Today’s Guardian brings us a gem from Patrick Strudwick, described recently on Twitter as a ‘warrior for gay rights’. The article, ‘The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Choice is Beyond Belief’ claims that

After supporting several gay equality cases, the EHRC now believes the rights of religious people are not being upheld. It stated: “Judges have interpreted the law too narrowly in religion or belief discrimination claims,” leading to insufficient protection for freedom of religion or belief. It continued: “It is possible to accommodate expression of religion alongside the rights of people who are not religious and the needs of business.”

To rectify this supposed shortfall in religious protection, the EHRC will now push for a new legal principle of “reasonable accommodations” so that believers can negotiate the boundaries of their contract with employers.

Strudwick then uses this decision to argue that the Commission will uphold the right of homophobic individuals to use their religion as a basis to discriminate against gay people. He cites the example of “Lillian Ladele, the Christian registrar who refused to perform civil partnerships and so was disciplined. And that of Gary McFarlane, the Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked for refusing to counsel gay couples,” claiming that “the EHRC has decided to back these people in the name of ‘reasonable’ compromise.”

Let us return to what the EHRC actually says about the rights of religious people: As quoted by Strudwick, the Commission pledges to attempt to accommodate their needs alongside the needs of others. It does not say that the rights of the religious cancel out or render obsolete those of gay people or anyone else. There are a number of problems with Strudwick’s line of argumentation based as it appears, as he himself says, on “even the most cursory of analyses” of the EHRC’s proposal. In fact it appears that Strudwick didn’t read the EHRC’s statement at all or, more accurately, that he read what he wanted to into it in the interests, once again, of pitting the discriminated against each other. This is a continuation of the same logic so beloved of Peter Tatchell whose mouthings-off about “some cultures that are inferior to others” I had the misfortune to have to listen to a couple of years ago.

Problem 1: Nowhere has the EHRC said that it will uphold the right of religious homophobes to abuse their position to discriminate against gay people. If the ruling were to be used by a religious person to discriminate against a gay person, it would evaluate the case on an individual basis to establish whose rights were being infringed upon more. In the case of a registrar who refuses to perform a civil partnership ceremony, clearly the issue could be easily resolved by having another registrar who does not have homophobic views conduct the ceremony (and frankly, why would you want a homophobe to officiate over your special day!). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone the views of someone like Lilian Ladele and find her and others who use religion, or any other world view, to excuse their homophobia abhorrent. However, the problem with Strudwick’s article is that it is making the claim that such despicable views would now legally be made prevail over gay people who they oppose morally. I do not find anything in the EHRC’s decision that would lead to this being the case. Read it for yourselves.

Problem 2: Strudwick makes the breathtaking assertion that the EHRC “will champion those who choose their minority status – people of faith – over those with no choice over theirs – gay people.” Beyond what social constructionists would have to say about the ‘choice’ to be gay, the fact is that, for some people, the issue of choice is as bogus for those of a particular faith than for those discriminated against for their sexual orientation. To make the claim that being gay is something you can do nothing about while belonging to a particular religious group is purely a matter of choice, is to completely ignore the way in which members of certain religious groups are viewed in European societies. In particular, people identified as Muslim, in the aftermath of 9/11, are labelled so whether or not they adhere to that religion. Since 2001 it is fair to say that Islam (a religion) has been racialised with people who may come from a Muslim background but in no way adhering to that faith, being labelled Muslim and by association seen as threatening whether or not this forms part of their self-identification. In essence, brown people today are often assumed to be Muslim, especially as many will testify while travelling, and stereotyped as fundamentalist, backward, violent, patriarchal, etc. on the basis of their outwards appearance alone.

In a similar vein, it is no accident that the photograph accompanying Strudwick’s article is of Lilian Ladele, a black African woman whose admittedly despicable homophobic views rightly raises our warrior’s ire. Now scroll to the comments below the article to understand the full import of the associations that can so easily be made. ‘Roman 78′ writes,

The elephant in the room is once again avoided. Immigration from “less developed” nations has brought with it a steady influx of people with often “less developed” views of gay, lesbian and transgender minorities. Hence the steady increase in homophobic attacks in recent years, which goes against the grain of British society.

The assumption is that crazy immigrants are responsible for bringing Britain back to the days of pre-gay rights and that the EHRC is pandering to the rights of people with no real legitimacy to be in Britain rather than to its ‘homegrown’ gay community. The problems here are manifold. Firstly, it assumes that white British Christians are less likely to be homophobic than their immigrant counterparts. Secondly, it suggests that, were it not for the perceived need to accommodate the rights of ‘other minorities’, homophobia would be a thing of the past in Britain. Just like the argument mobilised by homonationalists to the effect that gay rights have been secured in the West and that the western mission is now to ‘save’ gay people worldwide, the type of argument that Strudwick’s article lends itself to is that homophobia would be a thing of the past if it weren’t for the damn immigrants and religious nuts. This is to forget completely the recentness of the repeal of Section 28 and the unfortunate persistence of institutionalised and everyday homophobia across British society. The Soho nail bomber wasn’t an immigrant, or a religious fanatic, just a plain white British right-wing homophobe who was as opposed to migrants as he was to gays. Which leads me to problem 3.

Problem 3: Strudwick represents a growing problem for progressives – he is part of a prominent gang of western liberals intent on driving a wedge between discriminated groups. Just as the Soho nail bomber hated gays, blacks and Muslims, the antiracist movement and the gay rights movement have little to oppose each other on, and indeed many work together to highlight and oppose the commonalities across the discrimination they face. Despite the attempts by people such as Strudwick’s disgraced friend, Johann Hari, currently undergoing investigation for plagiarism by his newspaper the Independent, to blame Muslims for homophobia, the picture becomes more complex when we note the rejection of the homophobic views of some by prominent Muslim voices.

Problem 4: Strudwick’s schema allows little room for those who are religious and gay, or for those who attempt to combat homophobia within minority communities such as UK organisations Imaan and the Safra Project who have spoken out against the East London Gay Pride March cancelled after it was revealed that its organiser had close ties to the racist English Defence League. Is there no room for being both gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender and a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc. or are the only gay people whose rights are worth protecting are those who follow the doctrine of Richard Dawkins and use their own dogma – liberalism – to dump all over anyone not deemed as enlightened or as free (because clearly all LGBT people in the UK are free) as them?

So where does this leave us? Yet again, a facile unresearched gut reaction from a second-rate journalist like Strudwick has liberals everywhere bleating about the unfairness of it all, about how gay people are always bottom of the pile, and how political correctness ‘gone mad’ has allowed a cabal of black people and religious nutters to stomp willy-nilly all over our inalienable human rights. This approach is the one that wins out because it is so much easier than thinking about how we could work together to bridge the divides between individuals and communities who seem to be coming from such different places. For every homophobe who denies the right of a gay couple to a civil partnership and for every Patrick Strudwick who appears to think that being religious is akin to having a mental illness, there are countless ordinary individuals who can see that, despite their differences, the fact of being discriminated against means that there are potential commonalties that can be built upon to overcome racism, homophobia and distasteful views against religious people. But reporting on this would go against the sensationalism of us against them that the cheerleaders of sexual democracy relentlessly peddle. It’s up to us to relentlessly expose them.

Following on from last week’s guest post by Aren Aizura, I am posting Sara Ahmed‘s incisive comment on the censorship of ‘Gay Imperialism’

by Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed

Peter Tatchell invites us to find evidence of ‘my Islamaphobia, racism or support for imperialist wars or the “war on terror”‘ in the articles that can be downloaded from his website. I would like to say that a brief glance at some of these articles shows some very serious problems in terms of the employment of racialised vocabularies for example in: Their Multiculturalism and Ours; Why has the left gone soft on human rights?; The New Dark Ages (you don’t need to read Frantz Fanon to discuss the problem with the use of the very term ‘the new dark ages’ though Fanon, as always would help) and Islamic Fundamentalism in Britain. I don’t have the time in this brief informal response for the call to respond to go through all of the problems with these pieces, for example, with how some of the critiques of ‘universal human rights’ discourse which have been an important part of LGBT, feminist, socialist as well as anti-racist histories are represented as ‘going soft’. I do intend to offer a systematic critique of some of the terms of the arguments used in due course, which I will publish where they can downloaded, in the interests of sustaining and enabling a debate. But I do want to question here how Mr Tatchell is responding to the critique, and even to the critique of the response to the critique (offered by very thoughtful and careful pieces of writing such as the one offered by Aren Aizura). Critiques of racism are reduced and misheard as personal attacks, which is what blocks a hearing of the critique. In the end, the situation becomes re-coded as a question of individual reputation and good will: we lose the chance to attend to the politics of the original critique.We need to reflect on what we are talking about when we are talking about racism. Racism in speech does not simply depend on the explicit articulation of ideas of racial superiority but often works given that such associations do not need to be made explicit. So for example politicians might use a qualifier ‘this is not a war against Islam’ and then use repeatedly terms like ‘Islamic terrorists’ which work to associate Islam with terror through the mere proximity of the words: the repetition of that proximity makes the association ‘essential’. In other words, proximities becomes attributes ( they become ‘sticky’ as I suggested in my book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion). The process of attribution is in turn bound up with the justification of action, especially in cases where actions are presented as moral whilst involving force (war on terror becomes about freedom from oppression/violence, or even liberation from the oppressors, where freedom resides here, ‘in us’, oppression resides there, ‘with them’). So some forms of violence becomes represented as intrinsic to some forms of culture, and not to others (violence ‘here’ would be individual or exceptional rather that something that can be attributed to ‘us’).

One of the hardest aspects of this process is how even languages of liberation and freedom, which we might assume to be ‘our languages’, to be oppositional, to be about challenging dominant norms and making possible new forms of flourishing, can be used in this process: freedom can be what ‘we’ have or even what we are. Other critics have pointed out how the language of freedom can be a technology for distinguishing ‘an us’ from ‘a them’: from Judith Butler, to Jasbir Puar, to Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem, the authors of the article whose passing from print we are right to mourn. When governments justify war on the grounds of freedom from oppressive gender regimes, it helps to recognise that theses justifications have a history, to refuse to hear them as in any way ‘new’. As Gayatri Spivak taught us, empire itself was justified in these terms, with a description that remains extraordinary for its precision: ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. Homophobia too can be exercised as what ‘the others’ needs liberating from; it too can become attributed to others, and thus an attribute of others (homophobia can be seen as intrinsic to Islam but homophobia in the West would be seen as extrinsic, as an individual problem or a problem with individuals). The language of sexual freedom and sexual rights can thus be exercised as if they are political gift (imperial histories are those in which force is narrated as gift). When freedom or rights becomes a justification for war and empire, they become cultural attributes: what we have, what we give them, what we must force them to have. To become aware of this process is not to withdraw from a commitment to freedoms, but it must mean acquiring a certain caution about turning our commitments into our own attributes or even ego ideals (as if we as activists know in advance what is good or right for ourselves or for others).

I am calling for a recognition of how racism in speech can employ the languages of freedom, which conceal the violence of its mark (note the recent uses of freedom of speech to justify the freedom of some to articulate racist views, or the reduction of freedom of speech to ‘freedom to be offensive’). When we are dealing with language and power we are dealing with how power often does not reveal itself: power becomes the capacity not simply to regulate speech but to generate ideas through proximity: freedom for example is put near certain other categories, giving them both value and force. My own work on Islamaphobia for instance has looked at how ‘being hurt or offended’ by racism becomes seen as the ‘problem’ of Muslims who don’t integrate, such that Islam becomes what offends our freedom, what challenges our freedom to be offensive. None of these associations have to become articulated as a viewpoints, nothing has to be explicitly said.

It might be helpful to point out that homophobic speech can also work like this, by withdrawing from the necessity to articulate a viewpoint: for example, someone does not have to be anti-gay by saying ‘all gays are paedophiles’ or ‘all gays endanger the well-being of our children’, all they need to do is put the category of paedophilia ‘near’ to the category of homosexual to create this effect. Or note how if a lesbian or gay person is involved in child abuse, the category of lesbian or gay will be made explicit in media reporting, which becomes an implicit invitation to make queerness part of the problem of the abuse: but a heterosexual person will be involved in child abuse (much more commonly) and their heterosexuality will not be brought up in the description, which allows heterosexuality to disappear from the scene of abuse. The way in which problems are presented makes some people and not others into problems (this again involves a process of attribution: you make the attributes of x essential to the problem). A critical and complex understanding of language and power is needed to get at this mechanism. We must take the time we need to get at this.

It is my view that Mr Tatchell’s writings on Islam and multiculturalism repeat and reproduce many ‘problematic proximities’ between Islam and violence, and thus participate in the culture of Islamaphobia. It is because this culture exists that we must take care not to reproduce its effects. I refuse the call to express solidarity with such work. I would also say that the apologies given to Mr Tatchell are a symptom of the problem rather than a solution. One of the most problematic texts I have read in many years is in fact the apology produced by Raw Nerve: which helps to reveal what is going on in the situation better than anything (it not only grossly caricatures the original argument, but it actually represents those critiqued as the ones to whom we should be grateful, who should receive our thanks). Still we can do things with problems: some texts in their problematic associations can help us understand the world we are. As Audre Lorde (an early black lesbian feminist critic of racism and imperialism in both the women’s movement and in lesbian and gay politics) taught me: we need to struggle to find better ways of describing what goes on in our world, which means staying proximate to the scenes of its violence.

I am aware that if there is any response to my comments it is likely that it will be to expose their error. But even if that is the case, its worth putting these words down. We all need to get words out there, words that attempt to offer new descriptions, to give us the possibility of imagining new worlds. Words can be offered as signs of hope: they get passed around; they can become lines that connect us, in the political struggle for other worlds.

The funeral of Marwa Sherwini

This article is also published on Multiculturality

The funeral of Marwa Sherbini was held in Alexandria on Monday July 6, 2009. 32 year old Marwa, who was three months pregnant, was stabbed eighteen times in thirty seconds by Axel W, a 28 year old German man in a court in Dresden in front of her husband and 3-year old son among countless others. While stabbing Marwa, Axel W shouted “you have no right to live.” Her husband was also injured when he was shot in the leg by a German security officer while he was trying to protect his wife.

“Ms Sherbini had sued her killer after he called her a “terrorist” because of her headscarf… Axel W and Ms Sherbini and family were in court for his appeal against a fine of 750 euros ($1,050) for insulting her in 2008, apparently because she was wearing the Muslim headscarf or Hijab.” (BBC News)

As reported here, Axel W also called Marwa Sherbini “islamist” and “bitch” when she asked him to make room for her son to play on swings at a local park.As the BBC reports, “the case has attracted much attention in Egypt and the Muslim world.” No doubt, for Egypt and the Muslim world the stand Ms Sherbini took against Axel W for insulting her for wearing the headscarf was seen as a courageous one in the face of western hostility to the Islamic hijab, hostility that has only been exacerbated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent outbursts on the burkha. However, for ever growing numbers of western commentators, many of them far from willing to endorse violent acts such as that committed against Marwa Sherbini, her case against Axel W will not have been viewed as favourably. Indeed, the fact that Sherbini won damages against Axel W for associating her wearing of the hijab with terrorism or islamism (leaving aside the hackneyed old gendered slander: ‘bitch’) would have stuck in the throat of many liberal commentators throughout Europe. This is because it has now become standard for liberals to conflate the religious symbols of Islam, the wearing of the hijab in particular, as at best a visible sign of separation and a rejection of national/European/western ‘values’ and, at worst, as tacit support for the actions of Islamist terrorists. Whereas these upstanding commentators would no doubt abhor the murder of Marwa Sherbini, some of their linguistic associations – hijab=terrorist – do not stray far from those originally made by Axel W.

Among those who call themselves liberal, something odd appears to be happening since September 11 2001. The word ‘liberal’ is increasingly being used as a synonym for ‘western’ or indeed coupled, as in the phrase “liberal, western values…” Thus, on the one hand, ‘liberal values’, which broadly speaking are said to be things like democracy, tolerance, freedom of speech, and respect for the rule of law, are upheld as standards that should be universally respected. On the other hand, however, no sooner have they been delcared universal are they said to be something that is unique to the west which those of other ‘cultures’ are almost innately unable to understand never mind uphold.

This of course depends on who the non-western target of the discourse is. Educated and apparently ‘westernised’ students in Iran, perhaps because of their knowledge of English or their penchant for the niceties of western consumer culture, can be included within a universalistic vision of liberalism. The fact that all Iranian women wear the headscarf is excused on the basis of the belief, whether this is actually the case or not, that they would remove it at the drop of a hat if they could.

In contrast, hijab wearing women in Europe itself, recent migrants or long-standing citizens alike, are less tolerated. Despite the fact that, as citizens or residents of European countries, it would be expected that their choice to wear the hijab could be seen as just one among any number of ‘choices’ open to those living in democractic, egalitarian, liberal societies, they are singled-out as throw-backs to a dangerous pre-modern age, the apparent antithesis of everthing that Europe struggled to rid itself of.

Christopher Caldwell’s ‘The Revolution in Europe: Can Europe be the Same with Different People in it?’

Among these liberals, there is genuine distaste for the fact that many European Muslims have not seamlessly assimilated European ‘values’ and have appeared, as Christopher Caldwell claims, to have retained “the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, marketplaces, and mosques.” But where this has been the case, because it is is far from being universally true, there has been little effort made to explain why there has not been a relinquishing of tradition. Western liberals are unable to explain this because they are so utterly convinced of the superiority of their own culture which, because they believe in its ultimate universal applicability, are incredulous is being rejected.

What this view fails to see of course is that firstly, what appears as traditionalism can often be a conscious, political rejection of western ways of life that appear contradictory and hypocritical, particularly in light of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Secondly, it ignores that universalism is in itself culturally specific and cannot, as the French philosopher Etienne Balibar reminds us, be disassociated from the particular trajectory of European racism and nationalism, a trajectory which was ultimately based upon the project of defining the ideal (male) subject.

Thirdly, universalist liberalism is far from having been instilled in the West itself. There appears to be a wholesale confusion between the apparent choice afforded us by capitalism and real freedom. When Islam is contrasted with western values, particularly in the citizenship policies of the various European states that have introduced citizenship testing, integration programmes, and community cohesion agendas, what is actually happening is that two culturally specific ways of doing things are being pitted against each other. The fact that it is impossible to definitively flesh out what either ‘national values’ or ‘Islam’ actually entail matters little. For liberal commentators, policy-makers, and Muslim community leaders alike, they must nevertheless be adhered to.

This is particularly pernicious when the integration of a set of ill-defined, or indeed indefinable, values is being made contingent for acceptance within society, as is the case in most European countries today. Unable either to define the values to be assimilated or to conclusively state what would constitute a completed integration process, outward symbols such as the hijab, the turban or the beard are being taken as proof that an individual has integrated inadequately whether or not the wearing of such symbols actually bears any relationship to the individual wearer’s attitude to their country, or indeed to the more problematic elements of his/her religion.

If anything, the stance Marwa Sherbini took against Axel W in taking him to court for incitement demonstrates that she had indeed assimilated some of the values that, it is to be presumed, liberals hold dear. She exercised her right to be treated equally within German society and not to be insulted for making a personal choice to wear the hijab. However, what has become undoubtedly true in the current climate is that, despite their call for universalism, many liberals see the freedoms of some as being more worthy of protection than others. Thus, because Islam is seen by many as a religion that denies rights to non-Muslims, whether or not this is the case, those who seek freedom to practice their faith without the risk of insult or constraint should de facto be seen as less equal than others.

It has become a commonplace in liberal circles to decry ‘political correctness’ in relation to race and religion, Muslims in particular, and to claim that a hierarchy of victimhood has led to discrimination faced by other minorities being ignored, a favoured line of the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. Beyond the fact that pitting disadvantaged groups against each other in such a way is entirely counterproductive in the aim of achieving a fairer society, this view tacitly endorses the notion that it is time that some groups were denied full access to their rights. Practicing Muslims in particular are held individually responsible for everything from sexism, homophobia, genital mutilation, forced marriages and honor killings, right up to riots and suicide bombings. Hence, it is only fitting that they are denied equality until such time that they integrate (again, into what it is unclear) or are defeated.

Unfortunately, the knots in which such liberal thinking ties itself are not obvious to the vast numbers of those for whom writers such as British journalist Nick Cohen or Dutch-Somali integrationist Ayaan Hirsi Ali are heroic in their stance against what they see as the onslaught of illiberal Islam. It seems that where Muslims are concerned, it is unnecessary to bring such ‘liberal’ arguments to their logical conclusions and to admit that they are not all as egalitarian as they profess to be. Rather, the rush to pit illiberal Islam against the liberal West will indeed lead to the segregated societies that Muslims in Europe have already been blamed for constructing, if not to a much worse future in which, due to the increasing authoritarianism of western states desperate to crush apparent extremism, liberalism in any form will be but a distant dream.