THE ABUSE OF WOMEN

British tolerance of Muslim culture should not include condoning the savage treatment of

young girls, says Theodore Dalrymple

IF IT is not exactly a truth, it is at least a hope universally acknowledged that all cultures are fundamentally compatible in their values, and that cultural cross-fertilisation necessarily results in a flowering of the arts and sciences. In short, the more cultures, the merrier.

There can be little doubt, of course, that the transformation of Britain into a cosIlliopolis has improved the quality of its food out of all recognition. Anyone who remembers the dire nature of British cuisine in its virtually unchallenged heyday could not possibly wish to return to the days of culinary innocence. But it required no official policy, bureaucracies or governmental guidance for foreign food to conquer: it did so because it was, almost without exception, better than the native variety.

Multiculturalism, however, is not just a question of eating Mexican on Monday and Thai on Tuesday. It is, among other things, the denial that assimilation into our historical, cultural and political traditions should be the goal of immigrants. It is permission for Albanians and Kurds to take their driving test in Albanian and Kurdish (though perhaps not in all the latter's several mutually incomprehensible dialects) instead of expecting them to have mastered a certain amount of English before doing so. It is to adopt a cringeing and uncritical attitude to every manifestation of every culture except one's own. It is to disarm oneself in advance against the argument that an unpleasant practice is part of someone's culture, and therefore inviolable.

When a Muslim in Birmingham observes that one of the largest mosques in the city is called the President Saddam Hussein mosque, is he more likely to feel gratitude for the tolerance that allows his co-religionists to worship unmolested in such an establishment, or contempt for the spinelessness and decadence of a country whose tolerance can so easily be turned against it, and whose liberties might without difficulty be used to propagate and eventually impose tyranny?

His contempt will not be lessened when he discovers that the society to which he has come does not have the will to impose upon him some of its own laws, notably those with regard to the education of his children. I have heard in my medical practice from innumerable young Muslim women that they were removed from school by their parents at an early age, several years before the law allowed, but I have yet to hear of even a single ease in which a school or the school inspectors took effective action to return such a child to the school.

I concede that the white girls who remain in the schools from which the Muslim parents illegally withdraw their daughters learn little after a certain age except how to be a lumpen slut, of the kind with which this country is so exceedingly well endowed: but the law is the law, and the subsequent fate of so many Muslim daughters is far from enviable.

At a certain age — 17, but sometimes younger — they are taken on a 'holiday' to Pakistan. (Their British passport is confiscated from them at all times by their parents, and they themselves handle it only for the brief moments when they must show it at airports. Virtually no Muslim girl keeps her own passport.) On arrival in their ancestral village, they are told that they are to marry a first cousin, a young man whom they have never seen before and who may well be deeply repugnant to them.

To say, in the words of the notices that used to be hung in corner shops with regard to requests for credit, that refusal often offends, is to understate matters absurdly. A young girl who refuses to marry the man to whom her father has betrothed her is likely to be (as several of my patients have been) beaten and starved into submission. Every Muslim girl whom I meet knows of girls who have been done to death for their stubbornness in continuing to refuse: sometimes hanged, sometimes strangled, sometimes thrown from the roof of a building, sometimes burnt. It costs a father about f.5 to put an end to the not very strenuous investigations into the death of a daughter.

Once married, the long process of obtaining a visa for her husband to come to Britain starts. If all has gone to plan, the young wife is pregnant by the time she returns to Britain without him, for a child is a good humanitarian argument for the necessity of a visa.

When the husband arrives, he behaves himself well for a year; that is to say, the year in which his wife has the legal right to object to his permanent leave to stay. But once he has such leave, he changes, often the very day after he receives it. He wreaks his revenge upon his wife for the year in which she has had the upper hand over him, which is so against the 'natural' state of affairs. Her beatings, often to the unmerciful point of torture. begin.

When her own parents get to hear of his conduct, they are often more concerned for the 'good name' of the family than for the happiness or welfare of their daughter. If she leaves the husband, they will have nothing further to do with her, and the rest of her family will disown her likewise. She will be known to the rest of the 'community' as virtually a prostitute, and will even be called such on the street; and since she has not gone to school or been allowed to work or to have white friends, she will have great difficulty in making her way in the wider society. It is hardly surprising if, in the circumstances, she decides that the beating you know is better than the loneliness you don't.

Of course, some daughters rebel and try to run away before they are taken to Pakistan in the first place, but there are private detective agencies that specialise in returning such daughters to their parents, if necessary by the use of kidnap. And I need hardly add that multicultural feeling is not strong among the Muslims — or the Sikhs, for that matter. There are local taxi-firms that act as vigilantes to their various communities, to ensure that there is no crossing of the community borders by the young people. Not long ago I had a Sikh patient who was nearly slashed to death a hundred yards from my hospital's front entrance with machetes wielded by the brothers of the Muslim girl he had been seeing. Quite often in prison I see young Muslim men who have acted in this fashion; and they believe that they have acted correctly, and that British law has nothing legitimate to say on the matter.

The Muslim men have it easier, on the whole, than the women. True, I have had male patients who have been forced at gunpoint to marry the girl selected for them by their father; but in general it is possible for a man to have an arranged marriage to a woman he would not have selected for himself (but who is nonetheless useful to him as a provider of domestic comfort), and lead a happy life elsewhere; a life that often includes the possession of a concubine or two, more often than not of the lumpen white-slut class. It will not come as a surprise to learn that he treats his concu

bine or concubines with contempt and often violence, and the fact that they are willing to put up with it confirms him in his opinion of the decadence of the West.

One might have thought that the girls who have been subjected to this culture that is now so much at variance with our own would have received loud, consistent and vociferous support from feminists. On the contrary, the feminists are the dog that did not bark, because, I think, feminism has appealed to the same kind of mind as multiculturalism has appealed to. And the only way the two isms can be held in the mind simultaneously is to ignore actual real-life evidence of their incompatibility.

It might be objected that, by the very nature of my work, I have contact only with young women whose experiences have been unfavourable; that, in fact, many British Muslim girls find the arrangements I have described perfectly satisfactory. But the number of cases known to me is by no means small, and each of them knows of many others whose cases have been just as bad or worse.

In any event, the fact that no one has consistently raised a voice in defence of these girls has played its part in persuading certain Muslims that they are virtually extra-territorial. They know that when a government such as the present one talks of women's rights, they — the Muslims — are excluded from its rhetoric, precisely because it would take both real conviction and considerable guts, the very qualities so completely lacking in Anthony Blair, to include them. They draw the natural conclusion that our society is running scared of them and — to change the metaphor slightly — that it is nothing but a rotting fruit waiting to fall from the tree. Loosing off a few missiles at Afghanistan from submarines thousands of miles away will not have changed their impression; rather, it will have confirmed it, and their opinion of the cowardice of the British government.

Every multiculturalist believes — whether he knows it or not — that it is right to force young girls into marriages they don't want, to deprive them of the schooling and careers that they do want, to regard them as prostitutes if they leave their abusive husbands, and to punish, even to kill, those who cross cultural and religious boundaries. As an Italian commentator once put it, multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers.