"My Muslim Daughter"
"How do I reveal to my Muslim daughter that women who look and dress like her mother have had their hijabs torn from their heads (...)?"
The article makes a few valid points about the threat of anti-Muslim hysteria, though it's hard to pick them out in the fog of exaggeration and partisan bias. It's a long time since I tuned out of Pat Condell, one of YouTube's currently most famous self-parodies, due to his apparent inability to distinguish between two quite different animals, viz. the religion of Islam, on the one hand, with its scriptures and strictures, and on the other, the notional collective of people who claim to subscribe to one or another form of that religion. For me, the simple recognition that a person is not and cannot be a religion, or a book (or a Book) is enough: I don't feel the need to play with taxonomies, and I have a certain visceral dislike for the term "moderate Muslims" (is there such a thing as a "moderate Jehovah's Witness" or a "moderate Buddhist"? There you go, then), let alone the pointless "Islamist" label. However, if I am able to distinguish between Islam - a horrible religion with horrible doctrines - and some regular Joe who was simply unlucky enough to have been brought up in it, you might expect that the regular Joe in question would, in turn, be able to see the difference between Trumpism - by all accounts another horrible religion - and the poor saps who find themselves grouped in the notional category of Trumpistas on account of their voting choices, despite their only real commonality being the shared belief that the spreading stain of corruption that was Hillary Clinton had to be kept out of the Oval Office, come what may. To put it simply: I want to be sympathetic, but the sky is not falling, and you are not helping.
Before I get onto why you, Mehdi Hasan, are not helping, a quick explanation of my odd belief that people are not books. Where does this come from? Aha! I am almost tempted to get up, walk four paces to the front door, walk another six paces down the street, and take a photograph of the delightful shrine that the neighbour over the road two doors down insisted on having built when his house went up. It has a gently curved roof, glass doors around groin level, and contains a rather extravagant variation of the Virgen del Cisne, for whom Google provides
As I say, one of my neighbours "presents" as this. Honestly.
Now I come to think of it, I used to be a Catholic myself. Briefly. In my teens. Long enough to know, though, that to go the whole nine yards with any religion of The Book is simply not feasible in the modern world, or in any world as far as I know, unless you plan on dying very young indeed. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out". I must have been about thirteen or fourteen when I read that: precisely that age at which the eye of the average male offends him several hundred times a day; yet somehow, devout as I was or tried to be, I didn't attack both my eyes with a kitchen knife, and in fact still have the buggers, though they do play up quite a bit these days.
So I get that adherence to a given religion is always a matter of compromise, of pick and choose, whether the adherent chooses to admit this or not. Knowing someone's religion allows you, with a margin of error, to predict certain beliefs: it does not allow anyone to predict that person's degree of commitment to those beliefs, their scale of priorities or their humanitarian disposition. Hence, it does not predict their fitness or unfitness to belong to any given society. Perhaps you will agree with me on that.
The society I live in, while overwhelmingly religious, is subject to certain taboos, one of which is that talking about one's religion outside of Church or Bible Study groups is rude and uncouth, and entirely inappropriate in a university setting. I suspect that many of my colleagues privately subscribe to dogmas that I would consider barking mad; but I have no way of knowing this; on the surface, they are all intelligent, eminently rational people. My own atheism, for the same reason, is also probably destined to remain a secret between me and, er, nobody in particular. None of my students have the faintest notion of what my religious or political leanings are: for me, this is a matter of professional pride. But despite the assumed difference in belief structure between myself and most of my colleagues, I don't see anything for either me or them to feel smug about. First, because beliefs are not that important, and secondly, because we all have, probably, our fair share of irrational ones. For example, I persist in believing, against all evidence, that the party of government in this country may yet lose the next election (Feb 2017) - this, in spite of the fact that the political opposition in this country makes Donald Trump look like a Founding Father. If this isn't an irrational belief, I don't know what is. I believe it because (a) whether I do so or not makes no difference to the world, and (b) it cheers me up. So I can grok other people believing in stuff for similar reasons. Peace.
Why not helping, then? OK, well, you mention the Muslim teacher in Dacula, Georgia who found a nasty note on her desk post-election, inviting her to hang herself with her own hijab. It may well be that election results do this to people, more or less as football wins and losses make supporters go on drunken orgies of random violence. Whoever wrote that note (I'm assuming a pupil) had perhaps spent a year or two in a state of intermittent, festering bitterness and resentment, believing the hijab-wearer to be an alien, an Other, a parasitical threat to the goodness and purity of Christian America. Then the "xenophobia option" wins an election, and the hater feels at last empowered by a huge imaginary collective to give voice to the festering resentment and sign it "America". What you don't mention is the response generated by this incident: not just messages of support for the teacher from across the country, but a rallying-together of the school and local community. This response is, surely, a much better barometer of widespread popular feeling than the action of that one isolated individual. And in my opinion, it's actually a bit more than that.
If I was American, I might take heart from the reflection that the political destinies of my country for the next four years were firmly in the hands of a clown whose bizarre and picturesque opinions few can take seriously for long. This to me would seem like excellent news. Why? Well, my reading is that the root of the nasty note, and of the two hundred or so other post-election "incidents" documented by the SPLC, and of the hysteria and tearfulness of the Clintonistas (#notmypresident), and all of those various sillinesses (see previous post for more #whatwouldDonalddo), lies in a single phenomenon, that of group psychology, or if you like, the mob mentality. I will need another post to cover this properly, but put simply, it's the football hooligan phenomenon writ large: the absurd identification of individuals with a "leader", the vicarious duelling, the zero-sum game of Us versus Them. This is the biggest threat facing contemporary societies, according to me, and to face it down, we need to stop caring, or at least to care a good deal less, who is President, and to care a good deal more about our own personal contributions to society, the ones that start when the voting slips are all tucked in and fast asleep. In a healthy polity, more than half the people would not even know the name or political allegiance of the President or Prime Minister, because in a society of empowered individuals, this person would be little more than a administrative flunkey, a boring irrelevance on the periphery of consciousness. If the POTUS is "the most powerful man in the world", then rather than seeking to replace him with someone else with the same attribution, we should be working to end that ridiculous state of affairs post haste. We should be working to make powerful men, and powerful women come to that, a thing of the past. So in that light, having a POTUS who is a walking absurdity is very good news indeed.
That is, provided people feel empowered to do their thing, which includes rallying round the occasional victim. We need a counterculture, as long as it really is counter, and doesn't end up being a distorted parody of what it seeks to replace.
I could say more, but time is limited, so: "my Muslim daughter". You do not get away with that. Your daughter is a child, and as Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, calling children Christian or Muslim or, for that matter, Atheist, is an obscenity. It's like dressing little girls up in hooker costumes and makeup and making them parade in ersatz beauty contests: that sort of obscenity. A Trumpish sort of obscenity, come to think of it. There is time enough for her to decide what her faith is. Let her enjoy what little innocence she has still ahead of her before the dank, barnacle-encrusted walls of religious identification clang into place around her.
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