A BILLION MUSLIMS CAN'T BE WRONG
Anwer Bati finds the liberal
thinkers of Britain more fundamentalist than the Muslims
'I'M not talking to you any more because of the way Muslims treat women,' said a woman journalist to a friend of mine at recent party. She had been perfectly pleasant to him for 20 minutes before bringing up the subject of religion. She then showed no hesitation in not only being grossly rude but, by implication, ascribing views to him that he didn't hold. I wasn't altogether astonished when he told me: it was just one more example of a rather disturbing recent phenomenon.
The Rushdie affair has, it appears, made it acceptable for journalists and others to abuse Muslims and make gross, indeed absurd, generalisations in a way which (a pretty good test this), if the word 'Jew' or 'black' were substituted for the word 'Mus- lim', would instantly and obviously be seen to be both nonsensical and distasteful. One of the defining characteristics of racism (a word I use with extreme parsimony) is that It makes unwarranted assumptions about the attitudes or behaviour of large groups of people. There are around a billion Muslims or people of Muslim birth around the world — of dozens of races and cultures. How much more absurd than simple racism to lump them together as if they all, or even a majority of them, think and behave in the same way. But that is what, it seems to me, is beginning to happen amongst otherwise liberal people.
Before I go on, let me get one thing straight: I am not in any way trying to defend fundamentalist Muslims or any of their antics in the wake of the Rushdie affair. Indeed, I condemn them. But that's Partly the point. The word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic', in some sections of the press and television, now seems to connote 'fun- damentalist' without any regard to the fact that Muslims, especially those living in Britain, have as complete a spectrum of attitudes to their religion as you might find amongst Christians or Jews. These range from lapsed (as I am) through liberal, to devout and, yes, fundamentalist. Fun- damentalism being, for those who might have forgotten in the wake of the Satanic Verses furore, a strict, literal acceptance and belief in the inerrancy of the word of whatever religious text one cares to men-
tion — be it the Koran, the Bible or the Talmud. Let me spell it out: only some Muslims are fundamentalist; only some fundamentalists are Muslims. It doesn't stop people like the buffoonish but influen- tial Sir Alfred Sherman writing to the
Times thus: . [the British Muslim com- munity] is for the most part strongly in- fected [my italics] by Khomeinism, as evinced by scenes of fanaticism and reli- gious mob violence which earlier genera- tions of Englishmen would have known only from books and films of backward countries.' Really?
Much of the problem is to do with lazy, shoddy and ignorant journalism. How much easier and more colourful to inter- view some self-appointed 'Muslim leader' or chairman of this or that meaningless 'Standing Committee' or 'Council' in the interests of good copy, than to present (not to mention understand) the complexities of the situation. Is it surprising that these nonentities like issuing press releases, threats and lists of conditions, or that they are delighted to hear the sound of their own voice's on Robert Kilroy-Silk's rub- bishy programme? Would you choose the 'Wee Frees', Jimmy Swaggart, or the Revd Ian Paisley as 'Christian spokesman'; would Rabbi Meir Kahane be trotted out as a 'Jewish leader'; would you, indeed, go to Sir Alfred Sherman if you wanted to discuss tolerance?
'Examples of this kind of journalism abound. Even in The Spectator. Jane Kelly (`The Irish jihad', 23/30 December) de- cided to have a snigger a few weeks ago at members of the extremely small and highly eccentric Ahmadi sect. Nothing very wrong with that but Ms Kelly couldn't resist using these oddballs — who are not even officially Muslims — as examples from which to give us the following observation: 'As Anthony Burgess recently pointed out, Mohammed had no sense of humour, there are no jokes in the Koran, 'I could murder a bowl of soup.' and above all Muslims don't like or even understand jokes about themselves.'
If Anthony Burgess says so, it must of course be right, but what record is there of Christ's antics as a jokesmith, or old Moses as a rib-tickler? Perhaps, indeed, she could show me the belly-laughs in the Bible.
How's this from Fay Weldon's recent breathtakingly bigoted, ignorant and in- accurate Counterblast essay Sacred Cows: 'Too involved in rooting out ideological heresies most of us, to worry about the fate of the Muslim women in our midst, with their arranged marriages, their children in care, their high divorce rate: the wife- beating, the intimidation, the penalties for recalcitrance: the unregulated work in Dickensian sweatshops . . . I challenge her to produce her evidence that the divorce rate, number of children in care or incidence of wife-beating amongst Muslims in Britain is higher than in any other section of the population. Nor is working in sweatshops, as she seems to think, some tenet of Muslim belief or paradigm of 'Muslim' behaviour. It is beyond belief that such rot is thought publishable.
Try telling Benazir Bhutto about the role, actual or supposed, of Muslim women. Ask Orthodox Jewish women or Buddhist women about their role. Talk to women in a strict Catholic country. Try telling Jane Kelly: '. . . [lunch]was served by a man, either because I was in the role of honorary man, or they knew exactly what I would make of a woman waiting on us.' What, I think, is known as a no-win situation; but not as silly as the profile of Andrew Knight in the Sunday Correspon- dent which told us that men were habitually served first at his dinner table because his wife was a Pakistani Muslim. 1 bet.
This approach is also reflected in the analysis of foreign affairs which likes to see Islam as the 'New Enemy' and reduces everything (Armenia-Azerbaijan, for inst- ance) to a simple Christian-Muslim con- flict. It relies on the idea that there is a monolithic 'Muslim' world (tell that to participants in the Iran-Iraq war) and is as absurd as the idea of a monolithic 'Christ- ian' world or a reduction of the troubles in Ireland to a simple Protestant-Catholic conflict.
The biggest irony of the phenomenon I'm talking about is that the liberals re- sponsible for it have to be, for the purposes of their polemic, more fundamentalist than the fundamentalists. By which I mean their arguments often rely on a literal reading of the Koran which the great majority of people called Muslims wouldn't go along with, just as the great majority of Christ- ians don't go along with a literal reading of the Bible. But then, if they couldn't present Muslims as book-burning wife- beaters who all follow every word in the Koran like zombies incapable of a modern, or at least pragmatic, interpretation of that ancient book, what would their indignation he worth?
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