Polly Toynbee and the “Islamophobia awards”
Polly Toynbee, an anti-religious liberal who writes regularly in the Guardian, mentioned today that she had been labelled the “Most Islamophobic Media Personality” of 2004 by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. I had not heard that this organisation gave such awards, let alone with a ceremony (in London’s Shi’ite mosque in Maida Vale), and I’m quite surprised by some of the people chosen for them. George W Bush gets the “Islamophobe of the Year” in preference to Melanie Phillips, and Chirac and Sharon are preferred over “Islam” Karimov. I’m sure Nick Griffin would consider the award a compliment, but Toynbee doesn’t like being lumped in with such people. Her point is that “whichever way they turn, they find themselves at risk of alliances with undesirables of every nasty hue”.
Toynbee said she had challenged the idea of making criticising a religion a crime akin to racism. Who has been calling for this anyway? What is currently being proposed is aimed at “incitement to religious hatred” and not at criticism. I have not heard of Muslims even suggesting that English law be changed to make criticism of Islam illegal; what is suggested is that incitement to hatred of a group based on a religion that cuts across national and racial lines (like Islam, or indeed Christianity) be put on the same level as the same talk against a religion closely associated with a nationality (like Jews and Sikhs).
In at least two cases, it has been demonstrated that the mere teaching of a religion can be grounds for prosecution. Muslims have been prosecuted for preaching which involved the hadeeths about future wars between Jews and Muslims, and for teaching the Islamic position on a man hitting his wife. As I have stated here before, a lot of those who protest about Islam giving a man the right to hit his wife will most vigorously defend the right of grown women to hit defenceless one- and two-year-old children. Certainly nobody would get prosecuted for suggesting it. The conclusion is that an affront to a grown woman’s dignity is a greater offence in these people’s eyes than an actual assault.
Later on in the piece Toynbee repeats her attack on religious schools, claiming that “if the government really wants to foster religious harmony, it should abolish all religious schools, not build more”. She laments that “it is getting harder to argue against the hijab and the Koran’s edict that a woman’s place is one step behind” (I’ve not heard this edict myself – can anyone give me chapter and verse?), and offers Turkey as “a coherent non-Islamophobic position”. Well, to take people’s taxes and give them a one-size-fits-all type of education may be the way things are done in Europe, but it’s not the Anglo-American model. Some religious schools are bad and some are good, and the same is true of non-religious schools. The non-religious special school I attended was dreadful, while I still have some fond memories of my Catholic infant school. And yes, I did get the religious education and needless to say, I saw through it. Some lefties (like Nick Cohen) don’t credit the human race with this capability once they’ve had a religious education. As for the hijab, well what of it? It’s a piece of cloth which means a lot to the girls who wear it and should mean nothing to others, except perhaps that she’s not “available”. As for Turkey, its “model” is sustained by continual coups and maneouverings against the elected government by the military. In other countries, this is called treason. The punishment for treason in this country until recently was death by hanging; I’m sure I can’t be prosecuted for suggesting that it should be the same for Turkish military officers.
“Women are always the main victims, since extreme religions express their identities through male priestly supremacy and disgust of women,” she claims. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but women have been the main victims of secular fanaticism which bars them from education – and worse. In Algeria at one point, women were threatened with violence from “Islamic” terrorists if they did not wear hijab, and from state terrorists if they did. The main reason religious fanatics in Islam attack women is because the only models for an Islamic state anyone knows today are Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of them miserable examples. I don’t believe that the last true Islamic states are even living memory today, and the contempt secularists show for believing Muslim women easily exceeds that of the Saudi “religious police” who have been reported as harrassing Muslim women in al-Madinah (see Yusuf al-Rifai’s book, Advice to our Brothers, the Ulama of Najd).
Finally she comes to another old canard about Muslims not doing enough to disassociate themselves from extremists. The people she talks of are, and always have been, a tiny minority who recruit mostly at the universities rather than in mosques. The mosques they frequent are well-known (and avoided by a lot of Muslims). They have a high profile because the media draw attention to them, and even solicit their views, time after time. In the Muslim media, Al-Muhajiroun in particular are criticised vigorously – in one article in Q-News the group were called on to stop putting their posters on bins and start putting them inside the bins, and were called morons. They sometimes draw attention to how western policies in the Muslim world help to stir up this type of extremism. But they don’t condone it, which is more than can be said for the left in relation to American actions (under both Clinton and Bush jr) in the Muslim world in the last few years.
