As the chaos in Iraq deepens, it is curious to recall the smug optimism of the Iraq war’s British and American proponents. Not only would, they insisted, the war rid the world of a murderous tyrant, it would also prepare the way for Iraq’s emergence as an exemplary pluralist democracy, a Middle Eastern showcase for the freedoms enjoyed by the peoples of Britain and the US.
By this stage, though, Britain and the United States alike, engaged as they now are in curbing their civil liberties and the scapegoating of minorities, seem less and less fit to vaunt their status as free societies. In Britain, there has been no formal parliamentary debate on the subject of the Iraq for three years. The other day, the former Conservative foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkin, pointed out that this would hardly be acceptable if the occupation of Iraq had been an unqualified success. Granted that it has been a debacle of historic magnitude, the refusal of the Blair government to submit its foreign policy to full and open debate makes a mockery of Britain’s democratic pretensions.
Yet while it is loath to allow discussion of British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government is more than happy to encourage national debate on the pros and cons of Muslim women wearing the veil. Thanks to the former foreign secretary and current Leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw, debate has been raging in Britain about the propriety of Muslim women attiring themselves in the burqa, with its concealment of the whole face bar the eyes. MP for Burnley, a town with a substantial Muslim community, Straw originally aired the issue in a local newspaper, maintaining that it is important for him to be able to see the faces of his constituents if he is to establish a proper rapport with them. A loyal member of a government which declines to admit the Iraq war was a mistake or that British foreign policy has contributed to the radicalizing of Muslim youth, Straw has effectively issued a nonnegotiable ultimatum to wearers of the burqa: Their willingness to concede his point has become a test of how far they are prepared to integrate with mainstream British society.
A seasoned politician, Straw can have been in little doubt what a furor his article was going to unleash in the present highly charged atmosphere. It has been cynically suggested that he is seeking to revive his dwindling political fortunes by identifying himself with a move to make Muslims accede to British values. Certainly, his remarks will have done him no harm in the eyes of great numbers of British people. As Home Secretary John Reid recently discovered when he warned that Britain would not be browbeaten by Muslim bullies or allow Muslims to create no-go areas, showing that you are ready to talk tough about Muslims has become a quick way for a politician to win public approbation. Whatever Straw’s motives, his dissent on the veil has already had large consequences. Attention has focused on the burqa-wearing Leeds teacher, Aishah Azmi, who has been suspended from her job for refusing to remove her veil, a ruling that has now been upheld by an employment tribunal; and other veil-wearing Muslim women have apparently found themselves subject to verbal and/or physical assault. Meanwhile, Tony Blair himself has felt obliged to join the debate, offering the potentially inflammatory observation that the veil is a “mark of difference” which makes people of other ethnic backgrounds feel uncomfortable.
If nothing else, all this has laid bare the extraordinary range of public opinions about the veil. And maybe it was a debate that needed to be had, even if it has generated rather more heat than light. The specific, and possibly justified, objection to Aishah Azmi’s veil was that children whom she was teaching how to speak English found it difficult to understand her because they could not see her lips moving. More generally, at a time when every effort is needed to assuage inter-communal friction, there are perhaps grounds for regarding the wearing of the full-face veil in Britain as a needlessly provocative assertion of difference. And given current security concerns, it may be wondered if worries that the burqa could be used as a disguise by a would-be terrorist are so very absurd. Yet the fact is that outlandish modes of self-presentation have long been familiar in Britain, some of them more than a little menacing. Moreover, if there is a case for outlawing the burqa, there is surely a much more compelling one for banning the hooded jackets worn by intimidating young British men who may be bent on anti-social, if not positively delinquent, behavior.
As it turns out, some of the most vehement critics of the full-face veil are to be found among Muslim women themselves. Railing against feminists who proclaim the right of women to wear the burqa, the Muslim columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, argues that they are colluding in the very oppression feminism fought long and hard to overcome.
Yet when all is said, the debate precipitated by Jack Straw carries unmistakably nasty implications. It is symptomatic of mounting national paranoia with regard to Muslims, of an impulse to demonize them as a community that is uncompromising in its determination to remain separate and which nurses a peculiar propensity to spawn dangerous fanatics. A country is in the grip of mass hysteria when a handful of women — who belong to a community which itself constitutes a mere three percent of the British population — can be portrayed in threatening terms simply because, for religious reasons, they are hiding their faces.
What the uproar over the veil above all underlines is the profound moral and intellectual confusion of Britain under the New Labour government of Tony Blair. For Blair came to power preaching the virtue of social inclusiveness while also proclaiming his commitment to individualism and choice, a stance which was to entail strenuous backing for faith schools. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, however, New Labour is recoiling from the diversity it once embraced, setting its face against multiculturalism and laying increasing emphasis on integration into the British way of life. The trouble is that few seem sure any longer what that way of life actually amounts to. Despite this, Britain’s Muslims, already hugely discriminated against when it comes to job opportunities, now face inordinate demands to prove their bona fides as law-abiding British patriots. What they are experiencing looks increasingly like systematic persecution.
