The necessity of free speech - in principle and practice
Writer and broadcaster, Kenan Malik, investigates Islamaphobia and discovers that…
What all this suggests is a huge gap between perception and reality. And it’s a gap that’s exploited by both Muslim leaders and mainstream politicians. For Muslim leaders, inflating the threat of helps consolidate their power base, both within their own communities and within wider society. British Muslims have long looked with envy at the political power wielded by the Jewish community, and by the status accorded to the British Board of Deputies. One of the reasons for setting up the Muslim Council of Britain was to try to emulate the political success of the Board of Deputies. Muslim leaders talk about using Islamophobia in the same way that they perceive Jewish leaders have exploited fears about anti-Semitism.
Exaggerating anti-Muslim prejudice is also useful for mainstream politicians, and especially for a government that has faced such a political battering over the war on Iraq and its anti-terror laws. Being sensitive to Islamophobia allows them to reclaim some of the moral high ground. It also allows Labour politicians to pitch for the Muslim vote. Muslims may feel ‘betrayed’ by the war on Iraq, trade minister Mike O’Brien wrote recently in The Muslim Weekly. But ‘the Labour government are trying to deliver an agenda that has shown consideration and respect for Muslims.’ According to O’Brien ‘Iqbal Sacranie, the General Secretary of the Muslim Council, asked Tony Blair to declare that the Government would introduce a new law banning religious discrimination. Two weeks later, in the middle of his speech to the Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair promised that the next Labour Government would ban religious discrimination. It was a major victory for the Muslim community in Britain.’
Pretending that Muslims have never had it so bad might bolster community leaders and gain votes for politicians, but it does the rest of us, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, no favours at all. The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more open to religious extremism. Muslim leaders constantly warn that Islamophobia is alienating Muslims and pushing many into the hands of extremists. However, it’s not Islamophobia, but the perception that it blights lives, that is often the bigger problem. In making my Channel 4 documentary I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims across the country about their experience of Islamophobia. Everyone believed that police harassment was common though no one had been stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife, though few had been attacked or knew anyone who had.
And he concludes…
These days it is becoming increasingly common for liberals to proclaim free speech is necessary in principle - but also to argue that in practice we should give up that right. Ruminating in the Guardian about the fallout from the Behzti affair, Ian Jack, editor of Granta magazine, suggested that whatever liberals believe in principle, in practice we need to appease religious sensibilities. ‘The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the Prophet’, he pointed out, ‘But I never expect to see such a picture. On the one hand, there is the individual’s right to exhibit or publish one; on the other hand, the immeasurable insult and damage to life and property that the exercise of such a right would cause.’ He added that ‘In this case, we understand that the price is too high - even though we, the faithless, don’t understand the offence.’
John Mortimor has described this as ‘tiptoeing around doing our best not to irritate other people by disagreeing with their opinions’. The irony of this approach is that it actually undermines what is valuable about living in a diverse society. Diversity is important, not in and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. In other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective language of citizenship. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’.
The article is a long one, but deserves to be read. So go read it.
Sunday 29 Jan 2006 | Paul | The Pit
