United In Tolerance: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Four)

United In Tolerance: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Four)

The Bishop of Liverpool was on Radio Four’s ‘Thought For the Day’ slot this morning. He described how a group of which he is a member, consisting of four Christians, four Jews and four Muslims, discussed Pope Benedict’s recent controversial statement that had been taken as implying that Islam was a violent religion. They ended up agreeing a set of five values that for them defined Britishness. They were:

· Respect for the law

· Liberty

· Language (i.e. English, not the only ‘indigenous’ British language be it noted)

· Landscape

· Monarchy

It seems that many people have their own lists of essential British values and virtues. The Bishop went on to explain that, in his view, these values – in Britain at least – had a Christian foundation, but that he had not wanted to emphasise this point at the meeting of the group. However, he would express this opinion at their next meeting, which had agreed the topic for discussion as that of tolerance. Pregnant pause as the slot came to an end; unspoken allusion to Tony Blair’s contribution on that theme last week (see my last blog, dated 9 December).

Is tolerance a – perhaps the – core British value that unites us all around common principles allowing us to express our differences within a framework of mutual respect? Tolerance is actually quite an ambiguous value. For a start, it can refer either to a personal characteristic (‘x is a tolerant man’), or to a quality or virtue, in a philosophical and ethical sense. As a personal characteristic, tolerance can have more than one resonance: being (over-)indulgent towards others; being prepared to put up with the annoying behaviour of others; having a high anger threshold; or being possessed of the ‘virtue’ of tolerance in the ethical sense just alluded to.

As an ethical and philosophical value, tolerance demarcates the boundaries of liberty: it refers to a high-minded, libertarian affirmation of the freedom and the right of individuals and groups to carry on their lives in the manner of their choosing, regardless of whether those lifestyles seem distasteful or even morally wrong – up to the point at which those behaviours become intolerable. They are intolerable, precisely, if they infringe the liberty either of the individuals concerned, or of others; or, in a more general sense, if they undermine the basic principles – of which liberty and tolerance are cornerstones – that create a framework under law enabling us to live together harmoniously.

Is Britain a tolerant nation in this latter sense? I think it is not, nor do I think the new-found champions of tolerance really want it to be. There is always, and arguably always should be, a moral basis to the law that limits the tolerance of society to a greater extent than is implied by the description of the libertarian limits of tolerance above. For instance, the idea of legalising the use of many currently illegal drugs is generally rejected, but not because free drug use in itself violates the principle of tolerance (allowing people to choose to harm themselves if they want to). On the contrary, the liberalisation of drug use is dismissed at least in part because taking drugs of these types is thought to be morally wrong, both in terms of the damage the user can do to themselves, and because of its potential to harm the wider ‘social fabric’. And this is despite the potential benefit that controlled legalisation could have in terms of decriminalising the supply of drugs. The same type of argument applies in the case of prostitution, which has recently come to the forefront of British public attention as a result of a series of murders of prostitutes in the town of Ipswich. Legalising the soliciting of acts of prostitution, so the argument goes, would make prostitutes’ working lives safer and the risk of sexual infection smaller. But such a change is rejected because of the moral condemnation of prostitution and the fear that legalisation would encourage its spread, thereby undermining marriage, family and social cohesion as a whole.

So Britain is not really a tolerant society in the full sense of the word, which would effectively be synonymous with radical liberalism. British tolerance is circumscribed by ethically defined limits. And those limits are Christian-derived – inherited from our Christian tradition – even if they would not necessarily be accepted as properly or entirely Christian according to either evangelical or Catholic orthodoxies. In this context, one cannot help wondering to what extent this Christian element within our tolerance plays a part in the thinking about appropriate responses towards, indeed legislation about, Muslim women wearing the full veil – niqab – or the burka (the body-length gown that incorporates the niqab). Is the view that it might be right to ban women from wearing the niqab in certain or even all public places derived from liberal principles concerning the limits of tolerance, or from inherited Christian responses?

From a liberal perspective, one could advance a view that it would be a good thing to ban the niqab in public on the assumption that some – possibly many – women are forced to wear it against their will. (There was an implication of this in Tony Blair’s speech last week; see my blog of 9 December.) This violates their liberty, and therefore, it should be stopped. (What happens in the home is another matter; but equally, it would be interesting to see what measures, if any, the potential legislators might propose to defend women whose husbands or families try to coerce them into wearing the niqab in private.) In reality, most of the media testimonies from recent adopters of the veil that have been printed or broadcast since the start of the public debate about it in October of this year emphasise the fact that they have freely chosen to wear it as an expression of their commitment to Islam and its moral teachings as they interpret them.

An additional argument from tolerance in favour of banning the veil in public would be one that relied on the more general basis for regarding a particular type of behaviour as intolerable, i.e. that it undermines the common principles or values that provide the framework for people of different cultures and faith backgrounds to live together in a way that does not infringe their legitimate rights and freedoms. In fact, the way this argument has tended to be put forward recently is not that wearing the niqab, as an expression of ‘radical’ Islam (definition please?), undermines those common principles and the established rule of law they support; but that it somehow intrinsically subverts the social cohesion and cultural integration that is the ideal end result of the application of those principles. In other words, the advocates of restricting the veil start from the supposedly visible effect of impaired cohesion (embodied in the veil) in order to infer the existence of a set of alternative principles and values (those of militant Islam) that is opposed to British values of tolerance. But no one in the public debate, to my knowledge, has set out a credible critique of the way Islamic teachings do (or do not) really conflict with and undermine those values. Now that really would be interesting!

In other words, we seem here to have a classic case of prejudice. We assume that a group of people who are different from us have beliefs and practices that undermine the whole basis of our society simply because they look different, talk differently (indeed, refuse to communicate with us; cf. veil debate), and adhere to a religion we find – in some ways, understandably – threatening and terrifying. But this is surely the point: we have an inherited, Christian-derived prejudice against Islam, which recent history appears to have confirmed and has certainly reignited. And it is that, more than any intrinsic opposition that Islamic values might pose to our own, that determines that beyond a certain point of moderation, public manifestations of Islam are no longer tolerable.

The ‘good intention’ of these British-value formalisers (let’s call them the ‘Briticists’) is to promote the adoption – in social practice and in law – of a value system that is a unique (?) British combination of liberal-tolerant and Christian-derived principles: one which sufficiently abstracts ‘core’ Christian moral and social teachings from any particular formal dogmatic expression of them in order to re-present them as universal, rational-ethical principles to which members of any religion can in principle assent because those core principles are also fundamental to their own religions. Except – so the thinking goes – in the case of ‘radical’ Islam. But here’s the whole heart of the matter: is fundamental Islam the one exception to the rule; the one religion whose core values are irreconcilable with the values that are common to Christianity, liberalism and all the other religions of tolerant Britain? Or is thinking along these lines just a prejudice – Christian in origin – that justifies a refusal to engage in dialogue with Islam; and then perhaps to discover a whole tolerant, humane tradition within that faith that is not so different from our own – and from which our own in many senses actually derives?

But so much for tolerance as a philosophical and ethical principle. In the next instalment of this blog (failing some news event that stirs me into a tangential diatribe), I will examine the question of whether or not Britain is temperamentally a tolerant nation and what that might in fact mean.

Cross Ban Reviewed, Veil Ban Confirmed: A Bad Day For Multiculturalism

Reconsideration Of the Cross Ban, Confirmation Of the Veil Ban –

A Bad Day For Multi-Culturalism

Yesterday, BA – the UK airline – caved into the barrage of criticisms that had been directed at it for its decision on Monday (20 November) confirming that it would not allow one of its employees, Nadia Eweida, to visibly wear a cross pendant during her duties as a check-in operative. On the same day, it was reported that the school-classroom assistant, Aishah Azmi, who had been suspended from her duties for refusing to remove her full veil (niqab) in front of male teachers, had finally been sacked on the alleged grounds that her veil made communication with her pupils difficult.

I have written extensively on the veil issue, particularly during the controversy in the UK in October over calls for Muslim women not to wear the full veil (see http://blog.myspace.com/culturalcritique). On Wednesday of this week, I also discussed the case of Nadia Eweida and concluded that, while on the face of it, BA’s actions had been discriminatory, it was a complex situation and there were in fact some legitimate grounds for BA’s decision. In particular, BA’s response could be viewed as that of a Western-style ‘liberal-Christian’ organisation acting to prevent an ‘inappropriately’ overt expression of Christian faith on the part of a front-line employee: as it were, a disciplinary action carried out by individuals some of whom would consider themselves (perhaps justifiably) to be acting in a Christian way, within a ‘broadly’ Christian corporate culture, towards another Christian employee; not a monolithic secular organisation acting from outside the bounds of Christianity to clamp down on an open expression of that faith within the workplace.

What is disturbing about the fact that BA’s decision to review its uniform policy and Kirklees Council’s decision to dismiss Aishah Azmi were reported on the same day is the links that this suggests between two superficially unrelated cases. Far from being a vindication of the multi-cultural right for individuals of any faith to openly wear symbols of that faith, BA’s original decision and about-turn has been seized upon as a cause célèbre by supporters of moves to define Britain’s identity and values as Christian. And supporters of this cultural trend include many of those who have made statements criticising the full veil.

Those who have celebrated BA’s uniform-policy review have said that it puts Christians on an equal footing with Muslims at BA, who are allowed to wear the head veil (hijab) in positions such as Nadia Eweida’s. But would they say the same about the niqab, or full veil? If a BA employee had been suspended for refusing not to wear a niqab, it is clear that many of the voices that were indignant about Ms Eweida’s case would have backed BA 100%. That’s not to say that it would necessarily be appropriate for a BA check-in operative to wear the niqab; although in a genuinely multi-cultural society, what are the real reasons (not the pretexts, e.g. being able to communicate with and reassure passengers; putting off passengers who have chosen BA because it is supposed to somehow represent Britain in general) why it would not be appropriate in some circumstances?

The point is that defenders of Nadia Eweida have argued that BA does in fact symbolise Britain and that, because Britain is historically and culturally a Christian country, the company should allow its employees to wear symbols of the Christian faith which – I argued in my previous blog – associate the cross with BA’s uniform in a way that subliminally puts across the message that ‘BA is a Christian company’; or at least, ‘a company that represents a Christian country’. This point of view was quite explicitly set out in the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu’s, defence of Ms Eweida earlier in the week. The opposite is also true: that BA’s banning of open cross wearing has seen it labelled as anti-Christian and as a representative of rampant secularism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’, statement on the matter on Thursday was more impartial: basically, criticising BA for denying Ms Eweida a fundamental freedom to express her religious conviction openly, in this instance through the wearing of a symbol of the Christian faith. But we are not in fact talking about a private individual here, or even an employee wearing standard smart clothing of their choice when at work. We’re talking about a uniformed representative of an organisation that clearly is taken as a symbol for Britain as a whole. I would argue that what is evoked, associatively or symbolically, by a uniformed BA member of staff openly wearing a cross is quite different from what is connoted by a similar employee wearing a hijab or a Sikh turban. In the latter instances, I think how most flying passengers would react would be to think that this was an example of Britain being a tolerant, multi-cultural society that is prepared to bend uniform rules in order to allow its employees to act in a manner that is consistent with their faiths, which are minority beliefs in the UK. In the case of an employee visibly wearing a cross, many of BA’s international customers, I am sure, would think that BA had actively encouraged its employees to wear crosses to proudly testify to Britain’s status as a nation of Christian heritage, where the Christian faith is the ‘majority’ religious belief.

It is a similar – though not entirely identical – case to other organisations where uniforms directly or indirectly symbolise the British state, e.g. the army, police, emergency services, etc. I’m sure that these organisations also have uniform policies that ban the open wearing of crosses and other forms of jewellery with a symbolic function (e.g. Stars of David). But you don’t hear a chorus of demands for members of these organisations to be allowed to wear crosses openly. Why? Because – apart from pretext-type arguments around health and safety – soldiers, policemen, etc. are supposed to represent the impartiality of the state and the law to all its citizens of whatever faith; and clearly, in certain sensitive operational situations that confront the army or police, it would be detrimental for the organisation as a whole to be identified as Christian by the fact that a single individual had exercised their freedom to openly wear a cross. Similarly, I have previously argued, there may well have been unspoken security considerations of this sort behind the request made to Nadia Eweida that she wear her cross under her uniform, in order not to identify herself and her airline as Christian, thereby making herself and it more vulnerable to attack. It is consistent with such impartiality (i.e. the desire not to identify an organisation with the majority Christian constituency in the UK) for BA to ask its employees not to signal themselves – and, indeed, single themselves out – as Christian, while at the same time making a compromise that allows members of other faiths that make stricter dress-code demands of their adherents to be true to their beliefs while at work.

One of the self-appointed defenders of Ms Eweida on Thursday of this week was Jack Straw, the former UK Foreign Secretary: the same Jack Straw who sparked off the veil controversy in October by stating that he asks niqab-wearing constituents who meet him at his weekly ‘surgeries’ to remove their veils – in the presence of another woman and of their husbands – in order to facilitate better communication; and by arguing that, in general, the veil served as an impediment to better relations between the mainstream British community and the Muslim community.

Mr Straw stated on Thursday that he shared the concerns of about 100 MPs who had signed parliamentary motions calling on BA to reverse its cross ban, and he indicated that he was expressing only a personal sharing of those MPs’ concerns, not the opinion of the government, which did not have a particular position on the issue. Methinks he protests too much. Mr Straw claimed that he was expressing only a personal point of view in the original veil row; but after a succession of interventions – again, only personal – from government ministers, the prime minister eventually chimed in, stating that he thought the veil was a visible “mark of separation” between Muslims and the rest of society; thereby conveying the distinct impression that the whole controversy was a campaign deliberately orchestrated from the very top. Similarly, I think it’s almost inconceivable that Mr Straw – a close confidant of the PM – did not consult with him over what position to take with respect to the BA row and Labour MPs’ protests against BA’s actions. The two positions – defence of an individual’s right to wear an item of jewellery that symbolically associates BA with Christianity, and rejection of the full veil as something that supposedly sets Muslims apart from British society – are intimately interlinked, and are so at the highest level of our society. They are both part of a drive to reaffirm and redefine ‘common British values’ as being ‘essentially’ (one might say, fundamentally) Christian (more precisely, liberal-Christian) in a way that is increasingly intolerant to overt expressions of difference of any kind (including religious difference), which are interpreted as divisive, radical / extreme and even aggressively hostile.

This is not a victory for multi-culturalism, at least not the inclusive model of it, which does not seek to ‘officially’ identify the national culture with any one religion, while recognising the traditional pre-eminence of particular forms of belief and customs. In this instance, of course, the UK government is trying to cut it both ways: not taking an official position of support for Christianity, while it is clear what its actual position is. No, this is what I have referred to as exclusionist multi-culturalism: minority faiths and cultures must accept integration on terms dictated by the majority culture, or be excluded. And the minority and majority cultures – as the differential responses in the cases of Aishah Azmi and Nadia Eweida demonstrate – are increasingly being framed as Muslim and Christian.

Is Banning the Veil Compatible With Liberalism?

Is Banning the Veil Compatible With Liberalism?

Yesterday, the Dutch government agreed to put together legislation that would ban the wearing of all full face coverings – including the Islamic burqa and full veil (niqab) – on grounds of security. Another justification that has been brought forward for the ban is that the full veil is an obstacle to the integration of Muslims into Dutch society, in that it prevents proper communication with the women concerned.

One absurdity about the whole situation is that the Muslim community in the country estimates that only about 50 women actually wear the full veil there. So that largely invalidates the argument about security, unless the Dutch government is seriously concerned about a specific terrorist plan to use the veil as a form of disguise to carry out an attack. But no official, as far as I know, has made this claim.

In terms of the argument about integration, it should be obvious that one effect of introducing a legal prohibition against the veil would be to make many Muslims feel alienated and victimised. One opposition politician, who is also a Muslim, was indeed quoted in the press as saying that if the new law is passed, it will lead many young Muslim women to start wearing the veil as a protest.

The Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen [now, would I be wrong to assume he is Jewish?], even said that women who were turned down for employment because they refused to wear the veil should not expect to receive welfare benefits. How does that square with integration? This is more the ‘exclusionist’ model of integration: either you accept integration on our terms, or you are excluded. On this model, society becomes integrated on the basis that certain groups or individuals that don’t fit in are simply not counted as members of that society.

The terms for social integration that are being proposed, or imposed, in the Netherlands could be called liberal, in a general philosophical sense. Is it appropriate to use the expression ‘liberal intolerance of non-liberal values’ to describe what’s going on? Is the increasing Islamophobia – in the sense of fear of Islam as much as dislike of Islam – we see in supposedly liberal Western European countries an example of how liberal societies react when they feel their values, and the institutions that support those values, are under threat? We see so many examples of this throughout the continent, another one being the argument that is adduced in the UK to support illiberal detention laws: that it is better that we accept derogations from the liberal principles that underpin our laws in order to protect our liberal society and institutions as a whole. I have previously argued [MySpace blogs of 11 November and 13 November: see http://blog.myspace.com/culturalcritique] that this is an illogical position: once the instruments of power and law enforcement start acting in an illiberal way, then they are by definition no longer fully liberal and cannot be said to be protecting liberal society.

What we are coming up against here is the question of limits and limitations: are there limits to liberalism? How should liberal societies take action against minorities that supposedly do not accept their values and who push those societies ‘to the limit’? Should we accept limitations to our own liberty to ensure its survival? Is wearing the full veil ‘the limit’ that liberal society can’t tolerate? Should specific individuals’ liberties be subject to limitations – e.g. UK-style Control Orders – to ensure the freedom of others in society?

In the specific Dutch case, the pretexts for the proposed law’s limitations of the freedom to wear what one chooses, and the freedom of religious expression that is at work in wearing the veil, are invalid, as I have argued above. There is little or no real security threat involved in 50 women throughout the Netherlands wearing the niqab in public places in general (specific public places like banks or public transport could be reasonably accepted as a special case). The proposed legislation makes a ludicrous but revealing equation between the niqab and other face coverings such as motorcycle helmets: as if women wearing the niqab for religious reasons represented a threat equivalent to that of people walking around public places wearing motorcycle helmets! I don’t know: maybe the atmosphere of Islamophobia has grown so intense in Holland that women going about in veils are genuinely suspected of being potential suicide bombers. But then those in authority should try to defuse and counteract those fears by promoting better understanding and greater interaction between mainstream society and the Muslim community; not reinforce those fears, and the barriers that sustain them, by officially suppressing the differences that arouse suspicion and forcing them to go underground.

In fact, the experience of suicide bombings around the world – including in London in July 2005 – has been that it is far more effective as a tactic if the attackers blend in with their surroundings and adopt a Western appearance. The hostility towards the veil merely seizes upon a visible “mark of separation”, to quote Tony Blair’s words last month, viewed as a symbol of a defiant Islam that insists on maintaining its adherence to orthodox teachings that are at variance with Western liberalism and which, by association with the terror threat, evoke the fear of violence.

In order for laws that restrict certain liberties to be tolerable within liberal societies, there has to be real evidence that the behaviour or actions that are limited in this way pose a serious threat to the enjoyment of freedom and the security of other members of that society. As I have previously argued [blogs of 11 and 13 November], the trouble about the UK government’s detention legislation is that it has not presented convincing evidence to justify some of the measures either on principle, or in practice, in terms of actual examples where – without the application of those detention provisions – a terror attack would probably have occurred. In the case of the proposed Dutch legislation, it seems clear that – as applied to the burqa and niqab – the restrictions are motivated more by fear (by actual terror, if you like, rather than real terrorism) than by a calm, evidence-based assessment of the real risks.

And also, of course, there are other motivations behind the shallow pretexts for the Dutch legislation, such as prejudice, racism, an anti-religious liberal agenda, and a social liberalism (including feminism and advocacy of free sexual expression) that perceives traditional Islam (symbolised by the veil) as the ‘enemy’ but won’t openly say so. But is modern Dutch intolerant liberalism (which you could also perhaps call ‘radical liberalism’) really liberal any more, in the sense of tolerating and embracing diversity of expression and belief, so long as those practices and beliefs accept the same freedoms in others? And are Mr Blair’s ‘common British values’ – in the name of which Muslim veil wearing has recently come under attack – truly liberal values?