On the same day 37 years ago today, I went on my first march for women’s liberation in central London. We demanded an end to discrimination in education and the workplace, as well as contraception, abortion and nursery places for all who needed them. We protested about the demeaning way women were presented by various media and we challenged the ideology that women were responsible for the hateful way we were perceived and portrayed and for the sexual harrassment and violence visited upon us. 38 years ago, if I’d looked this far into the future, I would have expected International Women’s Day 2010 to be a day of celebration.

This post isn’t going to be an analysis of the successes and failures of the women’s movement. Suffice to say that I feel as if I live in a very different world nowadays to the one of my childhood — a world where so many people thought it was a waste of time for girls to get A’ levels, never mind go to university; a world where girls were told to aspire to marriage for “security” and to “give the children a name”; a world where women who reported sex crimes to the police came away feeling as if they were the criminals.

Undoubtedly, the bit of the world that I inhabit is a better place for women nowadays and the credit ultimately lies with all of us who’ve embraced the liberal and democractic values that are the legacy of the Enlightenment. However, that the world is still an agonisingly brutal and barbaric place for women the world over puts a dampener on things. And the absolute pits is that so many women living in liberal democracies — and benefitting from the reforms we fought for and won on their behalf — are kowtowing to a pernicious ideology that denies women our humanity and autonomy: the ideology that says ‘honour is between the the legs of women’* and we should cover ourselves from head to foot so that men can control their dicks.

Because — let’s be honest — that’s all it’s about. In the eyes of misogynists, women exist to serve men and fulfil a primarily sexual function. Women need to be cowed and controlled. Making them feel vulnerable and ashamed (or just beating the crap out of them) if they’re not covered up is but one way to do it.

A commenter on one of my previous blogs, who calls himself “Kope”, invited me to look at his blog and read how “Islam will win the clash of civilization”. There he sums up the ancient spiritual wisdom of his worldview very succinctly:

Women must take responsibility for their dress standards.
Dress like sluts, get treated like sluts. Its only natural.

To me the hijab represents the biggest symbol of women’s oppression and the most hateful insult to every woman who has struggled for justice and equality in the developed world. I initially assumed the news that Tower Hamlets were planning to build some great monstrosity of a hijab-shaped arch at the end of Brick Lane was a tasteless wind-up — some April fool story I’d missed at the time, perhaps. Alas, it was for real and I express my heartfelt thanks to every one of the 158 residents of the borough who objected. Whatever were those morons on the council thinking??

Naturally, there are varying degrees of loathesomeness in respect of this garment. I recall a Saudi student of mine who, while she was in London, wore the smallest headscarf she could get away with. She would have loved not to wear one at all, she said, but didn’t dare. That’s one end of the loathesomeness spectrum. Women wearing headscarves have become a familiar sight but I still hate to see the bloody things just because of what they represent — and I don’t mean the commitment to Islam, I mean the obsequious deference to misogyny. At the other end of the spectrum are the full-face veils and long robes she had to wear back home in Saudi, the like of which I never saw on the streets of London when I was a child but which are now almost commonplace. For crying out loud, they even brought out a burkha-wearing Barbie doll!

Let me just say that I am not concerned with what the Qu’ran says or how Muslims interpret it. Any argument that women should cover themselves up because that’s what it says in some old book is going to be lost on an atheist like me, especially when a high profile Muslim like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is so comprehensive in her condemnation of the veil.  (Edit: See also Saira Khan in the Daily Fail, Why I, as a British Muslim woman, want the burkha banned…) As far as I’m concerned, if God expected women to cover themselve up, he wouldn’t have made sunlight so important for the production of vitamin D. I have Muslim friends and not one wears the hijab. Well, if they did, they wouldn’t be my friends. I don’t want to be friends with people who celebrate what I have agonised over and fought against all my life.

Nuzhat Ahmed on wife swap

Just as any religious argument will be lost on me, I know my own argument will be lost on many hijab wearers reading this. Some of them have never even engaged their brain long enough to question the wearing of these odious garments for religious reasons; they do so because they’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood. Raising a child to believe that they must hide their hair, let alone their face, to be sure of avoiding “hellfire” is, in my opinion, a form of abuse. Yet that is what is happening in Muslim schools in Britain today, if the one featured on the Channel 4 TV series last year is anything to go by.

Then there was that episode of Wife Swap when the hijab-wearing mother, Nuzhat Ahmed, confessed that, yes, her  hijab was hot but “hell is hotter”. For shame!

I managed a smile for the camera

By the way, in keeping with my open-minded approach to life, I prefer to conduct empirical research and, to prove it, here’s a photo of me wearing a niqab purchased for a fiver on ebay together with the note I made when I first tried it on:

“As every specs wearer knows, seeing the frames of your glasses as you peer through them is something you get used to. I guess it would be the same for looking out from behind a niqab. At the moment everything has a thick black frame and it’s bugging the hell out of me. But the worst thing is not being able to breathe freely. I’m suffocating. And I can’t wear my glasses because they keep getting steamed up. I’ve been wearing it a mere 15 minutes and already I have a headache. It’s coming off.”

But — hey! — you can get used to anything, right?

For many hijab wearers in liberal democracies, hijab has become the badge of the club they belong to; a way to distinguish themselves and each other from members of other tribes. Just what we need in a multicultural society — let’s emphasise our differences, why don’t we?

Ed Hussain’s book, The Islamist, is illuminating:

To packed halls we brought speakers from different Islamist groups who explained why women must cover their hair, be different from non-Muslim women, and earn God’s approval. At the time there were a handful of young Muslim women at college who wore the hijab. This commanded my full support, but questions from teachers, and sometimes students, made the practice increasingly confrontational. We put pressure on unveiled Muslim women to join the ‘sisters’ who wore the hijab or risk being seen as un-Islamic rather than practising, proud Muslims. The resultant upsurge of hijab wearing took even us by surprise as scores of fashionable free-fllowing hairstyles disappeared from view.

…The sisters who wore the hijab put their mothers and older siblings to shame — the fact that young, educated, confident women at Tower Hamlets College wore the hijab sent a message to the wider community. They saw our sisters on buses, on the roads and at weddings, and slowly the hijab became a symbol of defiance of Western values and of a return to Islam.

And some of those sisters may even delude themselves that, as long as they are covered up, they won’t arouse the interest or star in the gross fantasies of men they don’t fancy. Let Ed Hussain disillusion you:

If the hijab was supposed to make a woman less attractive, then it clearly had not worked. Several society members commented to me that the women looked extraordinarily feminine and more desirable in the scarf than without. I shared that sentiment, but dared not express it.

…The craving to unclothe the excessively clothed was cruel.

Not that those hijab-wearers whose faces are unveiled but who wear a bucketload of make-up will be unaware of the effect the mixed message might be having but, in fairness, not all hijab wearers go around looking like that. At least some are consistent and go easy on the slap (and the beautiful ones look beautiful in spite of wearing hijab and the plain ones look plainer because of it — just my opinion).

Ask a lot of young women why they wear hijab and they will give an answer similar to a commenter on another blog of mine, who posted from Egypt.

I want to explain why we do wear that (Niqab)
First of all,I wear it as god demanded me
More over,you may noticed those who were niqab more than others ,but you didn’t any of their body details
as they didn’t expose them except for their husbands,not by force,but by love.
Women quality ;as no one can deny;is by her thoughts,beliefs and spirit.Not by her body.So what disturbs any body whether to see her body or not?!
when i am married ,i feel that no one has the right to see my beauty but him(and of course my father brother and those who don’t ever marry me)

In a nutshell, if women cover up, they will be judged on what they say and do, rather than on their looks. A woman’s beauty should be a gift of love to her husband. I suppose the same goes for a woman’s ugliness.

In other words, men are in thrall to their animal natures and can’t see past what women look like and it is women’s responsibility to protect men from themselves because asking them nicely not to rape us won’t work — they can’t help themselves, poor bastards. All of which might have been convincing had I lived in some earlier century before the shameless unveiled women of the world had gained the success, power and respect that so many have today.

Another deadly weapon in the hijab-defender’s armoury is to point to the dark side, the negative consequences of Western sex-obsessed culture. I can’t be bothered to list these — suffice to say I agree there is a dark side to Western sex-obsessed culture. That kind of even things up a bit, doesn’t it? But it’s a bit like homeopaths who defend the worthlessness of homeopathy by pointing to the problems of conventional medicine. The ugly side of my culture doesn’t make the ugly side of your culture — whether it be ‘honour killings’, genital mutilation, executing rape victims or any of the other atrocities committed against women for no good reason — any less ugly. Prostitution, it seems, takes place everywhere.  But at least we don’t flog or execute our prostitutes.

Nor would I defend the raunchy dress and behaviour some young women adopt solely for the purpose of pleasing men but, as this tends to be a phase young girls grow out of, the suggestion that it typifies Western culture is just daft. Most women, young or old, don’t dress or behave like that but hijab-defending male commentators on Western culture seem oblivous to that fact, preferring instead to perve over pictures of naked female flesh and proclaim the superiority of a culture that would rather have women suffocating in hideous shrouds. Kope, whom I mentioned earlier, has helpfully provided plenty of pictures of nubile young women in various states of undress on his website, in order to illustrate “how Islam will win the clash of civilizations”. Here’s a typical caption:

The  judeo-christian’s sodomites half naked on the beach because of christian’s god does not require dress code for women and men

It’s not clear how he thinks those pictures demonstrate the greater glory of Islam but so what? At least he gets to have a wank.

One final thing: in case, you think I’m building up to calling for a ban on the burkha in Britain, I’ll end by disabusing you of that notion. I agree with Andrew Copson on this one. I don’t defend liberal values one minute only to flush them down the pan the next. Even though it is repressive, divisive, insulting and intimidating, I would defend to their death the right of these women to flaunt their vicimtisation in any way they choose.

Just don’t expect me to get used to it.

*’Honour is between the legs of women’ is a chapter title from Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s, Does God Hate Women? — a book I possess but have so far found too horrific to read.

the oldest freethought community in the world. It was founded in 1793 as a dissenting congregation and for more than two centuries has been a focus for serious discussion of basic ethical principles. By 1888 SPES had rejected the existence of God and became an Ethical Society, the only one which now survives. SPES is now an educational charity and maintains a proud tradition of free enquiry in all areas of thought and action.

So it was a bit of a surprise and actually quite alarming to arrive there on a hot summer evening and find a number of women shrouded from head to foot in black being shepherded upstairs by men who were dressed a good deal more comfortably.

I can think of three possible reasons why women would be dressed like that in the Conway Hall in the heat of summer:

She might have been there

1. They are mentally ill;

2. They are forced to dress like that by their boorish and tyranical menfolk;

3. They choose to dress like that as a political statement.

I’m guessing that the third of these options is the one they’d tick themselves though, in reality, I wouldn’t rule out a combination of all three. To be fair, not all the women there were wearing the niqab. With some of them, you could actually see their noses and mouths. Risky! I’m surprised they didn’t get raped. To be honest, the sight of these ninja sisters openly flaunting just how oppressed they are made my blood boil but even so I’m guessing that I wasn’t as uncomfortably hot as they were.

They were there to attend an event entitled The Great Debate: Sharia Law v British Law. It was to feature radical psuedo-Cockney Islamist, Anjem Choudary — a thoroughly nasty piece of work who defends the murder of people who don’t see things his way thus:

At the end of the day, when we say “innocent people” we mean “Muslims”. As far as non-Muslims are concerned, they have not accepted Islam. As far as we are concerned, that is a crime against God.

The above quote was lifted from a BBC TV interview about the 7/7 bombers who murdered 52 people in London, included several Muslims.

Opposing him was to be the rabid neo-conservative Douglas Murray, whose talent for hyperbole often makes him an entertaining read, if one hard to take seriously e.g.

Our cowed police appear to have become little more than the militant wing of The Guardian.

( Laughing my arse off at that but I bet Ian Tomlinson‘s grieving family aren’t.)

I’d arrived early for my own meeting so I killed time watching the ninja weirdos flitting about the foyer and up and down the stairs and it struck me how they were so much more visible than anyone else there. I suppose the point of dressing bizarrely is to attract attention to oneself but it doesn’t sit very comfortably with the notion of modesty, as I understand it. It’s those of us who dress to blend in with the crowd who are the truly modest ones, girlies, so shame on you.

I noticed, from my vantage point halfway up stairs, that down in the foyer there was some commotion starting: a crowd was forming around South Place Ethical Society Chairman, Giles Enders, and voices were being raised. Islamists shouting and being confrontational? Surely not! The next thing we’ll have Giles telling us they made death threats. Anyway, my meeting in the upstairs library was about to start, so I left them to it.

Settled with some fifty others into the library,  the shouting from outside the room seemed to get louder and louder. In fact, it sounded like very loud chanting in unison. I wondered if in fact their debate was about to start and they were just kicking off with some weird religious ritual. Whatever it was, it was bloody noisy.

Our speaker was the heroic human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, speaking on Multiculturalism and the Subversion of Human Rights. I’m sure the irony of his topic wasn’t lost on any of us and I’ve made notes for a post on it some time.

It wasn’t long before Giles Enders knocked on the door of our room and asked permission for police officers to enter so they could “survey the demonstration going on outside” from the library balcony. The police had been called because he had “refused to respect their segregation of women” and the Islamist brothers didn’t like it.  And, yes, he had received death threats.

When it comes to utterly bizarre and moronic religious or cultural practices, it can sometimes take a long time for the penny to drop with me.

Islamists having hissy fits

Until that point, it hadn’t seriously occurred to me that the Islamist stewards had been ushering the ninja sisters and other women upstairs because they thought they could practise Sharia in our Humanist Centre and reserve the seating in the main hall for the men and the smaller space in the upstairs gallery for the women.

Presumably there was some objection to this segregation from people who wanted to attend the debate but who didn’t consider themselves bound by Sharia and wanted to sit wherever they chose. As Giles wasn’t about to squander the liberal, freethinking, humanist heritage of the building (and this country) by giving in to the lunatic demands of a bunch of bigoted religious fanatics, he cancelled the debate and the fanatics threw their toys out of the pram and stood outside shouting for over an hour before dispersing.

Giles has since given this account to the New Humanist magazine website:

These thuggish bouncers wouldn’t allow anyone in, so I said we would call the police. But the police took forever to come, so in the end I had to send our maintenance man across to the police station to get them. It became extremely aggressive in the foyer – somebody got hurt and was bleeding. I said to the bouncers that I run this bloody hall and what I say goes and they pushed me away. They wouldn’t even allow me in the hall, so I went round the side way and got on the stage, and made an announcement through the mic that the meeting was not to take place. After I said this I stood on the stage with all the chanting mob screaming at me in Arabic, and pointing fingers like guns at me. Then they then cut the mic I was using, as one of their people was operating the sound control box. Then the main speaker [Choudary] got hold of a radio mic and started shouting in Arabic. So I grappled that off him, and then I sat on the stage.

Was the whole thing engineered by the Islamists as a publicity stunt? Possibly. I did wonder what exactly was the purpose of this debate (as I wonder about the purpose of many public debates). It’s a pretty safe bet that the only people attending would be people who felt passionately for one side or the other (and from where I was looking, I’d say one side outnumbered the other by at least twenty to one) and none of these people were going to have their minds changed that evening or any time soon.

Did Douglas Murray agree to participate because he thought it would be fun? Because he thinks it an essential part of his work as Director of the misnamed Centre of Social Cohesion to participate in confrontational debates about Islamism with people from the opposite end of the spectrum? Because he thought his report on it would make an entertaining read?

No. According to this report on The Independent newspaper’s website, Murray agreed to take part because “(Choudary’s) opinions have to be countered”. Ah, that explains it. Naturally I wish him all the luck in the world in countering the views of an extremist Islamist in a room packed with his devoted followers.

At least the same report makes the reason for Choudary’s participation a bit clearer:

Mr Choudary intends to re-launch Al Muhajiroun at a debate entitled “Sharia Law vs British Law” between himself and the Centre for Social Cohesion think-tank, which is being adjudicated by the Global Issues Society.

So that’s it. The debate was basically a front for a re-launch party for Al Muhajiroun, a group that wants Britain to become an Islamic state and which was banned by the British government in 2005 for its glorification of terrorism. Perhaps they thought a party on its own wouldn’t generate as much publicity or, indeed, any publicity seeing as no respectable building would’ve let them hire a hall if they’d been upfront about their purpose. Or perhaps they intended to kidnap Douglas Murray and behead him. Who knows?

One charming website puts it this way,

Purpose of Debate

The purpose of this debate is ultimately for the truth to prevail and for the falsehood to vanquish, and we hope that by this illuminating discussion the British public will experience the superiority of al-Islam over that of the British Law.

As most of the British public neither knew nor cared about this debate and would be unlikely to want to watch it on youtube, one can only marvel at what kind of fucked-up brain produced that particular piece of reasoning. Nevertheless, the idea of the British public experiencing the “superiority of al-Islam” at an event taking place at the Humanist Centre is so deliciously ironic, I almost wish it would happen. Given their obduracy over the relatively small matter of seating arrangements and the hissy-fit they threw when they didn’t get their own way, I wouldn’t rate their chances of winning over the hearts and minds of the British public on anything else.

Here’s a report from the National Secular Society: Misogynist Islamist group forced to leave Conway Hall.

From the New Humanist blogspot: Battle of Conway Hall

And from The Guardian newspaper: Douglas Murray on why we must debate the extremists

And finally, also from The Guardian: Islamist Al-Muhajiroun relaunch ends in chaos over segregation attempt.

Outside, Choudary criticised British society as “dirty” and predicted that, within one or two decades, Muslims would make up the majority. Asked why, if society was so bad, he was living here, he said: “We come here to civilise people, get them to come out of the darkness and injustice into the beauty of Islam.”

Charmed, I’m sure.

Related post by Skepticat:

No Sharia: One Law for All