Muslims Trust Dialogue

Segregation in Universities

 

The debate over the guidance issued by Universities UK about what to do in the case of a request to a university for audience gender segregation on behalf of religious guest speakers has ignited spectacularly in recent days. The arguments seem to be becoming more shrill and tendentious all the time. Even the Prime Minister has now waded in with his views.

In its guidance, UUK suggested consideration be made of freedom of speech obligations as well as discrimination and equality laws when considering such requests - neglecting to say how the presumed speaker’s freedom of speech would be infringed by having a mixed audience: would he be struck dumb by the sight of females or tongue-tied with embarrassment? It concluded that ‘if neither women nor men were disadvantaged and a non-segregated seating area were also provided, it might in the specific circumstances of the case be appropriate for the university to agree to the request’. Mr Cameron administered a verbal slapped wrist to Universities UK: ‘they shouldn’t say that’, he opined to Channel 4 News.

The whole business is starting to sound like one of those well meant but hapless liberal fudges which draws attention to the perceived cultural faultlines thrown up by multiculturalism, thereby giving further ammunition to its opponents. The argument goes that religion belongs in the private sphere and universities are public spaces of freedom and debate (unless you happen to be a University of London student wishing to protest against the imposed closure of your student union just recently, in which case you will be visited with the full force, judicial and physical, of the law). UUK tried to explain the need for advice to its members saying, ‘where the gender segregation is voluntary, the law is unclear’: a statement of fact, perhaps, but one which neglects to ask who is doing the volunteering and how we can tell just how ‘voluntary’ their acquiescence actually is.

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The Wise Monkey

The Wise Monkey (aka The Attorney General)

Seasoned watchers of Islamophobia may or may not have been surprised to read in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 23 November, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve’s assertion that ‘Corruption is rife in the Pakistani Community’. In a wide-ranging interview, Grieve identified the main threat of corruption in public life coming from ‘minority communities’ that operate a ‘favour culture’. Moreover, he was at pains to trace this specifically to Pakistanis and ‘not the Indian community’, while generously conceding that corruption may still be found in the ‘white, Anglo-Saxon community’.

Grieve’s comments drew swift denunciation from a number of quarters, causing the Attorney General to issue an apology the following day. However, the unusual step of tarring one specific group might give us pause, as might the language in which the attack was couched. I have heard Dominic Grieve speak and he is always measured and articulate, with a precise choice of words as befits a lawyer. So the notion that his outburst might have been unpremeditated seems unlikely.

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Can we trust Muslim faith Schools?

Is the Niqab a Muslim or British issue?

Why does the niqab generate such heated debate in the UK? The choice of what to wear in British society seems subservient to an orthodox secular agenda in society.  This agenda is at loggerheads with faith based values and from time to time a tussle between the two will be witnessed and presented for judgement and legal justice to ensure that all women living in British society are liberated from the shackles of veiling? Most recently we heard of the ruling given by Judge Murphy at London’s BlackFriars Crown Court that a niqab would not be permissible while the defendant gave evidence. If this controversy was not enough, another niqab headline was unfolding at Birmingham Metropolitan College where the college authorities did a U-turn on their niqab ban for students.

The very specific diasporic context of the niqab debate is not particularly studied in the immediate reportage but instead becomes a synecdoche for a group of people who can never reach modernity. It is not an issue that is representative of most Muslims but it takes on the guise of just that and requires a politics of positionality from those in representative positions to speak on behalf of their communities. Women’s liberation and/or lack of it seems to be the driving force behind the media investigations. It reignites a comparison between secular politics and its engagement with religion in Britain and France, their respective models of integration and multiculturalism. For the viewing and listening public in Britain the niqab confirms the extremities that Muslim women occupy  in the public sphere, they are depicted as the subaltern victims of oppressive religious practice. They bring to our minds the horrors that have been experienced by a Mukhtaran Mai or a Malala Yousafzai, marked targets whom the west has rescued from oppressive Islamist practices. The niqab wearer unsettles us as she is a minority within a minority, yet her dress code has the power to mobilise political and public opinion from national debates to newspaper polls. She inspires an outdated feminist practice to save her from oppression, and there are practical reasons of national security as she disturbs the state’s security agenda.

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