Cow slaughter and Halala Friday Night with Barrister Hamid Bashani
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Sunday 2 April 2017
Sunday 12 February 2017
Sunday 15 January 2017
Tuesday 13 December 2016
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?
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?
Tuesday 24 May 2016
Abolish personal laws: Patriarchy remains deaf to the Quran’s call for justice, equality and compassion
Sadia Dehlvi in Times Of India
Whenever Muslim women approach the judiciary in a quest for justice, Muslim orthodoxy rallies against the abolition of Personal Laws. Their rhetoric of ‘identity under attack’ resumes. Clearly, Indian Muslims have moved beyond the politics of identity; choosing to express themselves through contributions to science, architecture, law, medicine, film, theatre, music, literature and other fields.
Debates over the validity of pronouncing talaq, divorce, three times in one go or over three months offer no solutions. Both methods find permissibility in schools of Islamic fiqh, jurisprudence. Unilateral divorce allows men to commit grave injustices by stripping women of honour and dignity, inalienable rights both in Islam and the Indian Constitution. It is unwise to expect reform from the community whose religious leaders have historically treated women as subjects and not equals.
Islamic law is a human endeavour that evolved over centuries with multiple schools holding diverse opinion. The principles of Islamic jurisprudence are weighing the benefit and harm of legal rulings in societies that jurists live in. Barring the foundational five pillars of Islam, nothing in Islamic law is definitive. Salafis and Wahhabis reject classical Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy. Their myopic literalist interpretations of Islam cause gross violations of human rights.
Sharia has always been flexible in adapting to changing times and situations. Umar, the second Caliph of Islam and companion of Prophet Muhammad, dropped sharia punishments for theft when famine struck Arabia. He realised people were stealing to survive. The eighth century Imam Shafie, founder of Shafie jurisprudence, changed many of his fatwas on migrating from Iraq to Egypt. Had sharia lacked movement, Islam would not thrive in India.
Islam is dynamic, understood and practised in a variety of ways in different cultures. Patriarchy remains deaf to the Quran’s call for equality, justice and compassion that extends to all humanity. Excluding women from leadership, patriarchy is blind to the Quran celebrating the wise consultative rule of Queen Sheba and her diplomatic engagement with Solomon.
Patriarchy fails to recognise the Quran honouring women as recipients of wahy, Divine Revelation; as experienced by Moses’s mother and Mariam, or Mary. Some famous early and medieval commentators of the Quran, such as Imam Hajar Asqalani and Imam Qurtubi, include Mary amongst the prophets.
The Islam of Prophet Muhammad disappeared within 40 years of his death with powerful and oppressive patriarchal tribes regaining power. The poor, women and slaves embraced by Islam were again marginalised. Islam’s paradigm shift in empowering women and slaves had created great difficulties for the Prophet. He sought political counsel from women, welcomed them in his mosque; encouraged women like Haqibatul Arab to deliver khutbahs, sermons. He appointed Umm Waraqa the Imam of her mosque, and sent a muezzin, one calling to prayer, from Medina to her village.
Some Islamic scholars, including the famous 9th century Imam Tabari, drew upon this precedent to proclaim it lawful for women to lead mixed gender prayers. American Muslim feminists are reclaiming this tradition despite the controversies it evokes.
Islam abrogated the concept of God as Father, saying, ‘Nothing is like Allah’. God transcends gender and is best understood as Noor, Compassionating and Illuminating Guidance. ‘He’, is used in the Quran and its translations because Arabic grammar is gender specific with no pronoun for the neuter gender. In most languages including Arabic, Persian and Urdu, the feminine is applied for ‘Zaat e Elahiya’, Divine Essence.
The word rahm, womb, is derived from God’s primary attributes Rahman and Rahim, Mercy and Compassion. Prophet Muhammad often likened God to a Mother who forgives her children. Traditional Arab poets addressed God in the feminine, literature that would probably be termed blasphemous today.
The Quran advocates equitable treatment of slaves and encourages freeing them, but does not specifically ban slavery. Responding to prevailing 7th century Arabian evils, Quran forbade the inheriting of women, female infanticide and abuse of slaves. Muslims across the world welcomed the abolition of slavery, believing it to be in accordance with Quranic guidance.
Islamic scholars have responded creatively with Quranic verses sanctioning armed struggles. Invoking the principle of ‘asbab e nuzul’, cause of revelation, they rightly limit this relevance to ‘just wars’ against oppression fought by the first Muslims. Instead of similar creative engagement with regard to oppressive canonised laws for women, patriarchy maintains the status quo. Women’s rights can no longer be defined by political Islam or Arab culture and histories.
In matters of inheritance and nafaqa, maintenance, Quran guarantees a minimum financial protection for women but does not cap the maximum. Offering more financial and emotional security to women can never conflict with Islam. Prophet Muhammad famously said, ‘None of you believes till you love for the other what you love for yourselves.’
Sharia law denies the right of punishment to individuals, leaving this responsibility to the state. Sharia endorses responsible citizenry, making it mandatory for Muslims to comply with laws of the lands they inhabit.
Traditionally, women pilgrims travelling to Mecca required to be accompanied by a mahram, husband or other male relatives with whom marriage is forbidden. Negotiating modern challenges, many Islamic scholars have ruled it permissible for women to travel alone. They declare the state as mahram, for in ensuring security, the laws of the state replace the role of the ‘protective bodies’. This principle should extend to the Indian state.
Monday 18 April 2016
'No women, no rape': The warped logic of Harvard's students should disturb us all
Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph
An all-male elite Harvard club has chosen 2016 as the year that it breaks a historic silence. In the 225 years of its existence, it has barely ever released a public statement. But as pressure mounted on the group to ditch its sexist ‘no women’ policy, the Porcellian went public.
Charles M. Storey, its president, defended the club’s single-gender status in an email to student paper The Crimson:
“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organisations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Storey’s defence of the club’s boys’ only rule is that it keeps women safe. According to his logic, inviting women into the group would increase sexual misconduct. For their own safety, they’re better off not trying to join. Got it?
This is clearly an appalling defence on many levels. But what’s worse is the fact that a large number of students agree.
Though Storey himself issued an apology shortly after a backlash, (“Unfortunately, I chose my words poorly and it came out all wrong. This failure has led to extreme and unfortunate misinterpretations, which were not my intentions at all”) other students have taken to the paper’s website to defend him.
“Porcellian has no female members and no guests. Ergo no risk of the ladies getting assaulted. If the risk today is zero percent, it can only get worse is the club goes coed,” justified one commenter.
Another spelled out that “statistically speaking, any change in membership cannot decrease sexual assaults as Harvard claims. As a matter of fact, they could only stay zero or potentially increase, which is exactly what the club stated.”
A third echoed their views, agreeing that what Storey had said was 'obvious' - "no sexual assault of women can occur when no women are present."
It's hard to believe just how literally people are taking Storey's words. To them, it's perfectly logical that if a woman is present there's a higher chance of sexual assault - 'ergo' women should steer clear of male-only clubs.
In other words: no women, no rape.
Their logic is chilling. It might all add up ‘statistically’ but is that really how we should be looking at rape? If we followed that argument through to its logical conclusion, we'd be living in a world where men and women are segregated simply because it’s 'safer’.
Women-only public transport would be the norm, and the possibility of gender-neutral loos wouldn't even exist. Non-binary people would be ostracised from society and everything from socialising to education would become boys vs girls.
This dystopian future could ‘statistically’ lead to lower sexual assault and rape rates, but how is that feasible in a modern society? We need to be moving forward not backwards. The answer does not and never will lie in segregation.
If we want to stop sexual assault from happening, we need to tackle rape culture. On university campuses, male-only clubs are a good place to start. They are generally known to be rife with misogyny. And when women are not present, it's harder for men to see them as equals who deserve respect. Little wonder they often end up as the butt of crude jokes. The same can go the other way - and neither attitude is healthy.
Men and women need to be equal - and that means integration.
In 2016, this should be an accepted truth. The fact that a group of Harvard students - supposedly the brightest minds in America - clearly don’t understand that is incredibly worrying. They're so busy looking at rape culture ‘statistically’ they’re missing the obvious: men and women should be able to spend time together without the assumption of sexual misconduct.
That their time at Harvard hasn't yet taught them that, is deeply worrying indeed.
An all-male elite Harvard club has chosen 2016 as the year that it breaks a historic silence. In the 225 years of its existence, it has barely ever released a public statement. But as pressure mounted on the group to ditch its sexist ‘no women’ policy, the Porcellian went public.
Charles M. Storey, its president, defended the club’s single-gender status in an email to student paper The Crimson:
“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organisations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Storey’s defence of the club’s boys’ only rule is that it keeps women safe. According to his logic, inviting women into the group would increase sexual misconduct. For their own safety, they’re better off not trying to join. Got it?
This is clearly an appalling defence on many levels. But what’s worse is the fact that a large number of students agree.
Though Storey himself issued an apology shortly after a backlash, (“Unfortunately, I chose my words poorly and it came out all wrong. This failure has led to extreme and unfortunate misinterpretations, which were not my intentions at all”) other students have taken to the paper’s website to defend him.
“Porcellian has no female members and no guests. Ergo no risk of the ladies getting assaulted. If the risk today is zero percent, it can only get worse is the club goes coed,” justified one commenter.
Another spelled out that “statistically speaking, any change in membership cannot decrease sexual assaults as Harvard claims. As a matter of fact, they could only stay zero or potentially increase, which is exactly what the club stated.”
A third echoed their views, agreeing that what Storey had said was 'obvious' - "no sexual assault of women can occur when no women are present."
It's hard to believe just how literally people are taking Storey's words. To them, it's perfectly logical that if a woman is present there's a higher chance of sexual assault - 'ergo' women should steer clear of male-only clubs.
In other words: no women, no rape.
Their logic is chilling. It might all add up ‘statistically’ but is that really how we should be looking at rape? If we followed that argument through to its logical conclusion, we'd be living in a world where men and women are segregated simply because it’s 'safer’.
Women-only public transport would be the norm, and the possibility of gender-neutral loos wouldn't even exist. Non-binary people would be ostracised from society and everything from socialising to education would become boys vs girls.
This dystopian future could ‘statistically’ lead to lower sexual assault and rape rates, but how is that feasible in a modern society? We need to be moving forward not backwards. The answer does not and never will lie in segregation.
If we want to stop sexual assault from happening, we need to tackle rape culture. On university campuses, male-only clubs are a good place to start. They are generally known to be rife with misogyny. And when women are not present, it's harder for men to see them as equals who deserve respect. Little wonder they often end up as the butt of crude jokes. The same can go the other way - and neither attitude is healthy.
Men and women need to be equal - and that means integration.
In 2016, this should be an accepted truth. The fact that a group of Harvard students - supposedly the brightest minds in America - clearly don’t understand that is incredibly worrying. They're so busy looking at rape culture ‘statistically’ they’re missing the obvious: men and women should be able to spend time together without the assumption of sexual misconduct.
That their time at Harvard hasn't yet taught them that, is deeply worrying indeed.
Thursday 14 April 2016
Unconditional Basic Income for all?
The idea of a universal basic income is about to leap from the margins to the mainstream, bringing promises of a happier and healthier population
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
With a basic income, the harsh, punitive model of ‘welfare’ is a distant memory – passing in and out of the gig economy is something everyone can afford. Photograph: David Pearson/Alamy
John Harris in The Guardian
John Harris in The Guardian
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
Sunday 3 April 2016
Freedom from triple talaq: Goa shows the way
S A Aiyar in the Times of India
A step forward in gender justice is the Supreme Court’s admission of the petition of a Muslim woman, Shayara Bano, pleading that polygamy and oral triple talaq —saying talaq thrice in succession — violate fundamental human rights, and hence are unconstitutional. Indian politics has always sabotaged gender justice for Muslim women. But the Supreme Court does not have to woo Muslim vote banks, and can be objective.
The mullahs are livid, of course. Kamal Farooqi of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board says, “This will mean direct interference of the government in religious affairs as Sharia religious law is based on the Quran and Hadith, and its jurisprudence is strong as far as Islam is concerned. It will be against the constitutional right to religious freedom.”
Sorry, but the Constitution makes it very clear that freedom of religion does not override fundamental rights, and does not bar reforms of traditional religious practices. Sharia law may permit the stoning to death of a woman for adultery, but our secular laws ban that. Sharia law may call for the amputation of fingers or hand of a thief, but not our secular laws. Sharia law may prohibit interest on loans, but Muslims giving or taking loans are subject to laws on interest payments.
Now, religious minorities have been allowed to continue with traditional personal laws on matters like marriage and inheritance. Jawaharlal Nehru had the courage to amend Hindu personal law, outlawing polygamy and providing female rights to inherit property, divorce, and remarry. Alas, he funked similar reforms for Muslims, leaving Muslim women as oppressed and subjugated as ever.
A Directive Principle of the Constitution says the state shall endeavour to secure for citizens a uniform civil code throughout India. This has never been implemented. Muslim conservatives are dead opposed. Religious objections apart, they say a civil code will become a form of Hindu oppression.
Some enlightened Muslims have urged modernization of Islamic personal law. But secular political parties know that conservatives control the Muslim vote, and woo them by saying Muslims themselves must take the initiative on reforms. In effect, secular parties have thrown Muslim women to the wolves in search of votes.
The BJP is the only party backing a common civil code, but its strong anti-Muslim instincts lead one to suspect it is keener on bashing Muslims than ending gender oppression.
Right fight: Politicians who say Muslims don’t want personal law reforms are thinking only of Muslim men
Oral triple talaq permits a man to utter three times that he is divorcing his wife, and she is at the mercy of his whims. In our travels through India, my late wife Shahnaz often spoke to Muslim women, who invariably said that one of the greatest injustices they faced was the ever-present threat of triple talaq. The same fears are expressed by Shayara Bano in her Supreme Court petition. “They (women) have their hands tied while the guillotine of divorce dangles perpetually ready to drop at the whims of their husbands who enjoy undisputed power.”
Women constitute half the Muslim population, but have no voice because of male subjugation. Politicians who say Muslims don’t want to reform personal laws are thinking only of male Muslims, not female Muslims. When oppressive Muslim laws keep women under the thumbs of men, they cannot express their true wants and have to follow male orders. Conservative Muslims have historically discouraged female education, keeping women disempowered and unable to strike out on their own.
If a referendum with secret voting is held among Muslim women, they will surely opt to abolish triple talaq and polygamy. But they are not given the chance. So they remain disempowered and subjugated,with the shameful complicity of secular parties claiming to represent universal rights.
The 2012 Committee on the Status of Women has made gender recommendations covering all religions. It seeks to ban triple talaq and polygamy. It seeks stronger provisions for maintenance payments to women and children (these can currently be cut off if a divorcee is “unchaste”). The Supreme Court should heed the report.
Forget the propaganda that a common civil code will mean Hindu oppression. Goa is the only state that disallows personal laws of all religions. It has a uniform civil code — with a few exceptions not relevant to Muslims — based on Portuguese colonial laws. Goa’s mullahs sought to extend Muslim personal law to Goa after liberation from Portuguese rule, but happily were foiled by the Goa Muslim Women’s Associations and Muslim youth activists. Muslims account for 8.3% of Goa’s population, and are a prosperous community. The civil code has not oppressed Goan Muslims or forcibly Hinduised them.
Any fear that a uniform civil code will mean Hindu oppression of Muslims will be exposed as groundless if India simply follows Goa’s example. The Supreme Court should point all political parties in Goa’s direction.
Monday 14 March 2016
Lecture on Nationalism at JNU #5 - Nivedita Menon
This attack on Nivedita Menon
Mary E John in The Hindu
A notable feature of the university protests that have rocked the nation in recent times is the prominent presence of women. Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula’s mother Radhika was hounded by the media, and her personal life vilified in the attempt to prove that Rohith was not a Dalit. The faculty members from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who came to the Patiala House courts for JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing and were attacked by irate ‘patriotic lawyers’ were mostly women. In Allahabad, the first woman president of the Allahabad University Students’ Union, Richa Singh, has faced physical intimidation from her political opponents who are now seeking other ways to oust her from the university. The latest in this series is JNU professor Nivedita Menon against whom a concerted campaign seems to have been launched, including media attacks and malicious police complaints.
One of the events that JNU teachers conducted in solidarity with students in the course of the campaign against JNU as a supposed den of anti-nationals was a series of lectures on nationalism. Professor Menon delivered a lecture in Hindi called “Nation, a daily plebiscite” (see video above) in which she made the argument that the formation of one nation does not automatically end all nationalist aspirations. Drawing attention to histories of nation formation as crucial to understanding present-day conflicts, she also discussed Kashmir’s complicated history of accession to India.
These lectures are available on YouTube, and some days afterwards, a TV channel started a campaign, continuously playing video clips taken out of context (including a clip from a speech at a political event in 2014), calling Prof. Menon anti-national, and creating an atmosphere of threat, intimidation and incitement to mob violence. In addition, according to media reports, two police complaints have been filed against her in Delhi by organisations linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a complaint lodged against her in a court in Kanpur. The complaints against her are, in effect, part of a right-wing offensive to lay claim to nationalism by attacking any mode of dissent as anti-national.
Does this mean that men are ‘patriots’ and women ‘dissenters’? Any such claim is immediately demolished, of course, by the powerful presence of militant right-wing women like Uma Bharti and generations of ‘sadhvis’ known for their incendiary demagoguery, from Rithambhara to Prachi. So there are plenty of women ‘patriots’. The real distinction is that it is those women who lay claim to the legacy of feminism who are being singled out as ‘dissenters’. Why is this happening? Why are feminist scholars like Prof. Menon being targeted? What exactly is Indian feminism and what are the forms of dissent that feminists in India have adopted? How have feminists become leaders in the present struggles over democracy in India and why is this being perceived as dangerous?
Feminism in India
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
Second, we as feminists have had to learn over and over again that our movements can only grow if we do not claim immunity from our own tools of critique and dissent. Some of the fiercest debates witnessed in the Indian women’s movement have therefore been internal ones, addressed to each other. Prominent examples of such debates include those over a uniform civil code; over the need and direction for reserved seats for women in Parliament and legislatures; and over how best to combat the scourge of female foeticide.
It is therefore particularly shameful, but also revealing, that sections of the electronic media and countless vicious trolls on social media have tried to instil fear by singling out Prof. Menon among other teachers as an alleged ‘anti-national’. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with her writings should know better. Prof. Menon has drawn from prior scholarship (both in India and abroad) to lay out why, in fact, simple universal theories of women’s subordination will not work in contexts like India. By tracing the effects of colonial rule and the many responses to it, she has demonstrated how both community rights and individual rights have played themselves out in our history, and continue to have a massive impact on women’s equality and freedom to this very day. Some of her finest work takes issue with other feminists in offering a dissenting interpretation of the problems women face. Will a blanket demand for one-third reservation of seats actually be the best strategy for the women’s movement, or should we ‘call the bluff’ of those who demanded a sub-quota? Equally provocatively, might the sheer demand to combat sexual violence against women rebound against the basic freedom from violence that the women’s movement seeks to protect? Such examples could be multiplied. Lest anyone be misled, these are all feminist arguments that work through a form of dissent that simultaneously upholds feminist ways of seeing and feminist forms of struggle.
Does this mean that everything that a scholar like Prof. Menon writes or believes should demand our assent? Not at all. I cannot think of anyone who is more open to disagreement and welcoming of constructive dissent, and who, in fact, encourages this attitude from students and colleagues alike.
An undemocratic mindset
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
Such campaigns are also revealing because they inadvertently recognise the transformational potential of feminism in India today. For feminism believes that genuine gender equality can only come about where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed for all, and where no other forms of oppression can flourish. This is the legacy that feminists in India have been striving for so long to bring to fruition, and which is therefore perceived as being so dangerous. This is also the tradition that Prof. Menon has embodied with integrity and force. And if there are those who would attack such a feminism, they should at least have the courage to attack us all.
Tuesday 16 February 2016
The housing crisis is creating sharp-elbowed husband hunters
Grace Dent in The Independent
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen, foretelling the British housing situation in 2016, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Oh how I struggled, as a sixth-former in the Nineties, with the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.
How hideous, I thought, that a time existed when a woman would marry a man for a house. Cut forward some two decades to the era of the £80,000 mortgage deposit. How odd that marrying bricks and mortar – with an added spouse as a bonus – seems pragmatic, rather than mercenary, today.
I very much enjoyed a recent column by the writer Esther Walker, in which she admits spying her then-boyfriend Giles Coren’s slightly neglected five-bedroom London townhouse, seven years ago, and being instantly smitten. With the house, that is. Coren, as alluring as he is, came second in the equation. First, Walker says, she saw the chipped front door, the replaceable carpets and all that lovely space. Here was a home in which she could live, nest, and raise children.
It is fascinating to me that, five short years ago, a confession as gloriously candid as Walker’s would have provoked feminists into bringing down the internet. I would have been among them, perhaps. Today, I greet the same news with a relaxed shrug of acceptance.
Just five short years ago, I remained convinced that if a young woman – or a young man, for that matter – dreamed audaciously and worked very, very hard, they need not be dependent on anyone for a home. I bought my own house through sheer slog and bloody-mindedness; why couldn’t Generation Buzzfeed do the same?
But little by little, I’ve watched the rise of single men and women trapped in later-life house-shares. I’ve seen how grown-up children are reduced to squatting like cuckoos in their parents’ back bedrooms until well after it is polite. Eventually, I was writing about the rise of strangers in London sharing bunkbeds (out of grim necessity, I should point out, not as a niche hobby).
The future seemed rather infantalising. And for women, feminism may well have flourished, but owning the house you live in, like Beyoncé sang about in “Independent Women” has fallen on its arse somewhat.
The facts are sobering: recent research by the Resolution Foundation on inter-generational fairness shows that in 1998, more than half of those earning 10 to 50 per cent of the average national income had a mortgage. This figure dropped to one in four by 2015. Within a decade, if things continue as they are, one in 10 will have a mortgage. In the late 1990s, when I was a strident youthful thing, it took determined people like me three years to save up for a deposit. Today it would take 22 years. That’s a long time to share a bunk bed, even if it’s in HMP Holloway.
This is particularly bleak in the light of new research on the rise of the “crowd worker” – people paid through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit. Here, instead of fairly paid, pensionable work which impresses mortgage vendors, there is a generation tied to their phones waiting to accept or decline piecemeal “tasks”.
Crowdworkers tend to work without benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or minimum wage guarantees. There must – I suspect, as I’ve never worked like this myself – be a feeling for crowdworkers of being tremendously busy and usefully employed. But meanwhile, financially at least, they are treading water. I’m not sure how you conduct a family life or a relationship around crowdwork, although I’m pretty sure the people who profit from it will say that it’s this versatility that is the unique selling point.
One thing I do know is that Walker’s confession unveils an unpalatable truth about the modern British relationship. We are, increasingly, a nation of clandestine Austen heroines in search of those “in possession of a good fortune”. Be you feminist or fervent bachelor, gay, straight, male, cis or genderfluid; for the average person, marrying into property will be your best shot at “owning it” these days. And if you can charm your name on to the mortgage deeds, well, even better. The housing crisis will make sharp-elbowed, radar-eyed Chelsea husband-hunters of all of us.
In another five years, I predict that Tinder will be outmoded by a simple database of single millennials who were lucky enough to inherit – or afford – a three-bedroom house with space for a homeworking office and a nursery. Or an app which lists unwedded people with sickly parents about to cark it who, in the meantime, happen to be sitting selfishly on a five-bedroom pile in Surrey. In the future, these property owners – not the slinky, the booby or the muscular – will be the sex gods of society.
These gods will woo you with their seductive talk of land registry documents, convertable attic space and the downsides of a 20-metre back garden. You will be powerless in the face of their Farrow & Ball catalogue and hopelessly impressed that their bed is on one level and not accessed via a ladder. You will swipe right for a place to call home. Sure, deep, real love will keep you warm in bed at night. But when the place is yours, you can stick in underfloor heating and a reliable combi-boiler.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen, foretelling the British housing situation in 2016, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Oh how I struggled, as a sixth-former in the Nineties, with the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.
How hideous, I thought, that a time existed when a woman would marry a man for a house. Cut forward some two decades to the era of the £80,000 mortgage deposit. How odd that marrying bricks and mortar – with an added spouse as a bonus – seems pragmatic, rather than mercenary, today.
I very much enjoyed a recent column by the writer Esther Walker, in which she admits spying her then-boyfriend Giles Coren’s slightly neglected five-bedroom London townhouse, seven years ago, and being instantly smitten. With the house, that is. Coren, as alluring as he is, came second in the equation. First, Walker says, she saw the chipped front door, the replaceable carpets and all that lovely space. Here was a home in which she could live, nest, and raise children.
It is fascinating to me that, five short years ago, a confession as gloriously candid as Walker’s would have provoked feminists into bringing down the internet. I would have been among them, perhaps. Today, I greet the same news with a relaxed shrug of acceptance.
Just five short years ago, I remained convinced that if a young woman – or a young man, for that matter – dreamed audaciously and worked very, very hard, they need not be dependent on anyone for a home. I bought my own house through sheer slog and bloody-mindedness; why couldn’t Generation Buzzfeed do the same?
But little by little, I’ve watched the rise of single men and women trapped in later-life house-shares. I’ve seen how grown-up children are reduced to squatting like cuckoos in their parents’ back bedrooms until well after it is polite. Eventually, I was writing about the rise of strangers in London sharing bunkbeds (out of grim necessity, I should point out, not as a niche hobby).
The future seemed rather infantalising. And for women, feminism may well have flourished, but owning the house you live in, like Beyoncé sang about in “Independent Women” has fallen on its arse somewhat.
The facts are sobering: recent research by the Resolution Foundation on inter-generational fairness shows that in 1998, more than half of those earning 10 to 50 per cent of the average national income had a mortgage. This figure dropped to one in four by 2015. Within a decade, if things continue as they are, one in 10 will have a mortgage. In the late 1990s, when I was a strident youthful thing, it took determined people like me three years to save up for a deposit. Today it would take 22 years. That’s a long time to share a bunk bed, even if it’s in HMP Holloway.
This is particularly bleak in the light of new research on the rise of the “crowd worker” – people paid through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit. Here, instead of fairly paid, pensionable work which impresses mortgage vendors, there is a generation tied to their phones waiting to accept or decline piecemeal “tasks”.
Crowdworkers tend to work without benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or minimum wage guarantees. There must – I suspect, as I’ve never worked like this myself – be a feeling for crowdworkers of being tremendously busy and usefully employed. But meanwhile, financially at least, they are treading water. I’m not sure how you conduct a family life or a relationship around crowdwork, although I’m pretty sure the people who profit from it will say that it’s this versatility that is the unique selling point.
One thing I do know is that Walker’s confession unveils an unpalatable truth about the modern British relationship. We are, increasingly, a nation of clandestine Austen heroines in search of those “in possession of a good fortune”. Be you feminist or fervent bachelor, gay, straight, male, cis or genderfluid; for the average person, marrying into property will be your best shot at “owning it” these days. And if you can charm your name on to the mortgage deeds, well, even better. The housing crisis will make sharp-elbowed, radar-eyed Chelsea husband-hunters of all of us.
In another five years, I predict that Tinder will be outmoded by a simple database of single millennials who were lucky enough to inherit – or afford – a three-bedroom house with space for a homeworking office and a nursery. Or an app which lists unwedded people with sickly parents about to cark it who, in the meantime, happen to be sitting selfishly on a five-bedroom pile in Surrey. In the future, these property owners – not the slinky, the booby or the muscular – will be the sex gods of society.
These gods will woo you with their seductive talk of land registry documents, convertable attic space and the downsides of a 20-metre back garden. You will be powerless in the face of their Farrow & Ball catalogue and hopelessly impressed that their bed is on one level and not accessed via a ladder. You will swipe right for a place to call home. Sure, deep, real love will keep you warm in bed at night. But when the place is yours, you can stick in underfloor heating and a reliable combi-boiler.
Wednesday 19 August 2015
Hope for mature women?
'Female Viagra' approved by US drug agency
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a libido-enhancing drug for women that has been dubbed "Female Viagra".
Flibanserin, a drug produced by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, recently passed an FDA advisory committee meeting.
The pill is designed to assist premenopausal women regain their sex drive by boosting levels of certain brain chemicals.
The drug has been criticised as having marginal effects.
Versions of the pill, which will be marketed as "Addyi", have been submitted for approval in the past but never passed.
It was rejected by the FDA twice for lack of effectiveness and side effects like nausea, dizziness and fainting.
Women taking the drug reported between half and one more sexually satisfying event per month - results experts admitted were "modest".
Originally the drug was produced by German company Boehringer Ingelheim. Sprout bought the drug from that company after it was turned down by the FDA.
Documents from the 4 June FDA advisory meeting describe the drug's purpose as "treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women".
Women would take it each night.
A doctor would have to determine whether a woman seeking the pill was suffering from a disorder characterised by a lack of sexual fantasies and desire, causing the woman distress.
Currently, there is nothing on the US market approved for treatment of HSDD or another condition, female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD).
"This condition is clearly an area of unmet medical need," the FDA documents said.
Sprout only has 25 employees. Large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Bayer and Proctor & Gamble have all studied female sexual desire disorder treatment but abandoned plans to pursue it.
Sprout's CEO, Cindy Whitehead, told AP they would promote Addyi carefully.
"We would never want a patient who's not going to see a benefit to take it and tell everyone it doesn't work," she said.
Lobbying by Sprout Pharmaceuticals was backed by the women's rights group Even the Score, which has accused the FDA of gender bias by approving a number of drugs treating erectile dysfunction in men without passing an equivalent for women.
Monday 14 July 2014
Imam Al Ghazali - On the ideal role of women
" ... Al-Ghazali is considered to be the greatest Muslim scholar ever. He is called “The Defender of Islam”. He has written around 1,000 books in the Fiqah of The Islamic Human Rights Commission . In his well-renown Book, “The Revival Of The Religious Sciences” Al-Ghazali defines women role:
- She should stay at home and get on with her spinning
- She can go out only in emergencies
- She must not be well-informed nor must she be communicative with her neighbors and only visit them when absolutely necessary
- She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything
- She must not leave her house without his permission and if given his permission she must leave secretly
- She should put on old clothes and take deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, and make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice, her footsteps, smell her or recognize her
- She must not speak to a friend of her husband even in need
- Her sole worry should be her “al bud” (reproductive organs) her home as well as her prayers and her fast (starvation for Allah)
- If a friend of her husband calls when her husband is absent she must not open the door nor reply to him in order to safeguard her “al bud” (vagina)
- She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment
- She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs at any moment
The great theologian then warns all men to be careful of women for their “guile is immense and their mischief is noxious; they are immoral and mean spirited”.Like a true Muslim cleric Ghazali states “It is a fact that all the trials, misfortunes and woes which befall men come from women” [3.2]
In his Book “Counsel for Kings,” Ghazali sums up all that a woman has to endure because of Eve’s misbehavior in the Garden of Eden:
“When Eve ate fruit which He had forbidden to her from the tree in Paradise, the Lord, be He praised, cursed women with eighteen punishments:
- menstruation
- childbirth
- separation from mother and father and marriage to a stranger
- pregnancy
- not having control over her own person
- a lesser share in inheritance; (one half of the male as per the Quran)
- her liability to be divorced and inability to divorce
- its being lawful for men to have four wives, but for a woman to have only one husband
- the fact that she must stay secluded in the house
- the fact that she must keep her head covered inside the house
- the fact that two women’s testimony has to be set against the testimony of one man
- the fact that she must not go out of the house unless accompanied by a near relative
- the fact that men take part in Friday and feast day prayers and funerals while women do
not
- disqualification for leadership and judgeship
- the fact that merit has one thousand components, only one of which is attributable to women, while 999 are attributable to men
- the fact that if women are profligate they will be given twice as much torment as the rest of the community at the Resurrection Day
- the fact that if their husbands die they must observe a waiting period of four months and ten days before remarrying
The idea that a woman’s sole purpose and “duty is to stay at home to satisfy the sexual appetite of her husband” is again summed up in Ghazali’s Book “Proof Of Islam.” Ghazali is still so highly revered amongst the majority of Muslim clerics that that he is called “Proof of Islam”. The most influential thinker of Islam, Ghazali, molded the minds of billions of Muslims with his opinions on women’s character :
“If you relax the woman’s leash a tiny bit, she will take you and bolt wildly….
Their deception is awesome and their wickedness is contagious; bad character and feeble mind are their predominant traits …”
Ghazali also exhorted women: A wife should never refuse her bud (vagina) to her husband even if it is on the saddle of a camel
Al-Gazali urged those men who teach their women to write : “Do not add evil to unhappiness” learning his lessons from his prophet Muhammad and caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab who commanded :“Prevent women from learning to write, adopt positions
opposite those of women. There is great virtue in such opposition.”
As the supreme cleric Ghazali defined marriage for generations of Muslims :
“Marriage is a form of slavery. The woman is man’s slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person. A woman, who at the moment of death enjoys the full approval of her husband, will find her place in Paradise.”
- She should stay at home and get on with her spinning
- She can go out only in emergencies
- She must not be well-informed nor must she be communicative with her neighbors and only visit them when absolutely necessary
- She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything
- She must not leave her house without his permission and if given his permission she must leave secretly
- She should put on old clothes and take deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, and make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice, her footsteps, smell her or recognize her
- She must not speak to a friend of her husband even in need
- Her sole worry should be her “al bud” (reproductive organs) her home as well as her prayers and her fast (starvation for Allah)
- If a friend of her husband calls when her husband is absent she must not open the door nor reply to him in order to safeguard her “al bud” (vagina)
- She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment
- She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs at any moment
The great theologian then warns all men to be careful of women for their “guile is immense and their mischief is noxious; they are immoral and mean spirited”.Like a true Muslim cleric Ghazali states “It is a fact that all the trials, misfortunes and woes which befall men come from women” [3.2]
In his Book “Counsel for Kings,” Ghazali sums up all that a woman has to endure because of Eve’s misbehavior in the Garden of Eden:
“When Eve ate fruit which He had forbidden to her from the tree in Paradise, the Lord, be He praised, cursed women with eighteen punishments:
- menstruation
- childbirth
- separation from mother and father and marriage to a stranger
- pregnancy
- not having control over her own person
- a lesser share in inheritance; (one half of the male as per the Quran)
- her liability to be divorced and inability to divorce
- its being lawful for men to have four wives, but for a woman to have only one husband
- the fact that she must stay secluded in the house
- the fact that she must keep her head covered inside the house
- the fact that two women’s testimony has to be set against the testimony of one man
- the fact that she must not go out of the house unless accompanied by a near relative
- the fact that men take part in Friday and feast day prayers and funerals while women do
not
- disqualification for leadership and judgeship
- the fact that merit has one thousand components, only one of which is attributable to women, while 999 are attributable to men
- the fact that if women are profligate they will be given twice as much torment as the rest of the community at the Resurrection Day
- the fact that if their husbands die they must observe a waiting period of four months and ten days before remarrying
The idea that a woman’s sole purpose and “duty is to stay at home to satisfy the sexual appetite of her husband” is again summed up in Ghazali’s Book “Proof Of Islam.” Ghazali is still so highly revered amongst the majority of Muslim clerics that that he is called “Proof of Islam”. The most influential thinker of Islam, Ghazali, molded the minds of billions of Muslims with his opinions on women’s character :
“If you relax the woman’s leash a tiny bit, she will take you and bolt wildly….
Their deception is awesome and their wickedness is contagious; bad character and feeble mind are their predominant traits …”
Ghazali also exhorted women: A wife should never refuse her bud (vagina) to her husband even if it is on the saddle of a camel
Al-Gazali urged those men who teach their women to write : “Do not add evil to unhappiness” learning his lessons from his prophet Muhammad and caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab who commanded :“Prevent women from learning to write, adopt positions
opposite those of women. There is great virtue in such opposition.”
As the supreme cleric Ghazali defined marriage for generations of Muslims :
“Marriage is a form of slavery. The woman is man’s slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person. A woman, who at the moment of death enjoys the full approval of her husband, will find her place in Paradise.”
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