Less Islamophobia, More Theophobia, Please

Public Enemy number one.

The first side effect of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been an orgy of analysis and commentary by politicians and the press, many of whom are advancing agendas (more power to the police and secret services) or grinding axes (all Muslims are crazy mofos). After reading far too many opinion pieces and analyses over the last few days, I can no longer resist adding my two cents to the glittering mountain of coins that's already out there. So here goes.

A common theme voiced by many people is that Muslims need to be, well, less religious, or at least less fanatical. How this is to be done isn't usually defined, but one gets the sense that what people mean is that Muslims should do what most Christians do; pay nominal attention to the tenets and ceremonies of their religion but ignore all the barbaric and nonsensical stuff. Advising Muslims to dial down their religiosity is something I can get behind as long as it's part of broader theophobic movement. It seems monstrously hypocritical to ask Muslims to be chill about depictions of Mohammed when in the US creationism is being taught in schools; no US president can get elected unless they loudly proclaim that they are a practicing Christian; TV networks routinely bleep the use of "goddamn" or "Christ" when it's used as an expletive; women's reproductive rights are being eroded in the name of Christian religion; the military has become a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism; and a wide variety of pressure groups and politicians are constantly attempting to erode or end the constitutional separation of church and state. In sum, any attempts by non-Muslims to lecture Muslims on religious tolerance ring hollow unless it's matched by equal fervour in putting all religions in their place, which, in my view, is out on the street with their brethren operating the three-card monte games.

Are the Hebdo cartoons offensive? If you're looking and hoping to be offended, yes. Charlie Hebdo has a meage circulation of 60k in a nation of more than sixty million, and I doubt many French Muslims, or any one of a conservative bent, would be on their subscription list. Like the people who used to rail against Playboy magazine, Hebdo's detractors don't read the magazine themselves, but they're mortally offended that other people do. Those who argue that the cartoon images shouldn't be disseminated further because they might upset Muslims are falling into a dangerous logical trap. If a cartoon, an act of ephemeral humour, is too daunting for the sensitivities of some people, where do we draw the line in criticism and commentary? If a newspaper columnist does a piece in favour of atheism should there be a warning on the front of the paper about it lest a religious person come across the column? And why should religious sensitivities count for anything? Why should people of faith be protected from criticism or satire or a contrary opinion? We don't expect politicians, their parties, or their ideologies to be shielded from scorn or commentary (unless you're living in a totalitarian state), but somehow in the early 21st century it's not seemly to ridicule religion and its adherents.

The Paris killings have also produced the usual spate of right-wing chaff that attempts to disassociate Islamic terrorism from recent political and military history in the Middle East. The usual line taken in these arguments is that Islam is existentially committed to overthrowing the West (just read what it says in the Koran!) and what's gone on in Iraq and Israel has little or nothing to do with attacks on Western targets. Since the signing of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, the major Western powers, Israel, the USSR and, later, Russia, have terraformed, as it were, the Middle East, North Africa and AfPak into the hot messes that they are today. This does not make ISIL less of a horror show or excuse what happened in Paris, but to pretend that monsters won't arise from the toxic ecosystem that much of the Arab world has become seems ingenuous in the extreme. And if Islam is existentially obliged to attack unbelievers and spread the one faith by the sword, why wasn't the West facing Islamic terrorism in, say, the 1950s? Or the '20s? Why not the 1860s, for that matter? Nothing in the Koran has changed over the centuries, so it seems odd, unless you factor in politics and foreign policy, that the West hasn't been under siege from the Muslim world for the past thousand years.

And now for the big picture stuff. I'd argue that Islamic fundamentalism is merely one branch of a conservative counter-revolution that's been going on across the world since the late 1970s. Bear with me here. The post-war era (for argument's sake I'm going to say this extends to 1979) was marked by greater social welfare spending, the growth and influence of unions, a bigger role for government in social and industrial policies, and the political, economic and social emancipation of visible minorities and women. In simple terms, power and wealth was flowing from the top of society to the bottom. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that flow began to reverse itself. The conservative counter-revolution had begun. This counter-revolution wasn't just about dollars and cents. The '60s and '70s had seen the growth of counter-cultural movements, alternative lifestyles, feminism, and gay rights. As these cultural changes gained momentum, the opposite and equal reaction was the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US and right-wing racist/nationalist parties in Europe. In broad cultural terms, what the counter-revolution was, and is, trying to do is re-establish a rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal  and mono-cultural society.

Although the West was where this struggle began, the rest of the world was not immune. The combined effects of globalization, immigration from the developing to the developed world, and the Internet have unsettled traditional societies all over world. Liberalism, in the cultural sense, has backwashed into countries and cultures that were anywhere from Victorian to medieval in their social outlook. Since the 1970s developing nations have been invaded by liberal Western values. These values have been carried there by Western businesses, immigrants returning to/communicating with their home countries, and the spread of the Internet. One sure sign of this cultural counter-revolution is the increase in misogyny just about everywhere. Women are always at the bottom of the pecking order in any kind of conservative culture, and because of this we've seen the spread of sharia law; gang sexual assaults on women in India; rampant cyber-bullying of women as seen in the Gamergate scandal; a mostly successful effort by rightists to turn the word "feminist" into a pejorative; and an epidemic of sexual abuse of women in the US military and colleges. Click here for a longer piece I did on women and religious oppression called Jim Crow is a Transvestite.

So even without the impetus of Western military incursions in the Muslim world, it's quite likely Islamic fundamentalism would have been on the rise as a reaction to liberal and progressive values arriving from the the West. But take this counter-revolution, combine with real and imagined political/religious grievances and young men who are desperate, alienated, mentally unbalanced, and you get killers like Anders Breivik in Norway and the Charlie Hebdo assassins.

Jim Crow is a Transvestite

A New Guinea cargo cult was the only religion not to object to
Lady GaGa's meat dress.

On January 14, 2014, the Quebec government began public hearings into its proposed "Charter of Values" law which will ban the wearing of religious symbols by public-sector workers. The stated goal of the law is to ensure that the public service reflects the secular nature of Quebec's society and government. Under the proposed law, clothing such as veils, turbans, and kippas would be banned, as would the wearing of crucifixes. And now here's what the law is really about:

The Parti Quebecois is the ruling party in Quebec, and with this law they are speaking to their base. As a party existentially committed to the independence of Quebec and the supremacy of the French language in public life, they have a vested, but unspoken, interest in discouraging a multicultural society. The PQ's hardcore supporters would prefer to see a Quebec composed exclusively of pure laine citizens. Pure laine is a Quebecois term that refers to people who trace their ancestry back to New France. The bigotry that lurks behind this term popped into the open during the Quebec sovereignty referendum in 1995, when PQ leader Jacques Parizeau blamed the referendum loss on "the ethnic vote." He also said that "we" (meaning the pure laine) had voted in favour in the referendum. It's clear that what the PQ is up to with the charter of values is an attempt to discourage immigrants from settling in Quebec and encourage the ones already living there to move elsewhere. From a PQ point of view that should help diminish the dreaded "ethnic vote" in any future referendum.

But there's an aspect to this story that's more interesting than the PQ's unsubtle politicking. The Charter of Values may list all kinds of religious apparel and ornamentation as verboten, but it's clear that the most obvious target are women who wear hijabs, chadors or veils. Yes, at heart this piece of legislation is one more symptom of Islamophobia, one aimed primarily at Muslim women. And it's yet one more example in the long, long history of women being told what to wear or not wear. A lot of the debate around the charter has focused on what this all means for Muslim women. In general terms, proponents of the charter have taken the line that banning religious apparel strikes a blow for equality of the sexes--why, they ask, should some women be forced to wear what's essentially a uniform? Opponents say that wearing a hijab or the like is a matter of choice and a proud symbol of a person's faith.

Both sides are ducking some more important issues raised by this wardrobe controversy. To begin with, the Koran's only directive when it comes to clothing is that women should dress modestly. Does that mean yes to a Chanel suit but no to Daisy Duke shorts? Who knows? But to categorize a particular piece of clothing as "religious" is futile if not absurd. And it's disingenuous, if not ridiculous, for people to claim that the wearing of such clothes is a matter of free choice. Anyone who lives or works in a Muslim area (as I do) can tell you that girls as young as five or six are being covered up from head to toe. They clearly have no choice in this matter. But a bigger question is, why is it that the discussion about faith-based fashion choices for women always seems to be limited to Muslim women? Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and conservative Hindus all place restrictions on what women can wear. For a taste of just how bizarre and abusive a religion can get towards women and their appearance, check out this article from Haaretz about a Hasidic woman's difficult decision to defy her sect by not shaving her head.

What women wear or don't wear as part of their faith is only the tip of the iceberg. If clothing is a designation of a woman's religion, it's also, in the case of the sects and religions listed above, an indicator of women who are denied a wide range of other freedoms. When you see a young woman dressed solely to please her faith you're also seeing a woman who is unlikely to do any of the following: live on her own; choose her own boyfriend or husband; go on vacation by herself or with girlfriends; go clubbing; start her own business; have a glass of wine; run for public office; go swimming or sunbathe; have a wild weekend in Las Vegas; go to a movie theatre; or even take up a career or pursue higher education. Some religions and sects might be more liberal, some even more severe, but it always comes back to the fact that faith-based apparel is a visual statement that an aggressively patriarchal and misogynistic religion is denying a woman a range of life choices taken for granted by the vast majority of women in Canada.

There's never a shortage of horror stories in the Western press about the suffering of women in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or India. The commonly-used term "gender apartheid" hardly seems adequate to describe excesses such as honour killings, dowry burnings, female circumcision, and executions for adultery; it would be better to describe this situation as gender slavery, because if you define slavery as one person having absolute power over another, then slavery is the only way to describe a situation where women's lives are completely controlled by men and their religions. There's no one in the West who thinks this is a healthy or just state of affairs, and organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization have spoken out against the mistreatment of women in the countries where these abuses occur.

Human rights laws in Canada ensure that the worst excesses of gender slavery can't take place here, at least without severe legal repercussions. But here's the odd and unpleasant thing about our relationship with gender slavery; we won't tolerate the most gaudy examples of slavery, and we decry these practices in other countries, but we're quite tolerant of social customs and traditions that I'd call the equivalent of the Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War South. The so-called Jim Crow laws replaced the Black Codes in the American South which had defined and regulated slavery. Jim Crow laws instituted segregation and created a new, less blatant, kind of slavery. It took nearly a hundred years for the US to rid itself of these laws and the racist customs and traditions that came with them. The social traditions and religious edicts that currently restrict some Canadian women from exercising their free will, of which clothing is the most visible symbol, are our modern-day Jim Crow laws, and they're just as iniquitous and cruel as the originals.

And this brings us back to the Charter of Values. It's a foolish, wrong-headed, politically-motivated attack on Quebec's minorities that one would hope never becomes law, and yet...There should be some effort made by governments to curb the tyrannical aspects of religion. All levels of government in Canada are happy to fund a constant stream of public service ads on the evils of bullying, drunk driving, child abuse, cyberbullying, elder abuse, and a variety of other social ills. So why not an ad campaign that lets the more extreme elements in the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities know that women are not to be bullied, coerced or shamed in the name of religion or tradition? Such a campaign should also let women in these communities know that their basic rights and freedoms cannot be denied for religious reasons. Unfortunately, there's a very good reason a campaign like this will never exist: Canadian political parties actively seek the support of ethnic voters, something that stands in stark contrast to Europe, where the political zeitgeist these days seems to include a lot of immigrant-bashing. The federal Liberals have a long history of being the party of immigrants, and in the last decade the Conservatives have worked hard to build support in different ethnic communities. Conservative PM Stephen Harper has been a very vocal supporter of Israel in an effort to curry favour with Jewish voters, and his recent refusal to attend the Commonwealth conference in Sri Lanka, which he said was a protest against human rights abuses in that country, was actually an attempt to pull votes in Toronto's Tamil community. Canadian politicians outside of Quebec will never do anything that might antagonize ethnic voters.

The battle over what women should and shouldn't wear will undoubtedly continue on many fronts and for many reasons. It would be nice if here in Canada we could remove religion from the fashion equation and in doing so offer up more freedom to girls and women who currently wear clothing that often represents the uniform of oppression.