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.

This article appeared in the Guardian last Friday, but only now I’ve got round to commenting on it. I read it eagerly and think it’s an excellent blueprint for a community school, with a few reservations. OK, naming a school after Richard Dawkins is a bit much, but I suspect any actual school will end up being named after some 19th-century or Ancient Greek philosopher. Beckett also doesn’t really take into account that any actual school might not have the finances to become his “dream school”.

I commented last month on Richard Dawkins’s own critique of faith schools, and many of them are quite valid. Some faith schools are set up by communities on shoe-string budgets with the aim of providing a decent education to their children which they do not find offered in mainstream schools; others are state-funded institutions which have privileges to discriminate, based on what they were in the past but are not anymore — church-funded schools who then started receiving some government funding. Given how church attendance has dwindled, both in the Church of England and the Catholic church (although immigration partly offsets the decline in the latter, but indigenous Catholic religiosity has nonetheless declined dramatically), some church/school complexes effectively become hereditary private clubs you have to join in order to get your kid into their school, even though you pay for the school in your taxes already. (Not all church schools do discriminate, however.)

However, you don’t actually need to be an atheist or a Humanist to share the ideals Beckett sets out. He proposes admission criteria based solely on living close to the school, for example, so that the school serves the local community rather than just part of it. He proposes rejecting the dogmatic approaches to education which currently dominate political discussion, such as the obsession the political right have with phonics. He seems to advocate doing away with uniform, because teachers have better things to do with their time than police children’s clothing; he wants “constant dialogue between parents and teachers” to replace parents’ evenings, and to assign a staff mentor to each pupil who will remain their mentor the whole time they are at the school.

There are two aspects of his proposal which are somewhat unrealistic, however. I’m no expert on “Reading Recovery”, a programme for rapidly learning to read for younger children that he proposes to adapt for 11-year-olds, but he tells us it’s quite expensive as it requires lots of one-to-one teaching, “but we will find the money”, and that it will be protected even if funding goes down. This would, he says, cut the amount of disruptive behaviour (because someone who can’t read is less able to benefit from almost any other teaching), but there could come a point where simply “finding the money” isn’t an option. Similarly, he proposes that the school should have its own pupil referral unit (PRU), some distance from the main school, where kids who “damage the learning experience of others” are confined.

Now, local authorities do actually still have PRUs — my aunt used to run one in south London; it’s still going. It takes kids who can’t, for one reason or another, go to a mainstream school (usually for disruptive behaviour, but I was told that a teenage girl with M.E. was referred to the unit at one time). There is, to my knowledge, only one in the whole borough (there were two, but they were amalgamated), so clearly there isn’t a great deal of money for them (and special education provision has declined over the years, with authorities being less able to farm kids out to private schools — not entirely a bad thing as a lot of them were rotten, but it does mean local schools still have to deal with them). Class sizes were a fraction of what they were in an actual school. For each school to have its own PRU will be an impossible financial burden unless the school has a very generous benefactor or two. Furthermore, if the Richard Dawkins Humanist Conservatoire has its own PRU away from the school, what’s to stop the Last Resort City Academy from setting up theirs right next door to RDHC?

All in all, this is a school a lot like the one I’d like to send any child of mine to. So much of our education system is weighted down by relics of the past, from old and inaccessible buildings to ridiculous rules; the schools, are allowed to function as communities in their own right with their own interests rather than state-funded institutions which serve the whole of the community that pays for them. There are too many different types of school, with some districts having not a single local-authority comprehensive school but only church schools and academies; this clearly reflects a hostility in some political circles to local authorities generally, which are a challenge to the power of central government. In some cases, academies are a law unto themselves, sometimes being named after their corporate sponsor and allowed to expel pupils for trivial misdemeanors while leaving other schools to deal with those the academy refuses to teach.

However, as I said, one does not have to be a “Humanist” to support this kind of reform of British schools — those of us who are part of a religious minority in their area who can’t get our kids into the nearest (in my case, Catholic) school would welcome a well-run mixed community school as long as it respected our beliefs and customs and did not attempt to suppress their manifestation; contrary to popular misconception, many of us don’t seek to cut ourselves off from those not of our faith, don’t have a problem with our kids rubbing shoulders with theirs, let alone with our children being taught maths by a Sikh or English literature by an atheist. Such a school could be run by a religious organisation just as much as by an anti-religious one; what matters is that the school is a service to everyone rather than just serving “their own” with everybody’s money.

Some of the points he makes in the first group are quite valid. He held up a map of Oxford in which there were three faith schools clustered in a small area, but the non-faith schools were miles away, and that if you live in the area where the faith schools were, you had less chance of getting into a local school. This seems valid on the surface of it, but in fact not all religious schools do discriminate against people from outside their church. The Church of England has a number of schools in which a majority of the pupils are not even Christian, let alone Anglican (this is particularly true in east London). The objection to this kind of discrimination has some validity; in the past, some of the white religious groups such as Catholics and Jews might have had a good reason to have separate schools because hostility towards them was rife. This is not the case anymore, particularly for Catholics, but it may well be true for Muslims in some places.

I should add here that religious or secular status is not in itself an indicator of whether a school is good or bad. I went to three Catholic schools as a child and two secular ones. As a rough guide, two of the three Catholic schools were reasonably good as was one of the secular ones. The other two were dreadful; the Catholic junior school seemed to be under the control of the reactionary faction of the Catholic school and had bizarre rules, allowing the boys and girls barely any contact with each other outside the classrooms with no explanation as to why. Several of the teachers were miserable individuals and they all taught in the lower section of the school, and the school had a system of prefects (usually girls) who could sometimes be heard screaming at a classful of children, while the teacher was out of the room, “stop talking!”. The bad secular school was a terribly cruel and brutal place.

Still, despite all this, the school had a fairly good ethnic mix as many of the Catholics in Croydon are from places like Goa and various parts of Africa. There was very little racial tension. The same was true of the Catholic secondary school I attended for my first year. However, some religions, and some branches of other religions, are ethnically based and any school which discriminates in their favour is discriminating against others. If a Jewish school sets its admission criteria based on strict adherence to a particular form of Judaism, that is not racial discrimination, but if they require them to just be Jewish but not necessarily practising to their standards, that is certainly racial discrimination. This may happen with some Muslim schools also: a school which demands adherence not only to Islam but to, say, a “Tablighi ethos”, is likely to end up with a predominantly Indo-Pak pupil base (there are some white and black converts who conform to this, but rarely any other ethnic Muslims).

In the case of the “fake observance”, it should be pointed out that fake observance at the outset can give way to true observance later, but even so, if churches are acting as a kind of hereditary or ethnic friendly society, a private club you have to join to get your kids into their school, that’s not a good way to run an education system, all the more so if they set entry barriers which keep out the less well-off, such as expensive bespoke uniforms. I should add that Catholic schools in many places in the world cater to pupils of their religion and others, and see it as a way of spreading the gospel through service to the community. If the Catholic church wants to do that here, I don’t have a problem with that; if they are merely providing services to their old ethnic bases in the absence of belief or practice, that surely isn’t a good thing. The state funds all schools, and should make sure that all schools are up to the standard that parents should not have to choose between faking religion, even if it’s the religion of their grandparents, or a bad education for their children. This is to say nothing of those of different religions who are shut out of multiple local schools, for whom faking another religion is likely not to be an option at all.

I don’t buy the “dividing the communities” argument. Northern Ireland’s problems, as I have said here many times in the past, did not begin when Catholics and Protestants started going to different schools. There may be a case for making sure schools there (and in other places of long-standing Protestant/Catholic division, such as Liverpool and Glasgow) integrate, although in some cases it could lead to gang problems within the schools given the way some of the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland had developed. I was never conscious of any division between Catholics and others at schools in Croydon, where I grew up, and we certainly weren’t taught to be suspicious of them or consider them as infidels or anything of that sort.

The secularist arguments were not well laid-out. Dawkins was asked one of the most common and weakest arguments against evolution, namely why there are still apes if humans are descended from apes. His response was that humans are in fact apes and, rather than being descended from chimpanzees, we simply have a common ancestor. Dawkins: one, Muslim schoolgirl: nil. There are much stronger arguments than this, such as why there are plants growing in England that wasps confuse for female wasps so they can pollinate them; if the plant existed without the wasp, the plant is unlikely to have lasted very long. A schoolgirl was shown arguing that there is a barrier between bodies of fresh and salt water, so that the fresh water stays pure for us to drink, something that left Dawkins flabbergasted, but it could well have been the interpretation that the girl quoted a bit of that was unscientific, not the fact of such separation. After all, we get our drinking water from fresh sources such as wells and streams and they are never, or in some cases almost never, polluted by salt water. The land itself separates the two types of water.

Finally, there is the issue of what right parents have to indoctrinate their children in their own religion as if they own them. Well, parents have always been responsible for bringing up their children the best they can, and to those with a religion, that includes letting them in on the religion they believe in. It’s not some kind of power play; the parents regard it as doing their best for them. No doubt Dawkins will teach his children what he believes as well. This teaching can hardly be said to be unbreakable given how many children were sent to religious schools in the UK and stopped practising as soon as they left. I stopped going to Mass when I was eight, well before I left my second Catholic school.

I should add that not all Muslim parents want Muslim-only schools for their children. I have spoken to one parent in London who pulled his son out of one because its standards just weren’t up to his. Similarly, when I interviewed sister Ardo from Ottawa about her niqaab story in 2006, I discovered that her family had passed over an Islamic school for her younger sisters partly for financial reasons but also because they simply found the state school to be preferable for various social and educational reasons. She had herself worn niqaab in that same state school in her final year (age 17 onwards). I have read various stories on blogs about private Muslim schools where there is a lack of professionalism, where teachers are not paid enough and contracts not honoured and so on (particularly in the USA).

As for my own personal preference, if I lived in a decent part of town I would prefer a school that did not interfere with pupils’ expression of their own religion (such as hijaab and so on) and did not cling to relics of the past (uniforms, prefects, pointless rules) as so many British state schools do, than one like them with the Christian bits replaced with Islamic equivalents. But it is also quite justified for parents to want to keep their children away from those who are openly hostile to them and their religion, and to prefer a religious school to a state school in an inner-city area where there are problems with gangs and where the general standard of behaviour is much less than what they want their children to see. I am sure Dawkins is a fairly wealthy man and lives in a place where that choice does not have to be made; many Muslim parents in the UK are not so lucky.

After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom are the editors of Butterflies and Wheels, the best atheist site on the web. In Does God Hate Women? they forensically dismantle the last respectable misogyny. They argue: “What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation . . . They worship a God who is a male who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.”

Another review, by Sholto Byrnes in the Independent, faults the authors for cherry-picking their evidence, failing to consider anything which might lead to a negative answer for their titular question, and “show[ing] no desire to go beyond name-calling and distortion”. I found the book to be spectacularly poorly argued and more reliant on emotion and opinion than logical argument.

It is quite obvious from very early in the book that the authors make little distinction between what religious people do and what their religion actually says; hence we get a chapter full of emotive anecdotes about young women being abducted and buried alive in Pakistan, allegedly for trying to elope to marry men of their choice rather than men chosen for them, Hindu women being cast out and rejected even by their own sons after being widowed, and women in fundamentalist Mormon communities in Arizona being forcibly married off to men with bad reputations at the direction of a “prophet”. The first of these stories will strike any Muslim as a clear example of anti-Islamic behaviour anyway, but its defenders did not refer to religion, but merely to “tribal traditions”, as the book acknowledges on page one.

A word on terminology: many readers, believers or otherwise, will not recognise the “God” being referred to. “God” in this book seems to be a personification of the worst extremes of religious behaviour, such as those they mention:

These religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of 10-year-old boys (sic), a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps.

They worship — despite rhetoric about justice and compassion and agapé — a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug. (pp29-30)

All this is based on a few examples of injustice perpetrated against women by mostly ignorant religious fanatics: she attacks religion generally based on the example of cultists, ignorant peasants and vengeful fundamentalists. There are numerous obvious logical flaws in this “surgical dissection”, to paraphrase Nick Cohen (whose admiring quotes appear on the front and back of this book), as well as examples of ignorance about Islam, in particular, which my American readers might call sophomoric.

Conveniently overlooked distinctions I: Major religions versus tiny ones

Benson and Stangroom devote much of their book to attacking Islam. However, we get six pages of information on the history and the depredations of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a small, cult-like sect which exists in a few colonies in the western USA and western Canada, notorious for the unbridled and exploitative polygamy of its leaders. It is a very extreme example and not at all typical even of closed religious communities or of polygamist religious communities. Besides, religion tends to police itself against these kinds of cults fairly quickly, at least disassociating themselves from, and condemning them, as heretics (in the case of Islam, the despotism of early false prophets like Musaylima is as well remembered as their heresy).

Conveniently overlooked distinctions II: Acts committed in obedience to religion and those committed in defiance of it

Pretty much any Muslim, and a fair number of others, including those hostile to Islam, can tell you that burying daughters alive was one of the top of the list of things the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) sought to do away with. Burying alive isn’t a penalty in Islam for anything that merits the death penalty. Eloping or otherwise going against one’s family’s wishes is not a capital offence in Islam. Rape doesn’t merit a 20-year jail sentence for the victim, nor is it necessary to prove rape with four male witnesses and the victim doesn’t get punished for adultery if she fails. Saving human life, including one’s own — let alone someone else’s — is more important than any religious duty, be it the prayer itself or covering a woman’s hair, so you don’t stop women fleeing a burning building without their hijabs. These are all instances of gross ignorance. There is a hadith in which a man with an injury feared that it would kill him if he took a bath, and asked a group of other men who told him that taking the bath was nevertheless compulsory; he took the bath, and died. When the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, heard about it, he said, “they have killed him — may Allah destroy them. They should have asked.” Bear in mind that they didn’t force him into the bath. In some cases, there seems to be a definite urge to be different from the West and to reject its notions of justice, and even to cause outrage in the west.

There is understandably a chapter on FGM, attempting to establish the possibility that religion might have played a role in spreading, or at least perpetuating, the practice. She attempts to refute the argument that, because most Muslims do not practise FGM and many non-Muslims do, that there is no link between Islam and FGM by comparing it to smoking and lung cancer: if you smoke, you are more likely to get lung cancer, but not all smokers get lung cancer and some non-smokers do (p140). However, this analogy holds only in as much as that there are two overlapping groups — Muslims and genitally mutilated women, smokers and lung-cancer sufferers — in each case. Smoking increases anybody’s risk of getting lung cancer; it is a matter of cause and effect. FGM is a custom which is spread across certain areas of Africa in which some people are Muslims and some are not; whether you experience it simply depends on which population you happen to be born into. If you are not African, you almost certainly will not undergo it.

The authors also completely ignore religious efforts to counteract it: it is established that Usuman Dan Fodio, a Muslim revivalist leader of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, preached against FGM in the areas of Niger and Nigeria where he was active, but in recent years the spread of anti-traditionalist, fundamentalist forms of Islam may have had a significant role in curtailing FGM among Somalis, particularly those in the diaspora. This is not a matter of academic research yet, but from the impression I have gained from speaking to individual Somali women, the practice is in drastic decline; there are significant numbers even in Somalia who disapprove of it (although they may be unable to stop others in their family from doing it), many young women have not had it done and nobody I have spoken to approved of or would continue it. This cannot entirely be put down to western influences, particularly given that FGM persisted through and beyond the period of British and Italian colonisation. We have also seen the emergence of an educated diaspora middle class, particularly of women; Somalis have been exposed to foreign Muslim influences and will have come to realise that most Muslim women do not undergo it.

Conveniently overlooked distinctions III: race and sex

There are a number of incidents in this book where it appears that a moral equivalence is drawn between sexism, or considering women to be different from men and better suited to domestic work and child-rearing, and racism and other forms of bigotry: for example:

Mainstream clerics no longer claim that blacks or Jews or foreigners or natives are fitted only for unskilled work. It is only women who are told that they are ‘naturally fitted’ to do one kind of work to the exclusion of all others. It is interesting to note that the first is no longer socially acceptable while the second is. (p75)

However, the moral equivalence is not really valid. Races differ only in colour and other minor details of their appearance; men and women differ in important areas of their biology. Men and women are, of course, capable of carrying out most of the same tasks, but there are two tasks related to child-rearing that only a woman can do, and if the work required to support a family is tough and dangerous, women might appreciate not having to do it. Most, though admittedly not all, women are better suited to caring for children, and indeed adults, than men, which more than explains the preponderance of women in these professions. The authors might like to provide evidence that the women involved find them demeaning; most were not forced into them, after all.

The book does not explore the political aspects of discrimination against women in Muslim countries, perhaps because there remains only one country where women are denied the vote in whatever elections happen, namely Saudi Arabia. However, anti-Muslim writers commonly talk of “gender apartheid” when real apartheid involves races which are enemies to each other by virtue of one having invaded, subjugated and humiliated the other. If a man has the vote and his wife does not, the man is likely to be thinking of his wife and children as well as himself when he votes; one can certainly not assume that a white South African, much less a white southern American during the era of segregation, would have considered the interests of non-whites. This is not to defend refusing women the vote, but simply to demonstrate that the comparison to racism does not hold.

Other problems with their analysis of gender

The authors suggest that men dominate women simply because they can, because they are stronger, and that men (and therefore male-dominated clerical establishments) defend male domination just because it suits them, because they are male and it’s “the other” — women — who suffer (e.g. p.54). The problem is that it requires us to accept a few dubious propositions, such as that most, if not all, men are bullies and that most, if not all, women are doormats, and that at a particular time when this state of affairs emerged, that this was the case. In many societies, there are taboos against men hitting women, and this was the case in Europe long before feminism was heard of. There are those who would tell a 12-year-old boy being bullied by a 16-year-old to toughen up or shut up, and defend a grown woman slapping a 2-year-old for some petty misdemeanour, but condemn a man who slaps a grown woman, or a boy who does the same to a teenage girl, even though she might be bigger than him.

Female weakness is accepted. Male weakness is generally considered the man’s fault, and possibly rectifiable. People will not, after all, find fault with a family saloon car for being unable to pull a trailer with a 40-tonne load: you use a truck for that sort of thing. Of course, not all women would have to be bullied into letting their husbands win the bread while they kept house and looked after the children, particularly if they had friends, they played with their own children and other people’s, and spent at least part of the day at friends’ houses chatting over a coffee (or whatever they drank back then) and did a bit of work on the side to raise a bit of extra money. Some might think that was more fulfilling than working down a coalmine, and a lot less dangerous, because much male work is not powerful or fulfilling, but tedious, physically draining and hazardous, and even though giving birth itself has its risks, women do not do that every day of their lives.

Many women like security. Many women expect men to be dominant, and find it attractive and masculine. Men have affection for women, and usually grow up surrounded by them — their mother, aunts, older sisters, perhaps cousins. If they grow up in a culture where younger people obey elders, they idea of taking orders from a woman elsewhere would not necessarily be even unfamiliar, much less “unmanning”. To accept that men established dominance by merely bullying them is to completely overlook the realities of human interaction, or perhaps to accept that there was a time in human history when women were distinguished from men only in being weaker than men, and female. These aspects of human interaction get scant coverage in this book, and the realities of what women often want from men are not mentioned at all.

Over-reliance on opinion and cultural values

The authors devote much of the second chapter to attacking Karen Armstrong, who defended the character of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) in her books, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet and Islam: A Short History (both Phoenix Press, London, 2001). I have already dealt with the matter of the marriage to A’isha (radhi Allahu ‘anha) in this earlier entry, and one might also see Abdurrahman Squires’s article on the subject, on which I drew for that article. Besides the fact that marriages to nine-year-old girls are not exactly common in the Muslim world these days, the judgements based on modern morality and experience made by people who were not there and judge only by the evidence that suits them are of no consequence. I will not consider it any further.

Religion and cruelty

The book, as already stated, gives numerous examples of terrible cruelty perpetrated against women in the name of various religions. As already stated, they do not distinguish between cruelty approved of by religion and that condemned by it. This is particularly significant in the case of Islam, which is a heavily text-based religion unlike say, Catholicism, in which the words of priestly authorities are heavily relied on as direct narrations back to prophetic origins are lacking; most of the Bible consists of stories, not straightforward moral or theological guidance.

The problem is that no reasons for such behaviour other than the presence of religion are even discussed. As Cristina Odone points out in her review of the book in the Observer today:

We see men dominating their women - socially, intellectually, psychologically and sexually — because here at least is one area where they can wrest some control. If you live under the Taliban, or in a Brazilian favela, you are the lowest of the low - until, that is, you turn to the women under your roof. Mocking, pummelling or stabbing her will make you top dog - even if in a small kennel.

This kind of behaviour is widely known-of and women and girls are not the only victims. (This seems to be a consistent blind spot for Benson: in this article published in the Observer in May, she mentions the horrors of the church-run Goldenbridge orphanage-cum-sweatshop for girls in Dublin, but neglects to mention that the recent Ryan report stated that most of the sexual abuse was perpetrated against boys; the section on the Fundamentalist LDS does not mention any practice which harms boys, such as the abandonment of groups of young males so as to eliminate competition for wives for the elders.) In settings where people have no power, they pick on those with even less, whether they are believers or not. Practically anyone who has been in a boarding school or a prison, male or female, or in some of the world’s armed forces can tell you that.

Even where the behaviour is not so much cruel as merely unthinking, ignorance and isolation may play as big a role as religion, particularly when commandments of that religion seem never to have been heard of and you would find people doing things that no literate metropolitan follower of the same religion would ever do. In such a community, I find it doubtful that preaching against religion would put these problems right for very long; you might end up with an ossified parody of the humanism you preach and that the situation of women would be scarcely better than when you arrived. Even in a village setting, it is not outside the bounds of possibility that religion would come to the defence of women: the alarm over the gang-rape of Mukhtaran Mai in Pakistan, for example, was raised when the local imam attacked the rape in his Friday sermon and then brought the incident to the attention of a reporter from a nearby town..

Finally, we only need look at the example of Mao’s China to know of the cruelty that atheists are capable of perpetrating against both men and women (read the chapter “The Kuomintang General’s Daughter” in Xinran’s book The Good Women of China for an example to rival anything in this book). People driven by ideas unrelated to religion are also capable of cruelty and oppression; we might take the example of the forced sterilisations carried out as part of eugenics programmes in the USA and Sweden, among other places.

Islamophobia

The penultimate chapter of this book consists of an attack on recent attempts to combat Islamophobia in the UK, including the two Runnymede Trust reports, Islamophobia: A Challenge to Us All (1997) and Islamophobia: Issues, Challenges and Action (2004). The authors find fault with them for being “produced by a ‘multi-religious’ committee”, including several imams and Muslim activists and several representatives of the Church of England and the Jewish community. They allege:

Certainly, there is something absurd about the idea that the best way to analyse anti-Muslim prejudice is to assemble a fairly random collection of religious apologists, all of whom have a vested interest in protecting religion from criticism, and many of whom have a specific interest in defending Islam, and then asking them to oversee a research project. After all, almost nobody woudl think that skinheads — however well educated and erudite — would be best placed to examine whether the far right is discriminated against, or that members of Fathers for Justice or Men’s Aid should stand in judgement over whether the move towards sexual equality has gone too far. (pp159-60)

Islamophobia was not a PhD thesis or some other piece of academic research; the Runnymede Trust is essentially a think tank. If the preponderance of religious people on the committee makes it somewhat unbalanced, this is par for the course with think tanks. Even so, those at the receiving end of prejudice are best placed to report on it; nobody would fault a report on racism on the grounds that its authors were black, or at least not quite white, or if they were white, they were foreign or something. Any white person telling a black person that their perceptions of prejudice were not valid because they were biased, or that they were just being a bit oversensitive, would not meet with much appreciation. Feminists often try to tell men that their opinions on “women’s issues” are less valid than theirs unless those opinions are in line with theirs, particularly on the matter of abortion.

Their later attacks on anti-Islamophobia material contains a side-swipe at Smearcasting, the website by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) which names a “dirty dozen” of the twelve worst Islamophobes. The twelve noted are not sober, secular critics of religion but writers and broadcasters noted for attempts to incite prejudice against Muslims. One of them is David Horowitz, a notorious academic witch-hunter; another is Michael Savage, who stated that when he sees a woman in a ‘burqa’, he sees a Nazi who would like to “cut your throat and kill your children”. They would not have been thought of if they were not popular figures among a certain section of the British and American populations. A few quotes from politicians to the effect that “this isn’t a war against Islam”, even if sincere, will not allay the Muslim perception of widespread prejudice, even hatred, when they see it on the front page of a national newspaper, or hear it on the radio, or hear of Muslim women being attacked or charity shops being firebombed.

Conclusion

This is a terribly poorly-argued book. It relies on largely irrelevant anecodes intended to make the reader angry; it conflates the cruelty of the powerless and the unthinking oppression of the ignorant with actual religious observance; it uses one invalid comparison after another; it gets facts wrong, such as confusing the Afghan poetess Nadia Anjuman, murdered by her husband in 2005, with Safia Amajan, a Kandahar politician assassinated by the Taliban in 2006, as pointed out in Cristina Odone’s review. It quotes ‘authorities’ who are no such thing, such as Sayyed Hossein Nasr. It is also sloppily annotated, with the endnote reference numbers in two chapters following on from the chapter before, but the actual notes numbered from one for each chapter.

However, the biggest failing of this book is that it presents the worst excesses of the cruelty of religious people as if they were characteristic of religious behaviour. If one were to write a history of western civilisation and as examples of it offer only tales of bloodthirsty crusaders, inbred Appalachian hillbillies and football hooligans and barely mention the modern, metropolitan educated classes, it would rightly be dismissed as a bigoted, unbalanced diatribe. Benson and Stangroom do not acknowledge that many Muslims, including practising ones, were outraged at incidents like the Madinah madrassah fire and despise the governments which perpetrate such atrocities. They do not acknowledge causes for the problems they identify other than religion. They do not acknowledge that many religious people agitate for change in their societies, against forced marriage, FGM and other examples of the oppression of women and in favour of better opportunities in education, both within the community and without.

In short, they mention a few of the worst recent incidents of cruel and oppressive behaviour involving religious people, and none of the good stuff. This is what makes this book a bigoted, unbalanced diatribe.

The opening paragraph sets the scene:

There is plenty to criticise in Islam’s view of women. Last year, the Observer told the story of a man in Basra who stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed to death his 17-year-old daughter for becoming infatuated with a British soldier. The relationship apparently amounted to a few conversations, but her father learnt she had been seen in public talking to the soldier. When the Observer talked to Abdel-Qader Ali two weeks later, he said: “Death was the least she deserved. I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion.”

Does anyone notice the leap? From the mention of “Islam’s view of women” to an example of an honour killing, which is forbidden in Islam and which goes on in some Muslim countries and not others, and which also goes on in non-Muslim regions such as India. Islam does not give men the right to kill relatives who “bring shame on them”, full stop. She is using the worst examples of the behaviour of some Muslims and using it as if it was typical.

Benson gives a few other examples of religious beastliness towards women, such as the anti-abortion law in Nicaragua and the Jewish seminaries in Jerusalem who tell women to stay out of their neighbourhood if they’re not properly covered. She then offers her opinion as to why religion remains popular with women:

So why is it so often women who fill the pews? Is it a form of Stockholm syndrome? Religions do a good job of training people to be obedient and loyal to the authorities and women in particular are raised to be both devout and submissive. Religions are sticky: they are hard to abandon and that is doubly true for women, given that subordination and unshakable fidelity are their chief duties.

The fact that women are defined as different from men (“complementary” is the religious euphemism) and confined to narrower, more monotonous lives as a result, means that they have more need of the excitements and passions of religion. For women, religion often is the heart of a heartless world. All they have to give up in exchange is their right to shape their own lives; as long as they behave themselves, all will go swimmingly.

I can think of more obvious reasons why women are more likely to be devout: because they are likely to be older (as women tend to live longer than men), or because they want to give the children a religious upbringing, perhaps for the moral values, perhaps for the educational advantage being part of a church community brings in some places, even though neither parent feels inclined to practise for its own sake. The older women often have outlived the need to be obedient or submissive to anyone; they may well be the most senior person in the family, and may also have had plenty of people, particularly children, obeying and submitting to them during their lives. Benson also conveniently overlooks the fact that many women simply do not want to work, at least not full time, and that life in many places is difficult and dangerous for everyone and not just women. If religion is only there to provide excitement and passion in a heartless existence, it is likely to fulfil that role for men as well.

Benson then brings the Irish child abuse scandal in, quoting the testimony of one female veteran of a notorious Irish industrial school regarding children screaming endlessly for years. It is ironic that she uses this particular scandal as evidence of religion’s bias against women, as boys were brutalised as well, and took the brunt of the sexual abuse which went on. The belief was not the problem: the problem was a society which turned in on itself after gaining independence from a United Kingdom which was hostile to Catholics, in which the Church dominated by celibates gained too much power.

However, cruelty is a general part of the human condition, and plenty of institutions have dealt it out, some of them not specifically religious and many anti-religious. The many crimes of the Chinese communists, both under Mao and after, and of communists in Russia and elsewhere, are an obvious example, as are the eugenic policies pursued in northern Europe and the USA during the 20th century, which were in fact opposed in the Catholic world. It is foolish to assume that child abuse or the oppression of women or other forms of cruelty will go away, for women or children, or indeed anyone, when religion fades in any given community.

Clive James is arguing that the reason feminists are not loud on the issue of promoting democracy abroad when the alternatives are far worse for women is because this reminds them that there is an intractable difference between the genders after all:

Democracy is the best chance for women. Or if that sounds too naive, too pro-western perhaps, then let’s put it this way. The absence of democracy is seldom good news for women. Or, to get down to bedrock, if women can’t vote for women, then they haven’t got many weapons to fight with when they seek justice.

My own view, which I’m ready to hear contested, is that this is the main reason why some feminists in the west have been so slow to get behind those women in the world’s all too numerous tyrannies who have to risk their lives to say anything.

It’s just too clear a proof that men have a natural advantage when it comes to the application of violence. When you say that women have little chance against men if it comes to a physical battle, you are conceding that there really might be an intractable difference between the genders after all.

The argument is pretty complicated, but it relies on a simplistic understanding of what feminism is, to begin with. Anyone who has even skimmed the subject, as I have by doing a half-year course on the subject at college, will know that there are many different types of feminist who do not agree with each other on a lot of things, and certainly many do believe that there are substantial differences between the sexes which are not based on social conditioning. He is using the example of one particular type of liberal feminism, but you actually do not have to study feminism at college to know that it is not the same as feminism as a whole. Surely a guy as learned as he is, with rooms and rooms full of books, would know that?

Clive James is confusing “promoting democracy” with supporting the invasion of Iraq, or perhaps using it as code for supporting the invasion. Come to think of it, I do recall that there was a lot of rhetoric about women’s rights and liberation being used to justify the Iraq war, and that most of it was coming from men. Perhaps they found the idea of the military, which in the USA is notorious for the high incidence of rape against its own servicewomen, going to liberate another country’s women rather ironic. However, the fact that Saddam’s officials used rape as a weapon against political enemies doesn’t mean most women suffered it; however, since “liberation”, women have been threatened by terrorists on the streets of various Iraqi cities without hijab or for going to college.

Another possible motive is that Saddam Hussain was a secularist, and most feminists support secularism to a greater or lesser extent. Neither GW Bush nor any of the politicians who are in power in Iraq now are secularists. In fact, no genuine democracy in a Muslim country will produce a secular state, even if a party which is not explicitly religious might gain power (as in Indonesia), any more than democracy in a western country where religion is strong will do; Ireland, for example, was always a democracy, even through its Church-dominated period from independence to the 1970s. Many feminists, as I have discussed here in the past, support interventions to make sure that non-religious women can progress on their terms, including measures which punish religious women and girls (whom they often despise, even if they do not say so). Many of these women opposed the invasion of Iraq, probably because they knew it would not lead to an outcome favourable to them.

In fact, historically, feminists have been active in promoting democracy in those parts of the West that until recently did not enjoy it, such as South America, where the brutal military dictatorships (supported by the USA) which ruled in the 1970s and 1980s also used rape and sexual abuse as forms of torture. The big difference with Iraq was not only that the culture of the Middle East is vastly more different from their own than South America’s is but that rhetoric of liberation was being used to support a war which was really not motivated by any concern for women, or concern for any Iraqis at all in fact, but was nothing more than a delayed reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Virtually any regime, actually, is preferable to Saddam Hussain; the problem was how and why the war was fought. Some progressives were fooled; it seems that most feminists were not.

Today’s Guardian Education supplement on how bigots in a north Paris education authority are using bureaucratic methods to deny a Muslim school funding, forcing it to the verge of bankruptcy. Despite the supposedly strict separation of church and state and the ban on religious symbols in state schools, the state funds religious schools provided that they teach the same curriculum as state schools and submit to inspection. Only two Muslim schools receive this funding, however, and the school has applied for funding three times, but is invariably told that its application is somehow invalid:

“We have applied three times,” says Fazilleau. “Each time they say that some papers are missing from our file. But I was the person in charge of sending the file, and I can assure you nothing was missing.”

Fazilleau, who was born a Catholic, converted to Islam in her early 20s. She has been surprised by the treatment the school has received. “Had I heard our story from someone else, I would have believed it to be exaggerated. This is my country. It’s supposed to be a fair country.” Thirty years of living as a Muslim in Paris has changed her views. “I feel ashamed to say it, but it is obvious there is discrimination, almost segregation, against Muslim people in France. They just don’t want to give us the money.”

The mayor and the MP of Aubervilliers have been quoted as saying that the school seems to have received “abnormal treatment” from the government, that they have the impression that an “injustice” is occurring and that Réussite has been “condemned to death financially” …

Last June, Réussite submitted to its most recent government inspection, and received a favourable report. “An inspector came and asked me a lot of questions and inspected everything,” says Fazilleau. “He told me that our school was very good. He said he would give his authorisation for us to receive money.”

The school had expected this money to come through in time for the current school year. It received nothing. In September, a delegation from Réussite went to the Inspection Academique to try to find out what was happening. “Nine of us went to hear what they would say,” says Fazilleau. “When we arrived [the school inspector] told us: ‘As far as the administration here is concerned, there is no trace of your school. For me, you do not exist.’”

Réussite (meaning success) has a 100% pass rate in the Baccalaureate (equivalent to A-level), compared to 81% in the local area. Perhaps they will soon be asking them how many bubbles are in a bar of soap. Clearly bigotry and malice is at play here, as with the anti-hijab law these filth passed in 2004. Mort a la République!

Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD(3).

He notes that, in the early days of Darwinism, it was bound up in the USA with social Darwinism, in which the rich were supposed to be at the top of an evolutionary ladder. However, another reason was the religious involvement in slavery and subsequent racism. He assigns a large part of the blame to the Southern Baptist Convention:

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

However, I cannot allow his connection of not knowing where Iraq is on the map with not accepting “that evolution takes place by means of natural selection”. What, I suspect, he means is that these people do not accept is that mankind itself is descended from apes, which is merely a fashionable theory among scientists, not an observed fact. Many religious people, certainly Muslims if not Christians, who do not accept Darwin’s theory in its entirety believe in some form of natural selection and accept that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. It is only certain types of religion, even fundamentalist religion, “that makes you stupid”, but even then, it is only the stupid among them that are stupid and no doubt the clever ones (the ones who run companies, political parties, cities and states - although not countries) believe the same things.

Among the replies to this in the letters yesterday was this from Tom Brown in London:

So whose electorate falls for the cynically spun illusion of million-pound tax-free inheritance gains, served up by George Osborne at last year’s Tory conference? Which country clings to an outdated imperial system, and lionises luddites as “metric martyrs”? Which country’s political class dare not speak of anything European except in terms of the UK dictating and the rest leading? Which capital city elected a mayor who is plainly unfit to hold public office on a resentment vote of car-owning, white, bourgeois suburbs against multi-ethnic, non-car-owning, urban gay and single-parent-family inhabited inner-city areas?

Quite apart from the fact that the US still uses non-metric measurements even when we don’t (they still have gallons of fuel, we take ours in litres), and that it was only a few market traders who bothered to put up a fight over metric (rather than having dual scales, for example, or using non-round numbers which equate to round numbers of pounds or whatever, as you still find on milk bottles), Boris Johnson won the election in London largely because Ken Livingstone had gone too far with his tax-grabbing, anti-motorist schemes. The congestion charge extension, for example, took in substantial residential areas, where not everyone was rich or bourgeois, by any means, and a lot of them really could have done without having to pay an extra car tax (on top of controlled parking fees and road tax) because they had no driveways on which to park. He could have avoided most of this by stopping the charge at the old A40, but he was too arrogant to listen to anybody. I did not vote for Johnson, but it was Livingstone’s high-handedness that cost him the last election. After all, Livingstone won comfortably in 2000, even against an official Labour candidate, having promised the original congestion charge, so he must have got some suburban votes then as well.

Claim: Shari’ah courts are a means of extending clerics’ power

This is the culmination of decades of activism and ideological conditioning by Islamic institutions to incorporate the principles of separate laws for Muslims in the context of British society. More generally, it is a male led movement, disguising itself under the rhetoric of equal rights and superficial notions of ‘multiculturalism’, to embed reactionary religious laws in our society, and beyond that, to increase the influence and power of Islamic values interpreted by male clerics over the lives of Muslims in Britain.

Shari’ah courts in the UK are not part of any attempt to “embed … religious laws”; rather, they are a means for people to settle disputes between themselves, usually about property or marital issues, by their own methods. The judgements have legal force only by virtue of both parties having agreed to accept them. They do not become law, at least not for anyone else. Whether or not it is male led or not, I doubt very much whether these two have canvassed opinions among religious women (as opposed to their favoured women who are not religious) regarding their support for these bodies, because their opinions are of no interest.

Claim: Shari’ah courts are being advanced by “Islamists”, and “non-Islamist” Muslim women oppose Shari’ah courts

Most Muslims go about their daily life without thinking about such things, because their most pressing concerns are to feed their families. Amongst conservatives there is support for the idea of basic sharia arbitration, especially when the denial of them is erroneously generalized by activists like Bunglawala as discrimination against Muslims. On the other hand, all sentient non-Islamist Muslim women are horrified by the long-term consequences of ceding power to sharia-ist men.

This conveniently confuses religious Muslims with Islamists, who are Muslims who support the various Islamic political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Jama’at-e-Islami and Hizb-ut-Tahreer. Most religious Muslims do not support these groups. The point that most Muslims go through life “without thinking about such things” is correct, because courts, by nature, intervene only when things go wrong. It is possible that many non-religious Muslims do not care for Shari’ah courts, but even so, many people who do not pray as much as they should, or who drink alcohol, or do other things not commonly associated with religious Muslim life, would want to conduct important matters, such as marriage, “by the book”.

The question we must ask is how will Sharia judges be operating? There are serious ideological issues to consider as well as legal. Remember Anjem Chowdery (of al-Mujhajiroun) and Omar Bakri; who both claimed to be judges of UK Sharia law. This is the impact of Islamist propaganda.

There is no such thing as “UK Sharia law”, and the authority of either of the two men mentioned - particularly Anjem Chowdery - is very dubious. On the other hand, most of those who sit on Shari’ah panels in the UK have a much greater degree of training, acquired at a traditional Islamic religious school such as those at Dewsbury or Bury in England, or al-Azhar or Deoband (or more than one of these). This is no more than attempt to generate guilt by association.

Mr Bunglawala from the MCB seems to have an issue with the Jewish arbitration system (Beth Din), but they do not impose or contravene with British laws and rights. Above all it is not Judaism that is in crisis, in conflict with democracies, or a threat to Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide. Islam has been brought to a crisis, and the Sharia law legal system is a major issue that cannot be resolved. It is ongoing and problematic.

However, the Beth Din does not rule entirely in accordance with British legal norms; it rules by Jewish law, as Shari’ah courts rule by what they can of Islamic law. Whatever conflicts there are between Muslims and “democracies” elsewhere is of no relevance here; the courts do not deal with terrorism or other matters of criminal law, only with property and marital disputes. I should add that in Israel, radical Haredi elements are indeed trying to dictate to less religious Jews in some places, such as Jerusalem, along much the same lines that Islamist governments do, such as dictating the separation of men and women on public transport; this, however, is not considered a black mark against the Beth Din, or even Haredi equivalents, in the UK, so why should any such conflicts hinder efforts by Muslims to achieve parity with other minority religious groups?

In addition, the presence of arbitration panels - Shari’ah-based or otherwise - is in fact beneficial, not threatening, to the population at large, because it relieves participants of having to go to court, which not only saves them money and time, but saves the courts’ own time, reducing delays for people who do need the courts’ services.

Claim: Muslim institutions do not submit Islamic marriage to British law

A brilliant Barrister who has written to Muslim newspapers about Muslim marriages, Neil Addison, has already shown how Muslim practice is out of step with every other religious community in Britain, including the other main minority religious communities, in refusing to submit marriage ceremonies to British law. This leaves Muslim women and men beleaguered when marriages go wrong and they do not have the same legal rights as all non-Muslims have in a similar situation, all because many parts of the Muslim establishment in Britain refuse to accept the privileging of secular British law over sharia.

This is partly true; some mosques do require people to have a registry office marriage before they conduct a religious marriage, others have the facility to conduct a legal marriage (I contacted some mosques about this issue, and I was told by people at one mosque that the council was unwilling to facilitate official marriages at mosques), but others will indeed conduct religious marriages only. In defence of this practice, it allows couples who wish to be together but not settle down and start a family (because both are in college, for example) to do so with religious sanction and a clear conscience, and a registered mosque marriage at least makes the arrangement public, which the alternative - a marriage conducted in someone’s living room - would not. As for when such arrangements break down, it may well cause some legal trouble, but so would the breakdown of a cohabitation arrangement between two non-Muslims (and they have no Shari’ah court to settle any dispute).

As for polygamy, which the article claims “is perpetuated by the reluctance of the Islamic establishment in Britain to submit their marriage laws to secular British law”, I invite them to provide proof that the Islamic “establishment” is promoting polygamy. While I do not dispute that unofficial plural marriage goes on, both here and in other non-Muslim countries where registering polygamous marriages is illegal, I suspect that they are more likely to be “living-room” affairs or conducted by mosques which are not connected to “the establishment”. I should add that in Islam, the conduct of weddings is independent of the state, even in an Islamic state; the fact of an agreement between the two parties, in the presence of the required witnesses, establishes a marriage. No document is required (or otherwise, how would marriage be established in desert communities, where illiteracy is the norm?).

Claim: the government should listen to secular women

In fact, they need to start listening to Britsh Muslim women like Shaista Gohar, Diane Nammi and ex-muslim women Ayaa Hirsi Ali and Maryam Nawaazi..who all strongly oppose Sharia law. Plus how are these courts going to be monitored and how can measures be taken to stop discrimination of women in these kangaroo courts when Islamists make no scope for any kind of progress to create change within their interpretations of Sharia law, in regards to family law and the rights of Muslim women. To us Sharia law is medieval.

The authors have misspelled the names of all four of these women: Shaista Gohir, Diana Nammi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (or Magan), and Maryam Namazie. The government already has a Muslim Women’s Advisory Group (MWAG), whose members are listed here, and include Shaista Gohir as well as other women, including some of a more religious tendency; as for Maryam Namazie, she is a member of an Iranian and Iraqi communist sect which demands that youths under 16 be prevented from being taught religion or participating it, and that the Arabic script be replaced with the Latin one for languages like Kurdish and Persian. Despite the fact that a few of their activists (Houzan Mahmood is another) are the toast of sections of the western liberal establishment, they should not be treated as liberals, or representative of anyone but themselves.

Claim: opposing Shari’ah courts is not anti-Muslim

To suggest that it is anti-Muslim is a cheap rhetorical trick employed by Islamists to mask their real agenda of special privileges and social control, and to paint Muslim opponents of sharia as being in some way traitorous or complicit in mainstream society’s discrimination against Islam.

Again, we have the confusion of Islamists and ordinary religious Muslims. Most Shari’ah panels are not run by Islamists. The description “traitorous or complicit in mainstream society’s discrimination against Islam” is fairly apt for one of the two individuals behind this article, who is best known for running to the Times to shrill a lot of generalisations about backward Pakistani men and mosques “importing jihad”. As for Paul Sikander, who is he? Pretty much every hit for his name (and there are less than two pages on Google of unique hits) leads to this one article attacking the MCB’s education proposals, suggesting that children might be prevented from taking part in art activities because “the men of the MCB” said so, when in fact, the MCB did not call for schools themselves to prevent children taking part, but merely stated that parents might object, and that they have good religious grounds to object.

It’s true that not everybody who opposes Shari’ah courts hate Muslims, or condone discrimination or violence against us, we often find that they support other religions’ arbitration panels and oppose ours. We often see Jewish and Christian religious councils accepted until Muslims want the same, at which point the talk turns to either abolishing religious arbitration altogether, or to why Jews and Christians merit it while Muslims do not, when Jewish and Christian religious law is no more likely to be favourable to women than Islamic law, and is in some cases less so (divorce is a well-known example; Jewish law requires a husband’s consent to divorce, without exception, while Catholicism refuses it altogether).

Conclusion

This article is nothing more than a manifesto by two extreme secularists who, I am sure, are not alone in their dislike of “male clerics”, but I am sure that their opinion does not represent that of most Muslims, male or female, religious or otherwise. It makes claims to speak for the interests of women, but I do not believe that the authors have bothered to canvass the opinions of Muslim women other than those in their social circle. Much as with the hijab laws in France, I expect that they propose to inconvenience those they do not care for - religious Muslims - in favour of those they do. They want the authorities to listen to them, and them alone, when they represent an extreme view and do not seem to respect those who disagree with them, hence the broad generalisations. While it is the prerogative of anyone who does not want the services of a Shari’ah arbitration panel not to use them, whether because they oppose Shari’ah or because they do not trust the impartiality of one particular panel, they provide a service which is a necessity for those who do use them.

Last week an outfit calling itself “British Muslims for Secular Democracy” had their big launch party, attended by Baroness Kishwer Falkner and “former Islamist Ed Husain”. This is after the group, and its rather shoddy website (text which gets bigger when you move the mouse over it, blue bars in the middle of the text), have been active for months, if not well over a year. Its chair is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and its trustees include the infamous Taj Hargey, senior NHS manager Dr Shaaz Mahboob, a bloke called Imran Ahmad who wrote a book called Unimagined and has some sort of career in Information Systems in which he travels round the world, and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui (and that’s only the people whose profile says other than that they are BMSD trustees). This list, while it may be said to be diverse, is hardly representative of the large body of Muslims that the existing Muslim organisations already represent.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown came out with this astonishing gaffe during her speech, which was reproduced by the Guardian:

“The government has found a way of placating Muslims in a way that will only damage us in the long term, Muslims wanting separate schools or different measures. There must be one law for all.

“This differential accommodation leads to us being pushed to the edges. How is it that the Sikhs and Hindus can live in democracy but not Muslims?”

It is a fact that Sikh men have one of the best-known legal opt-outs: they are allowed to wear their turbans in place of motorcycle helmets. This is typical of what Muslims have been demanding - the right to wear common religiously-mandated dress and yet have the same opportunities as everyone else - only there is a real safety issue at hand, not just social conformity. The level of accommodation to Muslims is overstated, in any case, particularly where funding is concerned; one only has to look at the profusion of Catholic schools and compare it to the handful of state-funded Muslim schools. Her sweeping accusation that “Sikhs and Hindus can live in democracy but not Muslims” is bunk; while the majority of Muslims (including religious ones) actually can live in democracy, one remembers that a mob of Sikhs managed to stop a play they found offensive from being performed a few years ago (Muslims have had much less success). It is also a fact that Sikhs resorted to terrorism to get their own state in India, including bombing passenger planes out of the air, and the antics of Hindu fundamentalists in a democratic state - India - are also well-known.

Still, in an organisation ostensibly of British Muslims for anything, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Taj Hargey really are completely out of place as they are not Muslims. Alibhai-Brown is an Ismaili, a sect rejected (for centuries, I might add) by the mainstream of Islam, while Taj Hargey is part of one of the hadeeth-rejecting cults as several of his MECO press releases demonstrate. Of course, I do not dispute their right to live their own lives and practise their own religions in a free country, but for them to promote themselves to the media as Muslims, and as more representative than the established organisations representing real Muslims, is dishonest. Both are well-known for using a spurious “Muslim” identity to promote ideas damaging to real Muslims, namely that the customs and strictures of the observantly religious are actually not Islamic, even though the consensus of Islamic scholarly opinion is that they very much are. Some of Alibhai-Brown’s writings on race issues and discrimination are valuable, but she takes an extreme position against accommodating religious practice and has, in this line, slandered religious Muslim women by accusing “sanctimonious British niqabis” of siding with Muslim wife-beaters rather than their victims.

The nearest thing the BMSD have to a mainstream religious Muslim on their board is Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, who is well-known for being one of the leading lights in the so-called Muslim Parliament, a highly undemocratic institution which acted as a spearhead for Iranian influence over the Muslim community in England and which was foremost in championing Khomeini’s fatwa. Now that their star has well and truly waned, their spokesmen are always looking for more excuses to get publicity and influence. He boasts of his work on human rights at Guantanamo and in the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, but if he was serious about Muslims’ rights, he would not associate with the likes of Taj Hargey.

BMSD is, therefore, a ragbag of dishonest, inveterate sectarian spoilers and a few wealthy secular Muslims (or secular British Pakistanis). Their claim to be a “silent majority” is laughable, since Hargey and Alibhai-Brown have been very noisy indeed. What makes these people think they are more representative of British Muslims than the observant are? In fact, probably more typical of less-observant Muslims than these wealthy Asian secularists are the Asian yobs who are known of in some of the ghettos of northern England. If there was great discontent about the failings of the MCB, it would be much discussed on the Internet and in the Muslim media, but clearly there is less now than when the MCB was set up, and organisations primarily reflecting the observant are a great necessity, because if religious observance faces petty obstructions at every turn, then theoretical religious freedom means nothing. Really, as far as I can see, religious Muslims do not seek to stand in the way of the success of our less observant co-religionists, so let them enjoy their success without standing in our way by slandering us or those who stand for us.