Interesting commentary by Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph. He points out the very unusual statements made this week by Jack Straw, the former British Foreign Secretary. Straw made a statement about Muslim clothing, stating that he preferred Muslim women remove their veils before speaking to him.
The most interesting thing about Jack Straw's pronouncement on the Muslim veil is that it was made by Jack Straw. No prominent British politician has been more friendly towards Muslims. With 25,000 of them in his Blackburn constituency, he has a clear reason to avoid giving offence.
Whether on big policy issues such as Iran's nuclear bomb, on which he was terribly weak when Foreign Secretary, or on small matters of style, Mr Straw has always stood out for his Islamophilia, and has sometimes been craven towards extremists. When the Danish cartoons of Mohammed were published, he attacked the European papers that reprinted them, not the mobs who burnt the Danish flag. I even have a strong memory – though I have not been able to trace it – of hearing him say "the Prophet Mohammed – Peace Be Upon Him" on the radio.
So when he says that he would rather Muslim women removed their veils when they talk to him, something big is inducing him to speak as he does.
That big thing appears to be a belated realization that there is a war for control of Islam and Britain itself being waged by extremists. One of their main weapons is, of all things, clothing.
Clothes come into this a lot. The case of the Muslim girl from Luton who won her human rights case (lost on appeal) to be permitted to wear the all-embracing jilbab at school was at first presented as a straightforward religious requirement, like a Jew not being able to eat pork. It turned out, though, that the girl was supported by Hizb-u-Tahrir, an organisation so hardline in its promotion of the Islamic overthrow of the secular order that it is banned in some countries. Her victory was threatening not only to the authority of her school, but also to all those Muslim girls (the majority) who did not wear the jilbab, and did not want it to be established as a religious norm.
Many moderate Muslim leaders, such as the Sufi Muslim Council, are worried by extremist infiltration of their communities. So are people of Muslim origin who like Britain because they don't have to live under clerical rule. There is an attempt to "arabise" Muslims from the Indian sub-continent, persuading them to wear clothes that are alien to their culture to show their religious zeal. Yet none of the four Muslim schools of jurisprudence, from which Sunnis derive their law, says that a woman must wear a veil. To tell girls they aren't proper Muslims unless they are veiled is as if the Orange Order were bullying Protestant Englishmen to prove their faith by wearing bowler hats.
For a few Muslim girls in this country, wearing the veil is a form of oppression imposed by their families; for more, it is a form of teenage rebellion, of showing more commitment than their parents – a religious version of wearing a hoodie. In both cases, the veil becomes more than a garment sanctioned by custom: it turns into a hostile statement about the society in which the wearer lives. In Christianity, when a nun "takes the veil", this is a recognised path of religious devotion (though in reality nowadays, she is rarely actually veiled), leaving the world to become a "bride of Christ". The case is different in Islam. The veil is a custom in some Muslim cultures, no more. To encourage it among citizens proposing to live and bring up families in the modern Western world is literally to set one's face against the rest of us.
And that is leading to a fragmentation of British society. A balkanization formed by multiculturalism. The Tories are trying to use that very issue as a wedge. Straw appears to be trying to seize the issue for himself. Read the whole thing, it's quite an interesting take on the situation.
