab and oppression, which is in my opinion misplaced. Just by watching a woman in niqab in the street, you have no idea of her personal circumstances or of why she wears the veil - whether it is because her husband told her to or because she chose to for religious reasons, or because it is part of the culture with which she grew up. As for the “outdated, cruel and degrading traditions” their veils supposedly represent, far worse things are known to go on in countries where the veil is not common, like the Indian subcontinent for example, and not just among Muslims. We all think we know “how bad” things are for women in the Gulf Arab region, particularly from the lurid and often exaggerated, or just plain fabricated, stories which appear from time to time in the press, and even from human rights organisations which should know better (case in point: Amnesty International publishing a passage from Jean Sasson’s Princess, a book which itself lacks credibility, but they failed to note that the incident appears in the book before the assassination of king Faisal in the mid 1970s).

Among the other misconceptions and ill assumptions in this piece is the suggestion that the daughter of the veiled woman she saw was “dressed prettily in Western clothes that she’d one day, presumably, be told to cover up in shame at being a female”. I’ve been Muslim for several years and have read a variety of Muslim literature on the subject of modesty, and I’ve never heard it being suggested that a woman should be ashamed of being female; rather, both sexes are required to display modesty and women are in particular required not to make a display of themselves in public. Even so, just because a woman chooses to dress in such a way it does not necessarily follow that she will insist on her daughters doing the same.

I actually fail to see why Ms Borr has started noticing the veiled women going about their business anyway - they have been doing so in London for years, even decades. They generally fall into two categories: the Gulf Arabs (found in Arab districts like the Edgware Road and Bayswater) and the strictly religious (found pretty much anywhere else). I’m sure Deborah Orr did not bother to find out which of the two categories the women she saw fell into; she does not know how well educated they are (and one finds plenty of them in any London university except, perhaps, Imperial College which banned them for “security reasons”), what their home situation is like, why they dress that way, or anything about them at all. If one wishes to find out such things, and one is a woman, one might ask them. If you cannot be bothered to find out such things, don’t write about them.

It is odd that he has called his party Veritas, which means “truth” in Latin, the language of intellectuals in Europe during the Middle Ages. Odder still that his party intends to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Is the English language not enough to provide his party with a name? Or does he intend us all to communicate in one of the languages used on the Continent of Europe?

Perhaps his intention is to destroy the EU rather than merely take the UK out of it.

Meanwhile, the prospective UK Independence Party candidate for Colne reveals an innovative policy for tracking asylum seekers. Because of EU rules, cattle can be tracked from birth to the dining table; the Government can’t, on the other hand, track asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. So what do the UKIP plan to do? Assign each asylum seeker a cow.

Only trouble is, once they pull us out of the EU, the regulations on the tracking of cows (which are for human health reasons, to make sure we aren’t fed beef products full of prion-rich offal) will no longer be part of UK law. How will they do their tracking then? Actually, when I read this I thought it was a joke, and I wonder if the Telegraph’s editors did too. With policies like this, perhaps the Monster Raving Loony Party will agree to a merger.

One way might be to abandon the policy of multiculturalism, in which the unit is no longer the rights-bearing citizen, but the religious group. People now see themselves not as British, but as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians. Unless Mr Howard places integration at the centre of his immigration policy, fragmentation of Britain’s national identity is likely to continue, and transform this country into a larger version of Lebanon or Northern Ireland.

This is a common lie, which has also been trotted out in the past by Denis MacEoin of Newcastle, known for his writings on the Baha’i sect which might explain his hostility to Islam. The Northern Ireland situation has nothing to do with multiculturalism: it’s got to do with the planting of Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland, who opposed (with arms) the formation of an Irish state because they feared that “Home Rule” meant “Rome rule”. When the Irish Free State was formed, Northern Ireland was given its own parliament (at Stormont), which proceeded to deny the Catholic population their civil rights, which is what led to the Troubles of the 1970s onwards. All of this is very well-known and anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant or lying. The civil war in the Lebanon was similarly nothing to do with multiculturalism. The state of “Lebanon” had not existed before the French established it.

Nobody even suggests that “the unit is no longer the rights-bearing citizen …” anyway. And in this country you can already get council support for projects aimed at ethnic groups, like Asians or Afro-Carribeans, but not for multi-ethnic religious groups. I once knew an Afro-Carribean Muslim from St. Lucia who ran a youth project for “Asian” youth in Hounslow, because the council wouldn’t fund a project aimed at Muslim youth. I don’t know how a person can be said to have rights when he (or she) can be forced to go against his or her religion in order to get an education.