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Showing posts with label Islamophobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamophobia. Show all posts

Sunday, 16 May 2021

Islamophobia And Secularism

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.

Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.

Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.

Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.

Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.

In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types. 

Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.

Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.

According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.

The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.

L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.

Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.

Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.

Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.

In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.

In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.

According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.

The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.

But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.

Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.

But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.

Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.

Wednesday, 20 November 2019

I’ll take Labour dithering over Conservative cruelty any day

We face a choice between a party in it for themselves and one seeking to solve our massive problems. It’s no contest writes George Monbiot in The Guardian


 
‘The first test of politics is this: are they in it for themselves, or for us?’ Rebecca Long-Bailey and Jeremy Corbyn with other members of Labour’s shadow cabinet. Photograph: Danny Lawson/EPA


Try to imagine Jeremy Corbyn in Tony Blair’s post-political role: flying around the world, enriching himself by striking deals with tyrants and oil companies. Try to picture John McDonnell setting up, like Blair’s righthand man, Peter Mandelson, a consultancy that gives reputational advice to controversial corporations. Try to picture Rebecca Long-Bailey being caught in a sting, like three of Blair’s former ministers, who offered undercover journalists political influence in exchange for cash.

I find these scenarios impossible to imagine. Whatever you might think of Labour’s frontbenchers, you could surely no more picture them behaving this way than you could picture Boris Johnson abandoning his career to become a hospital cleaner.

The first test of politics is this: are they in it for themselves, or for us? I don’t mean to suggest that Blair and his frontbenchers were entirely selfish, but self-interest and the national interest became too easily entangled. Among the Conservatives there is no confusion: self-interest is the political doctrine. Unlike either group, Corbyn’s team passes.

This carries a cost. The game you are supposed to play in British politics is feathering your nest by feathering the nests of others. Those who refuse are denounced in the billionaire press as unfit for government.

I’ve never been a member of any political party, and have no party loyalties. I know the Labour party is imperfect. But what I see is a group of people genuinely seeking to solve our massive problems – environmental, political, economic, medical and social – rather than appeasing press barons and queueing at the notorious revolving door between politics and money-making.

My experience, as an author of the Land for the Many report that Labour commissioned, has been of a party boldly seeking new ideas for improving national life, and being prepared to weather a storm of lies for having the temerity to mention them. We are likely to see a lot more of this when it publishes its manifesto on Thursday.

Of course the first test is not the only test. Another is the ability to lead, and here Labour often fails. First, some context. Several hundred Labour members, out of 485,000, have been accused of antisemitism. That is several hundred too many: every instance is an outrage. However, as a fraction of 1%, it’s a far cry from public perceptions of the issue. According to a new book about the media’s treatment of the Labour party, Bad News for Labour, the average estimate by people surveyed is that 34% of Labour members have succumbed to this evil.

Part of the problem is that Corbyn has failed to get a grip on his party and respond with the decisive speed this deadly bigotry demands. Instead, senior figures sometimes appear to have done the opposite, obstructing the swift and uncompromising resolution of complaints. This is completely unacceptable. But it does not amount to a party riddled with antisemitism.

Corbyn’s dithering on this issue reflects a general diffidence about asserting power. It could be seen as the flipside of his lack of self-interest. Blair might be egocentric, but one result was that he immediately stamped out any tendency he believed would threaten his chances of election.

By contrast, Corbyn wasted precious months failing to articulate a clear position on Brexit. He repeatedly missed the open goals the government offered. He allowed infighting to dominate when the party’s energies should have been concentrated on the Tories. No one could definitively solve the conflicts within the Labour party, but a firmer leader could have prevented them from spiralling into open warfare.


FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The Conservatives are entirely focused on wealth and power, and the protection of those who wield them.’ Boris Johnson at the CBI conference in London. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Yes, drift in politics is a sin. But compare it with the alternative. Last week, I wrote about the government’s proposal to criminalise the lives of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, among the most persecuted minorities in European history. It was so determined to beat them up in public that it broke its own rules: “Consultation exercises should not generally be launched during local or national election periods.” This is what institutional racism looks like.

Of course, it does not cancel or excuse Labour’s failure decisively to crush antisemitism. Yet, by contrast to the justified outrage about Labour’s weakness on this issue, my article, a week after the consultation was published, was the first in the national press to criticise the government’s extraordinary assault on threatened minorities. There has been almost no take-up since.

A survey by YouGov for Hope Not Hate discovered that 54% of Conservative party members believe Islam is “generally a threat to the British way of life”. Islamophobia is a genuine majority sentiment within the party, whose leader has repeatedly made racist and Islamophobic statements. This week, I searched Google for mentions of Labour antisemitism by the BBC, and found 7,810 returns. But a search for BBC mentions of Conservative Islamophobia delivered only 1,420 results.

Labour has an urgent desire for a better world. But it is coupled with such a weak instinct for power or even self-preservation that you can’t help wondering how much of its programme it can deliver. The Conservatives are entirely focused on wealth and power, and the protection of those who wield them. On one side, there is a ferment of new ideas. On the other, the old agenda of stripping away public protections and promoting private business at the expense of public interests.

We have a choice of self-denying dither or determined cruelty. Neither set of traits will deliver an ideal government. But I know which one I favour.

Friday, 12 August 2016

For Muslim women life had been getting better. No longer

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian


Muslim women are the most economically disadvantaged group in Britain. They are three times more likely than other women to be unemployed or looking for work, and twice as likely to be economically inactive (ie, not looking for work). Those who have the same educational qualifications and skills as white Christian women are 71% more likely to be jobless.




Cameron 'stigmatising Muslim women' with English language policy



These bleak findings appear in an MPs’ report published today. This is bad news for Muslims, feminists, anti-racists and for the nation. Britain cannot be highly productive, functional, inventive, internationally competitive or properly meritocratic while so much human potential remains dormant or suppressed. Families and communities with unemployed women cannot escape poverty and hopelessness. So why is this happening?

British Muslim women have come a long way since the 1980s. In 1984 the study Black and White Britain was published by the Policy Studies Institute. The author, Colin Brown, is now my husband. He found that though vastly fewer Asian women than black or white women were in the workforce, among those Asian women in employment only 18% were Muslim. Today eight Muslim women are in parliament, and several are peers. More British Muslim women than men are getting degrees.

I am a part-time professor at Middlesex University, where many of my students are feisty young Muslim women. One of them, Saira (not her real name), told me recently: “My mother can’t read or write. They got her married at 12, when she was a child. But she pushed me and my five sisters, stopped my father arranging our marriages. She is like a lioness.” Sharmin was a young, incredibly bright Bangladeshi mum in Bethnal Green. I used to teach her English. After her husband left her and married a younger wife, she enrolled at a further education college. She is now a social worker.

Some Muslim leaders have been calling for these transformative developments for a very long time. Back in 1924, our worldwide imam, the Aga Khan, instructed his believers to educate daughters because they would then go on to raise educated children and, in time, prepare congregations for a future they could not even imagine. As a child in the 60s, I remember the first time I saw women doctors in our mosque surgery in Kampala, Uganda, and teachers clip-clopping in high heels in our schools.

According to the parliamentary report, “the impact of Islamophobia cannot be underestimated” and there is now a “chill factor” stopping women applying for jobs and promotion. What a blow that must be. All that faith, all that education, for what turns out to be a false promise, a chimera. They face a triple penalty: they are female, of minority background and Muslim.

One recommendation in the report is name-blind recruitment. This would help, but not that much. Women who sound “British” and believe they are, turn up at interviews where visceral hostility comes at them. I have experienced it several times in my own life. I started to apply with just “Brown” as my surname, but then felt the air freeze when I arrived at the interview.

Despite these barriers, 45% more Muslim women are in work than were in 2011. That is a remarkable figure. Yet just when things were getting better, they got worse. Attitudes towards migrants, minorities and refugees have noticeably hardened since Ukip and other rightwing politicians moved from the fringes to the heart of British politics.

Jihadi terror cells undeniably have some support from British Muslims. Muslim self-segregation is also an evident and serious issue. So too Pakistani grooming gangs, whose heinous activities were kept hidden for too long. Needless to say, this is not what most Muslims do or approve of. But these behaviours play into the narratives of racists and have also turned fair-minded people against Islam and Muslims.

The most “integrated” of us are insulted, abused or attacked. Muslims can’t fly, walk, talk, or use public transport or public spaces without fear of being seen as a terrorist. Since the late 60s, when the first race relations laws were passed, most white Brits accepted the need to protect minorities against discrimination. Not any more, it seems. TheCommission for Racial Equality was abolished a decade ago and its notional replacement, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is moribund. Race equality has been kicked off the agenda while racism goes up.

However, the report’s authors are completely right when they say the discrimination Muslim women experience “is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role”. It’s clear that self-segregation is increasing within some communities.Farhat Hashmi, who gained her PhD from Glasgow University, is one of the most influential internet female proselytisers. She orders middle-class women to stay at home and give in to men’s demands.

I receive countless letters from young women. They and my acquaintances tell about oppressive practices now being imposed by their brothers, not their fathers.

Yasmin Weaver of the gender equality group Inspire says that addressing unemployment among Muslims is a priority for government and must be a priority for Muslim communities too. This, I fear, is where we fall flat. Weaver believes strongly that anti-discrimination measures need to go hand in hand with a reform of cultural, parental and religious practices and beliefs.

The parliamentary report recognises that both discrimination and internal oppression keep Muslim women in their airless, hopeless places. Governments can tackle the first, but who in a liberal society would dare challenge the second?

Monday, 12 January 2015

French Have My Condolences, Not My Apology

By Rana Ayyub in ndtv.com

This is not an angry letter, and if you insist it is, feel free to say that, for we seem to have a global consensus on free speech in a long time.

A  friend remarked in good humor hours after the firing at the French satirical newspaper "Why yaar, you Muslims kill all the time?" It was a remark made in good humour, she suggested, just as my friends in Class 5 would ask me, presumably in similar fun ribbing spirit, before an Indo- Pak cricket match "So Pakistan today, na?"

For the longest time, I have evaded questions on Islam on official fora.

My faith is a personal matter and sacrosanct. Having said that, I consider myself a proud Muslim. I have taken the most bigoted comments on my work in my stride though most of my investigations seen through the prism of religion, judging by the comments posted on my pieces and the reactions I provoke in person from people who discuss my work.

My reportage on fake encounters has been dissected with clinical precision, generating fury and an interrogation of my credentials, while my investigations on tribals and Dalits, for which I have received prestigious awards, have largely gone unnoticed by my critics and friends alike. 

As and when ignorant assumptions about my faith have been raised, I have, with the little knowledge of Islam imparted to me, mostly by my father, tried to clarify the misconceptions. 

My father belonged to the progressive writers' movement. While his Communist friends would cherish their whisky and cigar at mushairas or get-togethers in the 70s, he would sneak into a room with dimmed lights, offer his namaaz and then return to the soiree to exchange his qalaam (couplet).

For him, his namaaz was a private and personal affair, just like his decision to kindly refuse the alcohol served at such mehfils.

While he would never touch alcohol, there was never an attempt to influence his friends and seniors alike with his beliefs - the group included Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Ahmed Faraz amongst other liberal writers. 

His Islam and Koran began with the word "iqra" (read/recite). It was for this reason that the son of a zamindar chose to spend a good part of his career, till he retired, teaching at a government school in Mumbai, as opposed to reaping the profits of his family business. A majority of his students were non-Muslims.

We, a family of six, stayed in a one-room kitchen modest apartment in Mumbai, situated next to an RSS karyalaya, whose members chose to spend most afternoons with my abba, their 'Masterji', discussing worldly affairs.

Abba was popular as the Masterji who would get students admitted to his school, give free tuitions and make frequent visits to the shakhadespite his ideological differences with the RSS. On Guru Poornima, his was the first wrist which had the red thread tied on it by the shakhahead.

Diagonally opposite to our housing society was an Ayyappa mandir loved by my siblings and me for the jaggery prasadam. On occasions that we didn't make it there, the pujaari would send it home on a banana leaf. During the annual Ayyappa pooja, all the plants from our garden would be packed off to the mandir, and mom would help them connect their water pipes to our kitchen.

Such was the joy of being a part of a cosmopolitan country like India. 

When I write this today, every word seethes with frustration. Because, my identity today appears to have value only as a terror apologist, a Muslim who stands up to bigotry. I have to frame a politically-correct response post every terror attack, some allegedly by members of the Muslim community, and others where the perpetrators were clearly misguided Islamic fanatics who stand in absolute contradiction to everything believers like me have ever stood for.

It baffles me when I am singled out for an apology. I wonder if my Tamil friends have ever been asked to apologise for the terror acts of the LTTE, for the suicide bombings by the Tamil Tigers, including the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

It baffles me when Brahmins in the country are not singled out when a family of Dalit women is raped and murdered in broad daylight in Khairlanji, and when the upper caste commits atrocities on Dalits across the country in the name of faith.

It baffles me that never is a Christian looked at with suspicion or anger over the attacks on abortion clinics, or the seemingly placid acceptance of a white who goes on a shooting spree of innocent students, or a Jew asked to apologize over the carnage of Palestinians. Is an American asked to apologize for innocent Afghans and Iraqis killed by the US Army in collateral damage?

Why do you sit in assumption over my morals and my essential humanity when you call me and ask me, "So what do you think about that attack?"

Yes, I do not quite enjoy when a hundred school kids in Peshawar are brutally slaughtered in the name of faith. And, if you think Islam teaches this brutality, you are as misguided as them, perhaps why you and these terrorists could be in agreement over Islam.

I feel compelled - sometimes pressured - to tweet stories of the religious identity of the officer who died saving the lives of journalists in France. Why? 

Why am I forced to let everyone know that the employee of a kosher supermarket, who risked his life to save the lives of Jews from a desperate gunman, was a Muslim?

Why am I forced to post pictures of Muslims in France offering namaaz for the slain journalists?
 
Why am I forced to reiterate to my friends, "Hey, listen, the commanding officer in the final raid on the assailants was a Muslim"?

I am tired and embarrassed at having to reassert that my faith has nothing to do with the lunacy of some misguided rascals who claim to be protectors of my faith. They are as misguided as the Buddhist monks in Myanmar who are targeting Muslims in riots, the very idea being contradictory to the Buddhist faith.

Yes, I have stood against anti-Muslim bigotry and will continue to do so in the light of the events in present times and that does not translate into being a terrorist sympathizer. No, I am not a "moderate Muslim" because the term is insulting to my faith just as it would be to a Hindu or a Jew or a Sikh - any faith demands honesty and not a quantitaive assessment or degree of your belief in it.

As I write this today, I am also assured that bigotry and this mindless Islamophobia will not be allowed a free rein, and the front-runners who will defend my faith and its followers from this mindless hate will be non-Muslims.

It is heartening to see that for every Rupert Murdoch who gives voice to this pandemic bigotry, there are a hundred other journalists, activists, humanists across the globe who are fighting an unpopular battle each day to defend Muslims from this rampant prejudice.

As fellow journalist Owen Jones, from The Independent, who I greatly admire for his unrelenting journalistic crusade against bigotry, once wrote, "Those few of us with a public voice who defend Muslims from bigoted generalisations are currently fighting an unpopular battle. But it is the right thing to do, and history will absolve us."