Segregated Seating
I enjoyed this article by David Aaronovitch in The Times the other week - which goes to show that standing up to tyranny can sometimes involve just small acts of courage - and and a refusal to browbeaten by religious demagogues.
This pandering to religion can only harm us
By David AaronovitchGender segregation at a small meeting at a British university tells a larger story – of a line we must never cross.
Here is a thing, and a bad thing at that. Last weekend University College London was the venue for a public debate entitled: “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?” The debatees were a godless American scientist and a pious Muslim convert whose outfit, the Islamic Education and Research Academy (or iERA) had organised the debate.
When people arrived at the doors of the large lecture theatre where the debate was to be held, they were then directed either to enter at the Ladies’ or the Gentlemen’s entrances. Inside iERA had arranged for there to be an area for men only, an area for women only and one which was to be “mixed”. Three young male students who attempted to sit in the women-only area were removed by security at the behest of the organisers and were allowed back in only when the scientist absolutely refused to debate until the gender segregation was abandoned.
Had it not been for the furious tweeting of Richard Dawkins I doubt whether I would have heard of this event. I wouldn’t have read the statement of UCL saying that it had specified that there could be no segregation at this debate or any other, and that iERA could go elsewhere for its meetings in future, or indeed have found out that gender-segregated meetings and events are taking place fairly regularly on British campuses.
To most of us over the age of 40 the word “segregation” has horrid associations. My immediate and visceral reaction to the UCL story was to wonder what people would say if we instituted blacks-only, Jews-only, gingers-only, Catholics-only, Liberal Democrats-only seating and entrances for public events. I long for the day when we don’t “segregate” home and away fans at football grounds.
The reaction of iERA and not a few other Muslims was to denounce UCL for anti-Muslim prejudice. “We urge UCL to see sense and rescind this extremist Islamophobic action immediately,” said an iERA officer. He continued, lamenting that “Britain was once a place of freedom. Normalised Islamic practices are now deemed as being against British cultural values”.
His argument at least was relatively clear. Customs observed in certain Muslim homes and events were now to be equally observable in public events. What happens in the mosque no longer stays in the mosque. Pretty quickly, however, this clarity was hidden under an accreted film of plausible nonsense. Did not white British liberals allow segregated public toilets, sports, prisons, schools and hospital wards? Could not women ask for women doctors without being reproached? Then why just Muslim women who just want to sit apart?
And what’s it to you or to me, anyway, if the Muslim women prefer it? So maybe you can’t sit exactly where you want, but what kind of man demands to sit among women who don’t want him there? The kind of man (they imply) who is halfway to being a flasher or a frotteur.
One male Muslim explained that it was somehow more “modest” for women to sit apart, as though debate attenders become sexually inflamed by a sitting proximity (they don’t, of course account for how gays and lesbians are to cope with the inevitable engorgement of being sat among their own sexes. Probably by being stoned to death). A Muslim woman at the meeting described anti-segregation students as acting with “indecency”.
Finally the accusation was levelled at those opposing segregation that they were, in effect, excluding orthodox Muslim women from debate since the latter could not attend non-segregated meetings.
This is what psychoanalysts call “violent innocence”. I recall it from the days when South African apartheid was still a matter of debate for some people. It is hard to recall them now, but you could discover apologists for “separate development” on any letters page and in even some editorials. It’s natural. White and blacks prefer to live separately. This big country for the whites, and these lovely little Bantustans for the childlike blacks. And you always find someone suitably black to say yes indeed, that was what they wanted, thank you very much.
And it never means separate but equal. It always means the white or the man is the boss. That’s why in orthodox synagogues the women (including the grandmas) are upstairs and the men (including the adolescents) are in the stalls. That’s why at UCL the women-only area was towards the back. That’s why at other Islamic events held in British colleges the men ask questions directly and the women have to write them down on a piece of paper.
That’s why, hilariously, on its own website iERA lists its speakers for debates, showing photos of the men and blank shapes standing in for the faces of the women. And doesn’t anyone who thinks about it for more than a nanosecond realise that the obedient “modesty” of some women — even if voluntary — is used by the big beards as a way of coercing others to conform?
I imagine that my anger at this two-fingers-up to secular sensibilities is shared by many. And that may be exactly the objective. Because either people such as iERA demonstrate a lead-lined insensitivity to British cultural sensitivity or they’re actually looking for a fight. The organisation itself seems to be led by men who are on the Islamic far right and who don’t much care for Jews, infidels, liberals or secular society.
But they don’t speak for most Muslims. This week the “Tell Mama” project reported on the large number of attacks, verbal and physical, carried out against British Muslims, especially women. Mosques are desecrated and sensibilities grossly offended. Islamophobia is a genuine problem. I believe organisations such as iERA would be quite happy if there was more of it.
Bending over too far to show that they are wrong, however, presents its own dangers. Our secular state is what guarantees the rights of religious minorities and of the unreligious. Already, however, we permit endless privileges for the religious that, say, the political may not enjoy. We allow non-medical circumcision, halal butchery, internal discrimination against women and gay people. We encourage religious schools where we wouldn’t permit political ones.
Most of this, I think, is acceptable. But in the name of religion, as the case of Lord Ahmed (reported elsewhere in this paper) illustrates, we have also begun to tolerate the absurd and the downright harmful. If his lordship had been an atheist from Penzance he’d have been an ex-Labour peer years ago.
There are lines that we cannot allow ourselves to cross. A small meeting in a London college tells us where one of the most important of those lines is to be found.
