'ISLAMAPHOBIA' AND THE LEFT REVISITED
It is now several years since I wrote 'Islamaphobia And The Left' and as the ideas expressed in it seem if anything even more pertinent today. I am now reproducing it here, with some minor editorial changes. Needless to say, I welcome any comments, just click on comments.
Islamaphobia And The Left.
I was fortunate enough to come of age politically in the late 60’s and early 1970’s, influenced by the likes of Orwell, AJP Taylor and Michael Foot; in short by the tradition of anti-Communist Democratic Socialism. I associated with the left of the Labour Party. In those days it was still possible to call yourself a socialist and be active in a branch of the Labour Party that owed a little more to Marx that to Methodism.
To be on the left was to be with the tide of history, was to stand with universal values, equality, freedom of speech, sexual freedom, feminism, freedom of discourse and anti-totalitarianism. Solidarity represented the primary tool of this struggle.
Those coming of age a little over a decade later entered a very different world, the world of compartmentalised and competing communities, a strange world of the highly codified and yet constantly shifting language of political correctness. A world dominated by the hideous spectres of the big ‘isms’ and phobias.
I can still remember the fearfully claustrophobic phenomenon of compulsory ‘race awareness’ training. In anaemic training rooms being ponderously informed, sometimes with a considerable touch of venom, that only white people were capable of racism. (It would be instructive to explain this now to the people of Darfur; those that are still left alive that is). In such ‘workshops’ largely well meaning middle-class women took onto their shoulders responsibility for slavery, the evils of the British Empire and the Irish Potato famine.
If you were to stand upright in such a ferocious wind you had better quickly establish your victim status. Thus to be white was bad, though could be offset by being gay or disabled, to be a lesbian was even better; the important thing was to establish ones bona fide as a repressed minority. Thus being half Irish with a disability I had some cover.
Theoretically at least to be a proletarian was a plus, however only if you had been completely gutted of every nasty ‘Ism’ or phobia. In practice, the white working class were distrusted and even despised as being too contaminated with a variety of unpleasant ‘Isms,’ phobias and prejudices.
All of this took place against the background of a burgeoning ‘multi culturalism,’ society being constantly split into ever more ‘separate but equal’ communities. Here the Gay Action Group, the Bangladeshi Woman’s Centre, or Somalia Support Agency. This increased atomisation was to have serious consequences for social cohesion only now being fully appreciated.
Islam as an entity came late to the table. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, it became suddenly very useful to present Islam as a persecuted religion, the subject of a particularly heinous prejudice; Islamaphobia was born.
Ignoring the more than two decades in which the indigenous community had accommodated, with it is true some tensions, the needs of a minority religion, in some cases transforming whole areas of cities like Bradford. Every slight, real or imagined was presented as the product of a wicked ‘Islamaphobia.’
It is as well here to confess that I, like many of the old left, am hostile to religious belief, in particular, the three dominant monotheisms. Having been born in Belfast I have felt a particular abhorrence for the dogmas of Christianity. As a long standing supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people, I have also been repelled by the racist fanaticism that seems to infect Judaism. The left I belonged to rejected superstition and irrationality, the absurd claims of religion.
However, since the Salmon Rushdie affair, it has been the steady assault of an aggressively assertive Islam that has provided the greatest threat to secular liberal values. Under the protective cloak of Islamaphobia ever more aggressive demands have been made of a liberal secular culture, from a primary school assistant’s insistence upon her right to go hooded in the classroom to a demand that some aspects of Sharia law be integrated into the legal system, This is not the responses of a persecuted and besieged religion but a manifestation of a growing confidence and willingness to take on secular principles.
All this came against the background of a growing terrorist threat emerging from within the Muslim community. However in the wake of the 7th July attacks in London significant voices from within the Muslim community presented themselves as the true victims of these attacks, often expressing themselves in grotesquely self-pitying tones. Of course, this does not mean that here has not been hostility toward the Muslim community, though in the light of 7/7 far less than might have been expected. For such acts of threats and intimidation that have occurred current law provides sufficient redress.
Against the attacks on secular principles the left has not only failed to defend secular values but in some instances have joined in the assault. Thus we have the idiot ‘comedian’ Mark Steele describing women who take objection to the imposition of the Burka as ‘so-called feminists,’ such objections you see representing something called cultural imperialism. Such useful idiots of the Trotskyite left have thus sought in this way to gain ‘respect’ within the Muslim community as a means to gain some political leverage.
Well, I guess what do you expect from the bottomless well of opportunism and stupidity that is the SWP, [1] however others who should know better have either remained silent or produced weasel words of appeasement.
Thus the ever present threat of the dreaded Islamaphobic tag has proved highly effective in silencing critics of the secular left. It is also interesting to note the increasing media trepidation in presenting criticisms of Islam. Certainly on one level, this is understandable, the BBC and CNN did not reproduce the Danish cartoons out of any particular concern for religious sensibility[2] but out of a desire not to see members of its staff assaulted or even murdered by Islamic fanatics. Such now is the nature of the dialogue we have entered into.
There was once an anti-totalitarian left which took for granted the defence of the legacy of the enlightenment, which believed in the universal values of free speech and the equality of the sexes, which stood up against religious superstition in favour of rationality and reason. It seems now largely to have gone [1].
Now anyone who values freedom of speech, rationality and a vibrant community of ideas must face a question that cannot be ducked, either we make a stand against the growing tide of religious, particularly Muslim, fundamentalism and clerical bullying or slowly surrender liberal values and enter a new age characterised by increasing censorship and illiberalism.
[1] I exempt the commendable creation of the Euston Manifesto to which I am a signatory as well as such individuals as Nick Cohen.
[1] The Socialist Workers Party.
[2] Though often presented as such, few indeed admit to being motivated by fear. See http://alextalbot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/mr-o-briains-moral-high-ground.html
