Saturday, October 31, 2009

The burqa debate continues in France

Several months ago a number of French députés called on Sarkozy’s government to launch a parliamentary enquiry, with a goal to determine the place, if any, that the burqa has in French society. Not so long earlier a Moroccan-born female had been denied French citizenship, on the basis that wearing the head-to-toe all-encompassing Islamic garment put her at severe odds with the values of a fiercely secular society.

The debate on the burqa continues to fan public outcry in the French republic, as the parliamentary enquiry around a subject that hits the core of the French republic: secularism, or laïcité.

France outlawed the wearing of any conspicuous item in the public schooling system in 2004. Education should be secular, and as atheists and humanists have already stated, there is simply no such thing as a Muslim child, a Christian toddler or a Jewish teenager.

Children are indoctrinated first by their parents, and later by official religious teaching. The argument runs: I am a child of Christian parents and I am too young to have made any decision governing my convictions. The argument is without flaw and the lawmakers were judicious in banning religious garment and symbols from the school ground.

Nevertheless, if we put aside woman who are coerced into donning the burqa, which present an altogether alternate set of issues, what about the woman who chooses to do so? Is the French republic so scared of a backwards-looking minority sect that it would introduce legislation to ban it altogether?

There is no place for fear and ignorance in the legislation of the world’s greatest democracies. Prohibition rarely works.

Still, France does have a minority of Salafists, those who follows the pure ways of the earliest descendants of Mohammed. Salafism is the uglier face of ‘them and us’ religion; reactionary, exclusivist and degrading to women. Sects are by name unable to integrate and indeed reject society as a whole. Salafism equates with obscurantism and its spread should be arduously watched for by other nations.

France should not ban the burqa. It should simply take a step back and think about who it is letting into the country. The country with Europe’s largest population of Muslims should acknowledge clearly that the majority of that population are peaceable and originating from northern Africa, where the burqa is equally seen as a sectarian anachronism.

Banning the burqa puts all Muslims in the same pot, when they are clearly as varied as any other faith.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Peshawar

Peshawar is a frontier town, capital of the North West Frontier Provinces (NWFP). The NWFP share much of its western border with the even more syllabic-challengingly named Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a thin strip of terrain nestled among gnarled mountains, and an area over which the Pakistan government holds only nominal control. Peshawar lies close to the fabled Khyber Pass, and the borders of Afghanistan can be reached by car in about one hour.

For readers of newspapers who can no longer follow the almost-daily explosions and attacks ripping apart this part of the world, the latest car bomb three days ago in Peshawar just seems but another event in a long string of lawlessness that undermines Pakistan.

The bomb was shockingly effective. While the dust floats back down onto the street and pavements of Meena Bazaar, there are now over one hundred confirmed casualties and two hundred injured. After a string of attacks in recent weeks as the Pakistani army leads an assault against Taliban militants in the FATA South Waziristan Agency, this city of three million must be living in constant fear.

According to the BBC, Hakimullah Meshud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the car bomb was the work of US and foreign security agencies. Hilary Clinton, in a speech delivered in Lahore, mentioned the women and child victims of the horrific blast. Regardless of age or gender of the dead, and irrespective of the Meshud’s words, the Taliban has to be removed. No serious secularist, here or in Pakistan, can trust the insane fundamentalist ideology of a savage bunch of cowardly murders.

The Taliban must be eradicated. With or without hard evidence to find the instigators of the Peshawar car bomb, the terror has got to stop. It’s going to be a long haul, and that the American Secretary of State pledging US$ 45 million towards higher education in Pakistan, it’s a very small step in the right direction.

Obama has iterated his desire to strengthen relations with a nation that, strategically, remains of vital importance in the region. Let’s just hope not a rupee of that foreign aid goes into the hand of religious teachers, but to secular learning based on humanist principles. The Taliban must be defeated and in the long struggle to do so it’s important that the opposing side worries less about being on the right side of some supernatural god and more about preserving values common to all of humankind.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

'Cos it's true... I do, I do, I do, I do, I do...

ABBA’s lyrics have resonated in another way since I attended Keysar Trad’s talk on polygamy last month at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas here in Sydney. Arriving sodden at the steps of the Opera House one languid and drizzly Saturday morning, I collected my delegate pass and wandered over to the Studio theatre to hear Mr Trad; first speaker of the festival, former interpreter for the outrageously divisive Sheik Taj El-Din Hilaly, and founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

Entitled Polygamy and other Islamic values are good for Australia, it is not within the realm of common sense that Mr Trad felt he would gain acolytes on this occasion. Indeed, the Festival’s organisers might have just been cunning in placing him as the first speaker on the first day, since almost anything with Islam in the title is sure to hasten disparagement and denigration in our irreligious, secular and promiscuous society. With the amount of media vitriol previously directed at Mr Trad, he must also have known he’d walk onto that stage a marked man. Unlikely as it was that a middle-class crowd of Sydneysiders would become openly hostile, question time assured a few heated exchanges.

The premise was as follows: In a society that protects all forms of intimate relations amongst consenting adults (excepting incest), why do we criminalise a branch of those legal relations when a person seeks to make a formal commitment? Such relations are only criminalised if one seeks to formalise them, if not, they are perfectly legal whether as boyfriend(s)/girlfriend(s) or de facto or as casual intimacy, they are only crimes if we make the commitment of a formal partnerships.

Regrettably, the proposed evidence for the argument was, putting it diplomatically, inadmissible.

After a significant swathe of precedents originating almost exclusively from scripture, it was put to us that polygamy should not be ridiculed as long as prostitution exists in the West. It’s tedious and tiresome to hear the holy texts quoted, and scant credence can be given to the claim that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Who believes that? And should the early Jews, Christians, Muslims or followers of any other faith have practised polygamy a millennium ago, that is hardly logical reasoning to continue any cultural tradition. As to prostitution, no civilisation worth its mettle has not had sex-industry workers toiling for the greater good alongside its politicians, scholars, scientists and artists.

Metering out anecdote and personal opinion does not constitute a sound method by which to influence and persuade. And for the majority among us, holy texts are anthologies of the fantastical, the fabulous, and the simply untrue.

As for "societies that practise monogamy and clandestine relations", they are demonstrably not, as Mr Trad, put it,"delusional." Monogamy is certainly not a perfect modus operandi for all. It is a manner in which millions of people with different beliefs and values take on, for better or for worse, with or without official sanction of the church, temple or mosque. Besides, a single fertile male and a single fertile female are the minimum ingredients required to procreate; if begetting children was the sole reason for our existence, mathematically two provides less relationship permutations that three, four and more. Further, no proof was offered that infidelity is less present in polygamous than monogamous relations. Why complicate the recipe by adding unwanted complexity into the mixture? Keep it simple.

After attempting to explain the shortcoming for one-on-one liaisons, we learn that Mohammed came upon the solution: polygyny. Quite naturally, the audience must’ve felt duped. Polgyny, the act of a male entering into conjugal relationships with more than one woman, was the only real thing on offer here. Its counteroffer, polyandry, where a woman possesses more than one husband, was not on the agenda. The reason for this? Scripture. More like bollocks. Further, apparently there are medical reasons that women should be disallowed from entering into polygamous relationships. What they might be, well, we weren’t to discover.

There are too many educated, independent and free-thinking women in today’s society to really bother any further with the remainder of Mr Trad’s speech. It was supposed to be a dangerous topic, however, inanity wasn’t what the audience had looked forward to. Well, maybe just a little.

As Mr Trad dug himself a deeper hole with the shovels of illogical anachronism and ancient mythology, he didn’t seem too bothered. Digging a small trench along the way, he even suggested the sexual proclivities of men predispose them to polygamy, and that women lose their libido if left to languish in monogamy. You had to wonder if the man remembered that question and answer time would inevitably follow.

But it should be stated: there is a sound, ethical argument for polygamy. Better still, polyamory, having a number of sexual partners at the same time, appears the egalitarian and just path down which to stroll. There might just be enough love to go around, without anyone belonging to another by law.

Keysar Trad's full speech is here: Supporting the right of women to choose

[It's worth noting, Keysar Trad is no fire-breathing monster. There are certainly attempts in the Australian media to cast the man as totally objectionable and offensive, which often detract from what he actually says. His ideas are more nonsensical than offensive, and it doesn't pay the smug, the highly literate and the University-educated to denigrate him. In public he has a warm smile and is approachable. He does believe what he puts forward, and since very few of us would show the courage to stand by our convictions under such scrutiny, I'll at least give him the benefit of an open mind. Even if I did have the odd wry smile myself during his speech. Vive la difference, I guess - just don't elect the man into office.]

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Moving forward

It's been a full eight months since I last wrote anything on this site.

Partly due to laziness and partly owing to my unexpected and unsatisfactory re-insertion into Western society, I've found time, patience and motivation wanting as I passed weeks and then months back in the corporate world, replete with mistruths, amoral hyperbole, mind-crushing conservatism and a sycophantic, uninspiring and delusional desire for social status.Frankly, if it weren't for my friends, I would certainly have gone off the rails by now. And there is certainly a small group of my acquaintances that has undoubtedly come to the conclusion that I have veritably digressed from the path of social inclusion, to a shady world where my loud opinions promise a life of misery and exclusion. I have a sneaking suspicion that my current path, while allowing me once more to sleep soundly at night, is forever making me incompatible with living in general, polite society.

You see, I've just about had it with the values and concerns of the place I presently call home. However, I know the problem to be me, and not the society I'm living. It's just not possible that everyone else is wrong. If the majority of people wake up five days a week, don suit, shirt and tie and head into an office to work an inordinate number of hours, I am not here to decry it. My dissatisfaction with my own life is entirely my own doing, and I am to blame for letting it get so out of control that I almost sunk permanently into a deep well of delusion.

I'm disgusted with myself; that I didn't have the courage to speak out sooner and face my fears. That I sold my sold to a devil I don't even believe in. It genuinely pains me that after four years where I had the fortitude to do what I want and construct a life that was moral and worthy of living, I gratified myself with the trap of Western work life.

None of it counts for anything. I see unhappiness wherever a person's goals direct only his ascent up the ladder of social acceptance. Misery behind hundreds of thousands of closed doors, houses in which inhabitants lead a life of self-absorption and slow suicide, where people venerate illusion and sweep anything that might hint at truth or visceral emotion under carpet, forever held down by upholstered Chesterfields and giant plasma screens bleating the latest garbage masquerading as newsworthy events.

It feels good to breathe again.