I doubt that Jim Fitzpatrick meant to create a media storm when he removed himself from a constituent’s wedding last week because he wasn’t allowed to sit next to his wife. It wasn’t the first Muslim wedding the couple have attended, but it was the first with segregation. I am sure that he didn’t mean to cause offence to anyone either. I respect his decision, and admire his courage for taking it. I would like to think in the same circumstances, I would do the same.
It goes beyond the decency that one partner should display towards another, and it transcends the feminist instincts shared by most Labour people. It exposes the dilemmas when British liberals and socialists are faced with customs and attitudes which are anathema, yet which form part of the identity of ‘oppressed’ groups with whom we have sympathy and solidarity. It generates Olympian political gymnastics, and ends up with muddle-headed lefties siding with vicious, gay-hating, totalitarians.
Since the death of ideology, our socialism has been mostly expressed in terms of our values. These might be described as a belief in a pluralist democracy, with civil, political, and economic rights for every citizen; a belief that humans have a potential to be realised, regardless of their race, faith, gender, sexuality, or ability; and a gut reaction against the unfair use of power and privilege. As GDH Cole put it, we are ‘on the side of the underdog’.
But sometimes our values clash; they can have within them a contradiction, because they exist in a hierarchy of importance. It comes down to which of your socialist values you consider more important. Your view that all humans have equal worth, or your reluctance to cause offence? Your solidarity with the victims of racism, or your opposition to ‘boss politics’? The principles which have guided your life’s work, or your parliamentary seat?
Nick Cohen in What’s Left describes the phenomenon of Guardian-reading left-wingers marching alongside misogynist, homophobic, anti-democrat Islamist right-wingers, united in the cause of wanting to keep Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. Lenin’s helpful formula ‘useful idiots’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.
If a Conservative MP suggested women were second-class, that gays were an abomination, or that the Twin Towers were brought down by the CIA and Mossad, it would create a political earthquake off the Richter scale. The Labour party would be united in its condemnation. But if a mainstream Muslim leader made similar comments (for example Iqbal Sacranie saying in 2006 on the BBC that homosexuality is ‘unacceptable’ and civil partnerships ‘harmful’), the reaction might be more muted. Some might tut, few would condemn. Why? Because well-meaning white lefties will perform ideological contortions rather than cause offence, or be denounced as ‘Islamophobic’, a term which is bandied around with the same abandon, alacrity and semiotic precision with which Rik in the Young Ones used the word ‘fascist’.
Islamophobia is defined as an irrational fear of Muslims. If a Muslim cleric says girls should be genitally mutilated for cultural or religious reasons, is it ‘Islamophobic’ to loudly condemn that odious view? No, which is why Labour introduced a new law in 2004 to prevent girls being taken abroad to be sliced up for no good reason. At the time Baroness Scotland, the then home office minister said ‘regardless of cultural background, it is completely unacceptable and should be illegal wherever it takes place.’
The sociologists call it ‘cultural relativism’ – the idea that an individual’s beliefs and activities should be understood via the prism of their own culture. It is best expressed in the idea that we should understand, not judge or condemn, people from other cultures who do things we find abhorrent, because to judge is to be guilty of cultural imperialism.
In our own times, we have seen a host of unpleasant cultural attitudes and practices become unacceptable because of public pressure and government legislation, from spitting in the street to battering children with a leather belt. Within my lifetime (and I am only 41 now) I can remember the following: friends of my parents coming to drinks parties, drinking seven or eight gins or whiskeys, and driving home with their kids on the back seat; use of the words ‘coon’ and ‘darkie’ in the playground (used as descriptors not insults); a game called ‘Jew rush’ which involved throwing a coin in the air, and hordes of kids chasing after it; lighting up a cigarette in the cinema, upstairs on the bus, and in the smoking carriage of a London Underground train. Part of the fascination of programmes such as Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, or Life on Mars, set in the 1970s, is the extent to which cultural attitudes have transformed. In Mad Men, the ad execs drink and smoke their way through the working day, hit their children, make homophobic remarks without thinking, and expect their wives to wait at home for them. None of these activities were considered unusual, until small enlightened groups of often brave people pointed it out.
It is entirely reasonable, based on the evidence, that those sections of Britain’s Muslim communities, or any other religious or ethnic group, whose culture is tainted by medieval prejudice and abuse of power, will change. Gay Muslims will be able to openly practice their faith. Women will be able to lead worship in Mosques. These things will happen, but only if progressive forces within Britain’s Muslim communities are able to thrive, and if the rest of our society stops its cultural appeasement.
Jim Fitzpatrick should take courage from the example of another Labour MP, who once represented the part of the East End of London about three miles north of his Poplar & Caning Town constituency. In 1910, George Lansbury was elected to represent Bow and Bromley. In October 1912 he resigned to fight a by-election in support of votes for women, and in protest to the vicious treatment of suffragette prisoners by the Liberal government. He wrote in his autobiography ‘it was a question on which I felt it was impossible to compromise’. He lost the seat, but placed himself on the right side of decency, progress and equality for women, just like the Fitzpatricks when they walked away from the London Muslim Centre last weekend.
This article was corrected on 21st October 2009.
On the 21st August 2009 Progress published an article titled “It’s time to end the cultural appeasement”. This article suggested that Sir Iqbal Sacranie had never been elected to “anything, not even a parish council”. Sir Iqbal has contacted us through his lawyers, Carter-Ruck, and asked us to point out that in fact he:
“was elected as the founding Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), when it was established in 1997. He was re-elected to the role twice in 2002 and 2003 by the 60 or so elected member making up the Central Working Committee. Under the MCB’s constitution, only elected members of the Central Working Committee can assume the role of Secretary General, so our client had first to be elected to this committee by the General Assembly (consisting of delegates from all the affiliates of the MCB, which is in the region of 500 national, regional and local bodies).
“Sir Iqbal has also been elected to various other positions. By way of example only, he was elected to his position as Chairman of Muslim Aid in 2008, he was elected to the position of Chair of the Executive Committee of Memon Association UK, he was elected to the position of Deputy President of World Memon Organisation, and he was elected to his position as Chair of the Management Committee of Balham Mosque and Tooting Islamic Centre.”
We have amended the article, and would like to apologise to Sir Iqbal Sacranie for the offence caused.