Sardanapale

“We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting… That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”
Nicolas Sarkozy

Up until now official dress codes had been the preserve of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

France is in good company

In an article in The First Post analyses Europe’s immigration problem thus:

“What European countries have done is give citizenship to individuals who feel no obligation to share in their societies for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer and in the event of a catastrophe, sacrifice themselves.

In this way, they evade one of the chief criteria of citizenship. Political allegiance to the constitution of your country is the minimum requirement.

It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West, which opens with the sentence, ‘Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind,’ a chilling read.

This absence of mind, which Caldwell lays bare, is reflected in Europe’s immigration policies and especially in its response to Islam…

Caldwell discusses this theme in an interesting light: he does not overlook the Europeans who feel that Islam is a danger to European values but asks, ‘How can you fight for something you cannot define?’

And this is Europe’s problem – insecurity about who we are, what our various flags mean, why, with every turn, we spend less and less on the military.

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative.

This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

The numbers and insights that Caldwell has collected in his book are visible to many Europeans. During my life in Holland, and in my trips back, I have spoken to European intellectuals who see the revolution that Caldwell describes so well in his book.

They may not call it a revolution, they may also not see it as complete, but they see the identity crisis in Europe.

Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, ‘No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like,’ and so on.

Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship.

Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish ‘blasphemy’, if not passed, has been considered in most countries – or old laws that were never used are being revived…

The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam…

In reality, if Europe falls, it’s not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today – unlike their forbears in the Second World War – will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe.

Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection.

All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.”

Evolution, sophisticated Europeans like to think, is only controversial in backward parts of the US.

Would that it were so.

Watching Richard Dawkins’ latest series “The genius of Charles Darwin” – broadcast by Channel 4 recently – I realized that creationist myths exert undue influence on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Says Dawkins:

“This is multicultural Britain. And one of its fault lines runs straight through our children’s classrooms. How do we reconcile scientific truth with the deeply held convictions that bind religious communities?”

Dawkins finds out by visiting a high-school in London, and finds astonishing resistance to Darwinian ideas on the part of students. (Clip here)

He then takes them to a beach and look at fossils, and only then are some of the kids willing to accept that evolution might be a fact.

Later, in the high point of the series, he confronts the kids’ teachers to find out why they failed so abysmally to acquaint with basic scientific facts.

The answer is clear: the teachers are unprepared to challenge religious views that contradict science.

“We can’t get in to the business of knocking down kid’s religions and the religions of families,” one says.

Dawkins retort sounds banal – but it obviously bears repeating:

“There really is something special about scientific evidence.

Science works; planes fly. Magic carpets and broomsticks don’t.

Gravity isn’t a version of the truth; it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth floor window. Evolution too, is reality.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on CNN:

“I have sensed in this country that there is no place for ambiguity. The American constitution is clear.

Of course you can have your own religion and of course you can have your own neighborhoods and you can self-segregate as much as you wish.

But there are certain things you have to abide by, the most important of which is, you feed yourself.

You work, and you have the dignity of living on your own earnings.

There is also the clarity of law enforcement. Europe, because of all these notions of post-modernism, and multiculturalism and what have you, has decided to treat immigrants as if they were not completely mature citizens, as if they were children, appeasing and looking away when they commit crimes.

I haven’t seen the same thing here. I’m not saying this is a perfect system, but it just gives Muslims who are looking for clarity that clarity (…).

If freedom of expression is protected the way it is in the United States (…) then I think (improvements in the lot of Muslim women in Europe) can take a very short time.

I don’t know if it will take 10 years or 100 years, but that’s the condition – to express your ideas freely and to be able to associate with one another and plan to change.

All of this is not possible if every time one criticises Islam, one is labelled an Islamophobe, works are not published, intellectuals are ostracized, and that’s what going on in Europe at the moment.

It’s no longer the issues that you address but your person that is attacked, and the whole debate is brought too a standstill.

That, combined with the terrorists who threaten, intimidate and promise jihad, is what has made progress for Muslims living in Europe something harder to achieve than for Muslims living in America.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s whole interview on Fareed Zakaria’s excellent weekly show is worth listening to.

Here are links to part one and two.

“The trial, which took place over the following weeks, was like a circus, although there was some difficulty getting the elephants into the courtroom. At last, the jury found Cloquet guilty, and he was sentenced to the guillotine. An appeal for clemency was turned down on a technicality when it was learned Cloquet’s lawyer had filed it while wearing a cardboard mustache.”

Woody Allen

The short story “The Condemned” by Woody Allen – a satire of French literature of the absurd – had always made me laugh.

I found the idea that judges could take silly accoutrements into account in their decisions deliciously surreal.

But then I read the story of a Moroccan woman whose husband and three sons are all French – but who fatefully filed her application for French nationality while wearing a burqa.

Guess what happened?

French judges turned her down, deeming “radical practice of religion incompatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of sexual equality”.

The absurd is no longer a literary fashion in France, but it appears to have become a legal one. You can read more about the case here.

Yesterday David Davis, the shadow home secretary, took a step that is almost unheard of in British political history.

He resigned as a member of parliament – and as the second most senior conservative leader after David Cameron – and promised to run again for his seat on a platform of defending “British liberties”.

Davis took pissed off his party – which is a year or two away from being elected – to take a moral stand, a day after the House of Commons passed a law extending detentions for terror suspects.

Many find his move baffling or quixotic. But his stirring resignation speech is worth quoting:

“Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because with centuries or forebears we defended the freedoms of the British people. Well we did up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, the document that guarantees that most fundamental of British freedoms – Habeas Corpus, the right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge…

Now the counter terrorism bill will in all probability be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for if not to defend Magna Carta…

But in truth, 42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials – that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state….

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate – while those who incite violence get off Scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped.

And for that reason, I feel that today it’s incumbent on me to take a stand.

I will be resigning my membership of the House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden….

I will argue this by-election, against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government. “

A recent article by John Gray in the Guardian attacks Richard Dawkins and other authors of recent books religion.

Between a (born-again) anti-market philosopher and a great scientific, my choice is clear.

So I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Gray.

His main idea is that, 9/11 notwithstanding, religion is not a force for evil in the modern world.

In the past century, the worst crimes against humanity have been committed by godless tyrants.

According to Gray, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Philip Pullman, Daniel Dennett and other foes of religion are fighting the wrong battle – often reproducing the fanaticism of their foes.

In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins tries to refute this objection:

“What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.”

Dawkins, of course, is right to say that atheist does not lead to crime (as a heathen myself, I can only agree). But he is wrong to say that religion does.

He neglects the fact that opposition to religious freedom has characterized totalitarian movements since France’s Jacobin revolutionaries.

Opposition to church independence is not confined to totalitarianism.

It was a feature of the absolutist mindset that arose in 16th century England and 17th France.

In both cases, power-hungry monarchs sought to bring the clergy and dissident churches to heel.

The battle against bolshy priests was a also a fixture of 20th century tyrannies, as illustrated in Graham Greene’s masterpiece The Power and the Glory, about Mexico in the 1920s.

In fact, it is a basic tenet of all faiths that there is a higher law than the rule of the prince.

It is no accident that some of the most eloquent defenders of liberty have been devout men, such as Chateaubriand, Martin Luther King, Solzhenitsyn, and Desmond Tutu.

And the Catholic Church, unlike earthly powers, never made its peace with the Soviet empire, and elected at its head an anti-Communist committed to rollback before the US did.

You might object that although Christianity may now be compatible with liberal values, but the same is not true of Islam, which does not recognize the distinction between the private and public spheres.

This is debatable – I do mean “false”, but a point of debate. Experts are arguing whether Islam is inherently inimical to liberal values.

The Koran is a hodgepodge of baffling and contradictory precepts (like the Bible) where you can find quotes in support in support of pretty much anything.

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve met too many good people who call themselves Muslims to indict a whole faith with the crimes of a fanatical minority.

I agree with Gray: there are much worse things in the world than religion.

Dawkins is wasting his considerable intellectual and argumentative powers on a mild quirk of the human psyche.

Gray’s article is here.

Dawkins is always worth reading.

Britain is consumed by the controversy triggered by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pronouncement that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law was “unavoidable”.

Rowan Williams said that many UK citizens did not relate to the British legal system, and that adopting parts of Islamic law would help maintain “social cohesion”.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia courts, which should be part of “plural jurisdiction” in Britain.

Most commentators were appalled.

One of the most vocal and articulate critics was the British writer Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in Slate.com:

“Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear.

She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight.

What she ought to be able to say is, “I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced.” But what she will often be told is, “Your problem is better handled within the community.” And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country’s official spiritual authority.

You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts.”

I don’t share Hitchens’s concerns. It seems to me that he confuses two things: criminal and civil law.

Any viable system of criminal law must indeed entail a monopoly. All citizens of a country should enjoy equal protection under a single norm.

The full force of the law must bear on any man who behaves like the bastard in the not-so-hypothetical case Hitchens mentions.

A woman who came to the police with those complaints should secure a prosecution: the guy is clearly committing a number of crimes (assault, child abuse and sequestration).

But what Williams is talking about is civil law – disputes between individuals (or individuals and companies) – and there a plurality of jurisdictions is desirable.

People should be allowed to choose their arbiter – as long as that choice is freely accepted by all parties.

Britain itself has a history of plurality in civil jurisdictions. Until the 19th century, England and Wales had a system “chancery courts” (which was famously denounced by Dickens) alongside other common law tribunals.

Now the chancery courts have gone, but parallel systems of dispute settlement remain, from chartered arbitrators to religious community courts for Jews – which are all recognized in law.

Even Muslims, in matters of divorce, can already go before Islamic Sharia Council.

It sure beats me why any woman would take her divorce case to a bearded man working out of a prefab cabin in a dodgy part of London, as opposed to say Heather Mill’s lawyer.

But as long as it’s her choice, I don’t have a problem with it.

As I write highly altruistic souls, somewhere not too far from here, are plotting to kill me – along with every non-Muslim in Britain.

What could lead otherwise well adjusted young men (the latest plot was the work of doctors) to regard mass murder as the fulfilment of a heroic destiny?

I thought everything had been said on British Jihadis – but I found Shiv Malik’s article “My brother the bomber” in Prospect Magazine illuminating.

Malik spent several months in a mainly Pakistani suburb of Leeds to research a film on the July 2005 bombers. After first hitting a wall of silence, he got to know the brother of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader, and pieced together the stages of his radicalization.

Malik’s startling conclusion is that jihadism in Britain is driven by a conflict between older immigrants and their children. Khan, like many second-generation Pakistanis, resented the strictures of the tribal system his parents had reproduced in Britain.

He detested traditional, Urdu-speaking preachers, and finally broke with his family after rejecting the marriage within the clan they sought to impose on him.

Writes Malik:

“Among those who study British race relations, there’s an informal theory that states that 30 years after the establishment of any sizeable ethnic minority community, there will be riots. After Jewish migration into Britain in the 1900s, there were riots in the Jewish communities of east London during the 1930s.

After the 1950s migration from the Caribbean, there were riots in 1981 in the Afro-Caribbean areas of Toxteth, Chapeltown and Brixton. And after the 1970s Pakistani immigration into northern England, in the summer of 2001, like clockwork, serious unrest kicked off in Oldham, then spread to Leeds, Burnley and Bradford.

One explanation is that it takes about 30 years for a sizeable second generation to establish itself and then become frustrated with its status, both within its own community and the wider society.

This frustration arises in part from a question of identity. Whose culture and values do you affiliate with? Those of your parents or of your friends? Those of your community or of your country?…

Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn’t the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters.

At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis – with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live. It is a conflict between tradition and individuality, culture and religion, tribalism and universalism, passivity and action.

When it is stated like this, the problem of Islamic extremism looks depressingly intractable. The government’s first reaction following 7/7 was to consult with a wide range of Muslim opinion, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and similar bodies.

The government now argues that the MCB and some of its affiliates are as much part of the problem as of the solution, and the new initiatives to tackle radicalism stress the promotion of British values at a grassroots level and working more closely with the few liberal modernizers in Britain’s Muslim community.

But maybe all that we can do now is remain vigilant and wait for the tide in the battle for Islam’s soul to turn in the west’s favor.”

Not convinced? Read the whole piece and get back to me. I’ll be around for a while yet. Despite those lurking murderers, the laws of probability are on my side.

Paul Berman’s article in the New Republic “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” makes dazzling, if lengthy, reading.

It’s the latest – and to my mind the best-aimed salvo – in a debate that agitated much of the trans-Atlantic intelligentsia in the early months of the year.

A few words about that controversy first.

The first shot was fired by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner who called Dutch writer Ian Buruma and British academic Timothy Garton Ash “enemies of freedom”.

Their chief crime, as Bruckner saw it, was their support for “multiculturalism”, i.e. the notion that all cultures deserve equal recognition.

The “mystique of respect for others” is a very dangerous thing when applied to repressive groups, and Buruma and Garton Ash stood accused of sanctioning “the oppression of the individual”.

How so? They had criticised the Dutch writer Ayaan Hirsi Ai, a fierce critic of Islam, and had warned against a hard-line stance towards Islamists.

To Bruckner, this “tolerance harbours contempt” for victims of fanaticism. Multiculturalism, he wrote, was the “racism of the anti-racists”.

Buruma and Garton Ash were not willing to stick up for liberal democracy, just like the useful idiots who lent their supports to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

Bruckner wrote:

“It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.

They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

Buruma and Garton Ash rejected the charge – fairly convincingly I thought – pointing out that they had a track record of opposing anti-Western sentiment.

“Liberal democracy must be defended against violent extremism,” wrote Buruma.

He added that revolutionary Islamism was “indeed a threat to our free society.”

Both Buruma and Garton Ash insisted that they were just as outraged by terrorism as anyone – they just argued that targeting a whole religion for opprobrium was not the right way to tackle Islamic violence.

Others joined the fray.

The Bruckner lot branded their opponents as fellow travellers of a new form of totalitarianism; Buruma called his attackers “Enlightenment fundamentalists”.

Berman’s piece is the most considered contribution to the debate, and it weighs heavily on the side of Bruckner.

Although his main target is Tariq Ramadan, Buruma is faulted for going easy on the Swiss Islamist in a profile written for the New York Times Magazine last year.

Writes Berman:

“All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma’s words, “a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam” based on “values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment.”

He judged that Ramadan’s values, although “neither secular, nor always liberal,” offer “an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.”

This was not quite a ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement.

It conveyed the unmistakable implication that Ramadan, the worthy interlocutor, stands for more than himself, which is why engaging him might be useful – in order to discover the human and philosophical principles that Western and Muslim hearts and minds might share in common, and to bridge the divisions, and at last to achieve, between the West and Islam, a cultural peace.”

For Berman, Ramadan glosses over the deep links between the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by his grandfather, and the ideologue of modern jihad Sayyid Qutb.

And Buruma took Ramadan at face value: he pulled his punches when he knew better:

“Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi reformism?

Buruma failed to notice Qutb’s prominence among its intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is “one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out.”

And why one of the few?

It was as if, without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept Ramadan’s overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because, in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic.

Ramadan ended up being “one of the few Muslim intellectuals” because the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, did not count.

Or worse, the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had decided to dismiss as neocons.

This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been receiving.

For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn’t we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights?”

But according to Berman, this is a sham. It is true that Ramadan disapproves of terrorism – but

“there is a cost in having it both ways, in noisily affirming his place within the salafi reformist tradition while pretending that terrorist components of the movement belong only to a distant offshoot; or in affirming his own disapproval of violent action while exalting his grandfather’s memory…

The cost is a little smudge of ambiguity in Ramadan’s own position….

But what is his final message with regard to violence? It is a double message.

The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism.”

Berman also takes Buruma to task over his argument that people like Ramadan, who refuse to tackle Islamism head on and have credibility with ordinary Muslims, are in a better position in influence them than Hirsi Ali.

“This ought to be a familiar argument – it was more or less the argument that Sartre invoked in order to explain why he refused to condemn the USSR.

Sartre invited his audiences to think of the industrial suburb of Paris called Billancourt, where the ignorant workers believed in communism and the Soviet future–and he did not want to demoralize the downtrodden, to désespérer Billancourt.

And so Sartre bit his tongue; if the workers were going to learn the truth about the Soviets, it was not going to be from him. And Ramadan is right not to désespérer Brick Lane (a Bangladeshi area of London) by offering a simple straight-out condemnation of violence against women.”

In conclusion, Berman contrasts the present restraint to the unanimous outcry among intellectuals that followed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

“During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen?

The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism… ; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas… – what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.”

I am not buying all of Berman’s arguments, and have some sympathy with Buruma’s, but this article makes fascinating reading.

I am struck by the power and clarity of Berman’s arguments, but I don’t buy every single one of them.

I find him sometimes harsh on Buruma and Garton Ash, who after all belong to the same intellectual family as him, the anti-Marxist left.

The fact that both sides have valid points makes the confrontation all the more interesting.

It raises crucial questions for which there are no easy answers: who are the West’s enemies: Jihadis? Islamists? Muslims?

Can a culture be totalitarian? After all, the totalitarian monstrosities of the 20th centuries did not rest on ancient cultures but on their destructions, and on the banishment of history.

Is the notion of Islamofascism a valid one? Is there such a thing as an “enlightenment fundamentalist”?

I have no definitive answers to these questions.

If you want to form an opinion for your self most of the debate can be found on this site.