As someone who devotes much energy to battling Islamophobia, it is important equally to oppose false cries of Islamophobia whenever any Muslim group is thwarted. Otherwise “Islamophobic” will become a meaningless pejorative just as “Anti-semitic” is thrown at any rational critic of Israel.
Having looked at the dispute over Camberley Mosque, I feel that it is the Bengali community which is acting with gross insensitivity. They wish to pull down a listed Victorian building to build a mosque. I would oppose that were the proposed replacement a mosque, synagogue, church or Tesco.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/surrey/8561342.stm
The old scholl has in fact been in use for many years as an Islamic centre. There is no threat to that. It is demolition of the building which is objected to.
It strikes me that the very large and sturdy building looks ideal for sympathetic internal conversion to make it a better mosque. Failing that, the community can do what anybody else has to do whose needs have outgrown a listed building, and move the mosque elsewhere.
I encountered a similar arrogance and insensitivity from some members of the Muslim community while campaigning on Whalley Range in Blackburn, when I was faced with a demand that a pub close to a mosque be closed down. I replied that the pub had been there for over a hundred years before the mosque.
The deliberate spread of fear and hatred of Muslims by politicians, media and security services is a real problem. But what we must insist is that Muslims are treated both no worse and no better than anybody else.
SS
But you did !
Suhayl – the tunes site. I just checked it, it seems to work, but it’s horrible slow to respond. Twiddle your thumbs a bit & it’ll be there. I hope. That’s the http://livetunebook.qualmograph.org.uk one. I just had a look at google, looks as though pointers to the old Leeds uni version are proliferating, which is silly, they should be dying away by now, it’s longgone. Nothing much I can do about it, though.
Want to say more about Michael Scot ? I vaguely know the name – scholar, translator of Arabs, “magician” ? – but not really any details.
Craig…
…well it doesn’t bother me either what they wear or indeed what anybody else does. They can go naked for all I care. The illustration was to indicate one example of an invited guest culture not conforming to the accepted norms of a host. In this case it was taking sensible precautions against the prevailing weather for health reasons.
I guess it also does not bother you that in this Muslim culture it is perfectly normal and indeed in cases mandatory that people marry within families. So what you might say? Well the resulting congenital illnesses of offspring that arise from this end up costing the national health service scarce resources to treat. This would not be required if they accepted the norms that restricted this.
Then there is also polygamy, treating women and children as chattel and the stoning or bashing of homosexuals. I suppose as good hand wringing Liberals you can look away and pretend it’s not happening….
As a non-believer in any organised religion, I am quite happy for anybody to believe what they like except of course when those beliefs influence the accepted cultural norms and laws which have been built up over generations. And if they are going to build a Mosque to go and pray in, at least get on and finish it in a reasonable time.
“well it doesn’t bother me either what they wear”
in spite of coming in complaining about it.
And if anybody picks the next set of points up, you won’t care about those, either, will you ? but there’ll be something else.
Some people just enjoy complaining.
He was probably biting his tongue not mentioning the burqa. I rather like Muslim female atire; to my eyes it looks dignified and mysterious.
(burqa)
It makes me a bit nervous. Of offending, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave around it, I wasn’t brought up to know what’s polite.
“I guess it also does not bother you that in this Muslim culture it is perfectly normal and indeed in cases mandatory that people marry within families. So what you might say? Well the resulting congenital illnesses of offspring that arise from this end up costing the national health service scarce resources to treat. This would not be required if they accepted the norms that restricted this.” Parky.
Parky, I’m sorry but this is really silly. Alcohol-related illness costs the NHS, and society in general, millions of times more than any congenital illnesses that might arise as a consequence of combinant recessive alleles.
80% of all attendances at A and E Depts are alcohol-related. And that’s just one secondary care speciality.
What about fry-ups and heart attacks/ strokes?
Or genito-urinary infections (aka STDs)?
You see, anyone can play this game. Where does one stop?
Look, I do not agree with burqas or hijaabs, nor with partriarchal oppression and I argue against these things in the Muslim/ South Asian communities and elswhere. But please, let’s not attempt to align rational discourse with emotive triggers to prejudice.
Oh, and incidentally, I am not a ‘guest’.
MJ: as I said to anno, try wearing a burkha for a year, every time you leave the house. Nothing to stop you.
Thanks for the suggestion technicolor but I probably won’t, any more than I’d wear a miniskirt and high heels.
Technicolor, you are very wrong about “nothing will stop you”.
My wife wears that, and people try and stop her all the time with fists and insults.
I’m sure MJ and Anno would be beaten up just as much as my wife if they started wearing one.
We are expecting her to be attacked again soon, because these physical attacks follow verbal attacks by MPs, such as Philip Hollobone’s recent attack.
Because the physical attackers see the MPs’ verbal attacks as a declaration of immunity. And these MPs use the views of Hijab hating self labelled Muslims as all the justification they need for their.
incitement.
Suhayl Saadi I have lost any respect I had for you. The next time my wife is beaten up, or I am arrested for protecting her, I’ll think of you.
anno, there is no excuse for this violence.
But I would like to know: why does your wife wear a burkha? Mohammed (pbuh) did not saying anything about a burkha. And Muslim clerics argue against the headscarf, even.
Does she really believe that she needs to be hidden from the world because of her gender? Does she believe that her hair or her face or her arms would inflame men to crazy passions? If so, who has told her these things? They are not true, you know.
And finally, why don’t you wear a burkha?
I mean, if you could wear one without being beaten up. I find it appalling, and terribly sad, it goes without saying, but it doesn’t make me any fonder of burkhas. Or oppression.
By the way, I think Muslim men are, in a way, as oppressed as women in these cases. Who wants to have their babe shut into a black pillar box? Who wants to have their children brought up thinking their mother needs to be hidden?
Please answer! And no need to attack Suhayl, I think.
Arsalan, I’m not “self-hating”, I just have a different view from you. You never come along to support me on these threads when I’m attacking racist or bigoted views but you’re always ready to go OTT at me whenever I say something with which you disagree. I obviously despise anyone who attacks people. That’s not what I’m supporting. For goodness sake!
Sorry, arsalan, of course. You sounded eerily like anno there.
“…as oppressed as women”
Are Muslim women oppressed? Is it because of the rules of dress? I remember hearing Germaine Greer argue quite powerfully that the dress-code is liberating for Muslim women because it releases them from the pressure to appear sexually attractive all the time.
She can argue all she likes but I notice she doesn’t choose to wear one.
Not all women who are Muslim are oppressed. Women living under extremist rules are oppressed.
Assuming the rumours are true and women really do wear things like that out of a wish to be less looked-at, it’s paradoxical, isn’t it ? they become conspicuous by it.
And to be conspicuous is to invite all sorts of pontification concerning a supposed obligation to conform, and the risk of being seen as fair game by anyone who looks at things like that. Having been on the receiving end of that lecture myself, back in the days when growing facial hair was thought to be just asking for the Doc Martins, all I can say is, buggered if I’m going to have opinions on how other people ought to look, I expect to fail the Cultural Conformity Test along with the best (deliberately, if necessary). Quite apart from the whole other can of worms about men having ideas on how women should dress.
A friend of mine, several years back, went back to university and did some actual research. She came out of it saying that most of the people who wear it around here were very clear with her that they were doing it because they wanted to, that was what they preferred. Certainly, I see them laughing with each other while they do their shopping and don’t get the impression they think they’re oppressed.
*shrug* just my ha’penny’s worth, it’s none of my business really.
(sorry posted too early) That’s why I said ‘in these cases’. On the other hand, Ayaan Hirsi Ali considers Islam a repressive religion full stop.
Richard; I found the same with some *young* Muslim women up north (one wonders whether they will still be laughing 30 years later, hope so, of course). Still, they probably do feel they’re doing it by choice. Talk to women from Afghanistan, who were dressing as they wished when the fundamentalists imposed the burka and you find quite a different, and not at all funny, picture.
My wife comes from a country which has been practising Islamic monotheism for 2,500 years. As a mature Islamic society it runs like a well modulated diesel engine, neither revving or stalling. Islam is a work-horse for the human being. Modesty is maintained by male and female in a way that is inconceivable in the UK.
In my view, the burkha is a gift from Allah for us to deal with seriously sick societies like the UK, to protect the personal environment of the Muslims who choose to live here, for whatever reason, from the kind of mind that can vote for a psychopath who invaded two foreign nations illegally in ten years, and who is now preventing our charitable resources from reaching a third, in Palestine.
“Still, they probably do feel they’re doing it by choice”
and I’d want to give it a good hard thinking-about before I was sure I knew their reasons better than they do themselves.
From Camberley to Afghanistan, via Blackburn, 2 separate Whalley Ranges, St. Patrick, Danes and Sheringham. Fantastic … Yes, I get a general impression the people there aren’t much
the better off for having had the rest of the world notice them.
“From Camberley to Afghanistan, via Blackburn”
Digression. Beg pardon, but I can’t resist.
To pick up dreoilin on the norse founding of Dublin … they were all *over* the Irish sea, and points north. I was going to say various things, but then I discovered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse-Gaels which does it better. (“McLeod” runs as a middle name in my family, so I’m particularly amused at the derivation of that).
All it misses is the story (from the Orkney Saga, I think) of the norseman who didn’t want to go and fight at what turned out to be Clontarff. Stupid idea, no good’ll come of it, etc. His mother sent him off anyway, telling him “If I’d realised you expected to live for ever, I’d have raised you up in my wool basket”. Which somehow manages to say an awful lot about peoples’ lives in a very few words. He got killed horribly, of course, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (…and, back to “conformity”).
The whole business has fascinated me ever since I realised it was there. Perhaps because “British history” is told so much from a south-east-facing perspective and I’m a contrary sod – there were all kinds of things going on in places we don’t think of very often.
and that’s before we start on their eastwards-looking Swedish cousins …
“Beg pardon, but I can’t resist”
Stll can’t … “Doc Martins”. Not to be confused with the Dock Martens, which would be a tribe of large sea-going weasels. Aaand, back to the norsemen.
Oh dear. I’m very sorry.
hey Richard; bankers ‘feel’ they are putting a tie on by choice, too. I think the test would be if they decided to choose not to. It is remarkable that no man ‘chooses’ to wear a burkha: although from anno’s account it seems as though he should. Why is that?
And, to repeat, the burkha has nothing to do with being Muslim.
Vikings.
All politicians, and most of us, try to establish a persona of superiority as a platform for their/our often flawed opinions.
Brown’s persona is indigenous Celtic ‘We got here first.’ Yorkshire Muslims often adopt a Viking intruder persona of, ‘Tha’ll tek us as tha find us.’ Many Muslims adopt, ‘ You know the rules better than us, we only just got here.’, but they know how to operate the rules, by heck. Then there is the curious Celtic stance of, ‘Wherever you came from, you obviously didn’t get on with them, or you wouldn’t have come bothering us.’
Blog commenting creates authority from these micro-persona-slices + anecdote and opinion. Wham! End of comment.
I AM your big sister/brother, believe me you are wrong about this.’
‘I am terribly sorry to sound racist, but can you get your foot out of my ribcage, there was plenty of room on this bus before you lot got here.
I just heard Nigel Farrage and Salma Yaqub talking about the burkha. Yes technicolour, as Salma Yaqub rightly pointed out, we are only talking about the burkha so that politicians can distract attention away from the enourmous tension between rich and poor in UK society in this recession. Nothing to do with being Muslim, as you said.
“My wife comes from a country which has been practising Islamic monotheism for 2,500 years”
That’s a clever trick.
Do you mean, all monotheism is ‘Islamic’ ?
technicolour
My beard is my burkha. as such it loses me an awful lot of business in the construction trade of The Sun’s Britain.
I don’t wear shawal chamees, soft cotton shirt and trousers, with numerous longjohns and jerseys, either, except at home of course, because it’s not my national dress. An Englishman can’t wear his pyjamas even in his own house in front of guests. But this too is culture, I find, and in other cultures it signifies ‘Welcome! Relax!’.
Richard Robinson
Technically, yes. Our prophets are the same as those of the Bible, and our universal creed is, ‘ None is worthy of worship, except God. Muhammad is His messenger’, May Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him. This is our universal witness or ‘shahaadah’. Why don’t you come and join us?
You remember from your Gospels the scholars asked Jesus who he was, ‘the Messiah, Elijah come back or the Great Prophet that is to come? peace be upon them all. In the Gospels he is quoted as asking them in return who they thought that he was.
The Great Prophet that is to come, being Muhammad (saw) and the prophecy in the Gospels is this. After I go , will come another, and he will confirm everything that I have said, and make all things clear, and he will speak only what he hears. These are the qualities of the last prophet, peace be upon him. After Jerusalem was invaded by the Romans in 73 A.D. many tribes left for Madinah in Saudia Arabia to wait for the great prophet to come. But some of them were not too happy that he turned out to be an Arab, and so the story goes on….