An unkind wag once said that Salman Rushdie’s only significant contribution to the English language was the word “fatwa”. It has indeed become part of our everyday vocabulary since its sensational appearance in Britain’s news. The same process seems to be overtaking the Arabic word “hijab”.
Hijab hit the news following the decision of the French government to introduce a law to stop Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves (or veils) in school. Angry Muslims staged demonstrations on January 17 all over France and across the world. All the obvious arguments were made about religious freedom, but 70% of the French population, including some prominent Muslims, said they supported President Chirac’s ban on “ostensible” religious symbols in schools.
In this country there seemed to be a smug, unspoken feeling that this sort of problem would not arise in tolerant, sophisticated, multicultural Britain.
If so, it is a badly mistaken feeling. Last week a British teacher was accused in front of a jury of religiously aggravated common assault, a charge created in 2001. She was accused of making a Muslim girl remove her headscarf because it was not of the school uniform type, of scratching her with a safety pin in the process and insulting her religion. The case was halted but will start again in March.
Also last week a school in Luton felt obliged to review its school uniform rule forbidding headgear in classrooms (including headscarves). Members of the radical Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun started handing out leaflets outside the school, and the governors gathered to reconsider. The hijab problem is already here.
The solution might seem relatively simple. Britain has a tradition of tolerance of which we are rightly proud and our presumption must be in favour of freedom and of the free expression of religious belief. Unlike the excessively rational French, we have never insisted on keeping schools strictly secular; on the contrary, we have overtly religious schools, some of them exclusive to members of the faith in question, yet paid for by the public.
Why not let Muslim schoolgirls wear their headcoverings to school? It is not as though they are demanding the right to flaunt themselves, like many other British girls, in microskirts and navel studs and behave like teenage jailbait.
Yet the truth about the hijab is far from simple. It presents a serious challenge to the West. It challenges our ideas of what’s most important in our own culture and the points at which we draw the line of tolerance.
One such point is the equality of women with men. The sight in this country of women, and particularly of young girls, heavily swathed and covered up as if they were not capable of going about as freely as a man, as if there were something about them which needed hiding, is genuinely offensive both to the informed and to the uninformed. The big headscarf is not quite so startling as the enormous burqa or the birdlike Arab masks, but its message is the same.
It immediately suggests a belief system in which women are inferior to men, which is intolerable here. It is, objectively speaking, strongly associated with cultures and countries which deny women the vote, equality under the law or in marriage and the freedom to work or to travel unchaperoned, and which frequently circumcise girls to control female sexuality (even though these practices are not necessarily Islamic). The insistence on the headscarf here (or in France) is quite clearly an insistence on identifying with those cultures. As a result it looks like a rejection of British culture.
Even in Britain there are Muslim children who are not allowed to draw or play musical instruments or do sports at school for supposedly religious reasons. Apart from those associations, the appearance alone of heavily swathed women suggests that there is something about them which must be hidden, secluded, controlled and kept private; their clothing is a barrier between them and the world and between them and us.
This is a central part of the problem. Hijab means curtain, and barrier is an important part of its meaning. It doesn’t at any rate mean headscarf. (The Arabic word for that is khimar.) Hijab is commonly used to mean Muslim dress, although there is a great deal of argument about that. How to interpret the use of the word in the Koran, how to understand its spiritual or practical meaning, is something I could not presume to suggest.
The Muslim world and Islamic scholars have different views themselves. Many argue that veiling is not a religious obligation for Muslim women. What’s clear to a westerner, however, is that the hijab suggests division and is divisive even if it is only a headscarf.
That in turn touches on another of the points in British culture where we are beginning to be inclined to draw the line of tolerance. We are beginning to feel, after years of misguided multiculturalist propaganda about diversity, that what we must emphasise is similarity. There is a growing feeling that the host culture should stand up for itself as the common culture and be less tolerant of the intolerant.
The traditional British approach to such problems has been to ignore them in the hope that they will go away. It might still work in this case. It could be that in a couple of generations the hijab may be just a memory in this country. But there seems to be some evidence that it’s being exploited by minority Islamic pressure groups.
It is striking that the demonstrators with leaflets outside the Luton school were from Al-Muhajiroun, the group which notoriously celebrated the slaughter of September 11 and which wants to establish a worldwide Islamic state. What were they doing there? Some French commentators have said that Islamic extremists are taking over the debate. The protests in Paris were organised by a tiny group called Party of French Muslims with an openly anti-Semitic leader.
It’s my impression that far more schoolgirls in Britain wear the headscarf now than used to; there seems to be a new interest in it. (Some strange confusions appear. Recently a girl emerged from a local comprehensive wearing a headscarf and at the same time a rather un-Islamic tight short-sleeved T-shirt with a Playboy logo on it.) Young British Muslims show some signs of resisting assimilation more than their parents. According to a Guardian/ ICM poll, those under 34 are more likely than their parents to say that their community is too integrated (my italics) and to define themselves first as Muslims.
For this reason it is essential to allow Muslim schoolgirls to dress in whatever way they think their religion demands, rightly or wrongly, and however much liberals may illiberally object.
It is essential that all Muslim children are welcomed and assimilated into ordinary schools. They should have no temptation to opt out of mainstream society.
Henri IV of France, showing judicious flexibility in religious matters, said, “Paris is well worth a mass.” The unity of Britain is well worth a headscarf.
