Maryam Namazie: What is the nature
of the recent sex segregation scandal at Universities UK
where the representative body issued guidance saying
side by side sex segregation was permissible? Why does
it occur and by whom is it imposed? Also, it’s more than
just a question of physical separation isn’t it?
Marieme Helie Lucas: Just like
with the niqab, it’s an extreme-Right political
organisation working under the cover of religion to
promote sex segregation as a pawn in the political
landscape and using all possible means to make itself
visible and impose its mores and laws. The idea is to
permanently demonstrate that the law of god (as
interpreted by them) supersedes the law of the people.
It is a blatant attack on the very principle of
democracy and one woman/man, one vote, particularly
relevant in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela's death.
The UK has laws for gender equity;
therefore, the government should be clear that these
laws are the only ones applicable in the UK. However we
know that this is not the case as it has already
accepted a parallel legal system [what’s known as Sharia
Courts or Muslim Arbitration Tribunals] which does not
grant women the same rights as the law of the land does.
This is a major setback.
Ŕs long as all these attempts by
Muslim fundamentalists - whether in the form of
different rights for different categories of citizens,
veiling, sex segregation and so on - is not analysed in
political terms - as the expression of an
anti-democratic programme, but rather in terms of
religion or culture, the British government will not
limit the rise of this extreme-Right movement, which
will be increasingly difficult to control.
Those of us who clearly see the rise
of a new form of fascism - mostly because we come from
situations in which we have had to live under the boot
of fundamentalists - are left to our own devices to
struggle against it. It is not very different from the
situation of anti-Nazi Germans who were not listened to,
for far too long, until a bloody war was inevitable.
Maryam Namazie: Universities UK’s
guidance first said (though it has now been withdrawn as
a result of pressure) if women are not made to sit at
the back of the room but are segregated alongside men,
since none are disadvantaged, then there is no
discrimination. Your views?
Marieme Helie Lucas: Whether
at the back or on the side, the old argument is always
that this is done to protect women - for their own good,
of course, and by doing so to restrict their freedom of
movement. By the same logic, some twenty years ago,
Bangladesh suddenly restricted women from leaving the
country as there was a lot of trafficking of women in
the region. What appeared to be their solution was NOT
to arrest pimps-protectors, but to prevent women from
travelling without a wali (a male guardian from their
family). Please note that Bangladesh does not even abide
by the Maliki School, in which the institution of wali
is legal.
What is discriminatory is to assign a
place to somebody, whatever that place may be. It says:
keep to your place; to women's place!
Universities have no business
pandering to such requests, and if they do, what’s next?
Fundamentalist speakers will only address audiences
where females are fully covered?
It seems we are already witnessing
some of the next steps. According to media reports, in
one instance at a UK university, women were not only
segregated but had to give their questions in writing to
the speaker, whilst men could raise theirs. As one
knows, their voices are sexually attractive and
fundamentalists plug their ears against temptation –
hence the ban on singing in the areas the Taliban
control…
What is sure is that fundamentalists
will not stop here and will produce more and more
demands, since the aim is not to get satisfaction for a
specific demand, but to gain political ground.
Maryam Namazie: Omar Ali, of the
Federation of Student Islamic Societies, says
‘segregation’ is ‘an emotive use of language’. ‘If a
society is set up to cater for religious needs on
campus, why shouldn’t they? ‘A lot of people would find
it insulting to say this is something discriminatory
against women.’
Marieme Helie Lucas: Why
should religious needs be catered to on campus? If we
launch a society for the rights of naturists, should
universities cater to our need to organise healthy
debates in the nude (in summer only), and to exclude or
seclude those who do not adhere to putting our
philosophy in practice? Or is Mr Omar Ali's religious
ideology considered by university authorities more
valuable than my naturist philosophy? In that case, I
could take the authorities to court for discrimination
against my philosophy, for creating a hierarchy of
rights amongst different views and beliefs.
What is to be allowed on campus? What
is in keeping with a university’s general mission of
expanding knowledge and reasoning? I presume that my
naturist philosophy could be and should be of interest
to all to debate about on campus, but that my insistence
to put my beliefs in practice may not be considered as
indispensable to the exchange of ideas.
Maryam Namazie: Separating men and
women isn’t necessarily discriminatory and can reflect
personal preferences, such as women-only gyms on
women-only refuges. The head of Universities UK which
issued the guidance endorsing segregation of the sexes
says: "It is possible for women to choose to be educated
in an all-women environment. It's not something which is
so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like
race segregation, which is totally different and it's
unlawful and there's no doubt about that whatsoever."
Are racial and gender segregation incomparable? Why is
it that everyone can see the distinction between a black
university and racial apartheid but when it comes to
gender, it’s not as obvious?
Marieme Helie Lucas: This is a
very crucial question that I have debated a lot,
including more than twenty years ago with feminist
friends in the USA. While sex segregation was rapidly
expanding in Algeria under the heavy weight of the first
fundamentalist preachers and religious groups, I was
trying to warn them about the potential backlash of
their gender segregation policy in the name of feminism.
Many of our feminist weapons have
been turned against us along the years… and I have come
to this very sad conclusion that we were not smart
enough to think, as thinkers and philosophers should,
about all the facets of the concepts we were grappling
with. Just think of our feminist praise for diversity,
whilst all along we knew that difference was used to
legitimise the racist South African apartheid regime, or
the segregationist states of the USA. This concept is
now used to legitimise the imposition of differences on
women that make them unequal in the name of religion,
ethnicity or culture.
I think we should urgently question
the present trend to regroup with 'the same' in order to
protect ourselves from 'the other'. It seems to me that
this is a general trend, from the creation of Israel to
the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia, to the
creation of ghettos - whether for Blacks - or
increasingly for wealthy Whites, Asians, Muslims, Sikhs…
you name it.
We are slowly returning to the
ethnic/racial/religious/gender purity which induces us
to stay amongst 'the sames'. Decades ago, I wrote a
chapter entitled 'What is your tribe? The construction
of Muslimness' in which I discussed the fear of the
other to discover that the other is the same…
Mixing is the future of humanity.
Maryam Namazie: Cultural
relativists will say that gender segregation is people’s
culture and beliefs and must be respected. If the
speaker wants segregation, and the audience are okay
with it, what’s the problem? Is denying the right to
“voluntary” gender segregation a denial of the right to
manifest religion? The head of UUK says: "If people feel
more comfortably about sitting separately, and that's
invariably the situation that will arise in these cases,
then universities have to listen to those views.”
Marieme Helie Lucas: There are
two underlying questions here: the first one is about
the limits to respect for ‘The Other’s’
culture/religion...; the second is about who speaks for
culture; who speaks for religion?
On respect, the real question is:
should everything be respected? Is Female Genital
Mutilation to be respected because old men think that is
their culture – and even if some women also think it is
their culture? Should forced marriage or child marriage
be respected? Should public flogging for adultery be
respected? Should stoning to death be respected? Or for
that matter should the death penalty be respected at
all?
There is a relativist culture of non
commitment and neutrality that has been expanding -
certainly in the West, under the influence of
liberalism, of human rights organisations and of
political correctness and the fear of appearing racist.
Accordingly, everything is equal; everything has to be
respected on par - the right of the capitalist and the
right of the worker, the right of the one who holds the
gun and the right of the one who runs for his life away
from the gun… It is high time to admit that there are
conflicting rights, antagonistic rights.
It seems to me that progressive
people have forgotten the virtues of being partisan. I
want to stand for the right of the worker, not that of
the capitalist, for the right of the man who runs for
his life, not for the right of the man who holds the
gun, and for the right of women to live their lives
without interference from extreme-Right religious
people.
There can be a principled response
regarding respect for ‘The Other’ and its limits, but
this first question can also lead to another: who
decides that THIS is The Culture of a group?
We could immediately produce, of
course, hundreds and thousands and even millions of
people, in each specific country, who would vouch that
‘this’ (be it stoning, FGM, child marriage, etc…) is by
no means their culture/their religion, not the culture
they feel they belong to, or the religion they believe
in.
Do we believe that those presently
standing in their own countries or in the diaspora
against FGM, public flogging, death penalty for
atheists, etc… have less legitimacy in representing
their people, their culture, their religion than those
who stand for it?
Are we really saying that women
fighting against sex segregation today in their own
countries are alien to their culture? That they are
illegitimate representatives of their cultures?
This stems from a definition of
culture as fixed in the past, a-historical, not as a
moving, living, permanently changing, social
organisation. But then WHEN is a culture arrested in
history, in which year? In the years of slavery, in the
years when women did not vote, in the years when women
did not have access to contraception, or could not open
their own bank accounts? In which of these historical
steps is a culture ‘arrested’ to be seen as authentic?
To me, the women who fight against
FGM or stoning for sex outside marriage or for gender
equality, etc are the representatives of today's culture
in their country.
It seems to me that cultural
relativists are furiously and deeply racist since they
exclusively promote as true and legitimate the worst
possible opinions of extreme-Right Muslims. If anyone,
white, European, would utter similar opinions about
their white European co-citizens, these same cultural
relativists would shrink in horror and refuse to shake
their hand. One can only conclude that cultural
relativists think that a Muslim must be a horrible
reactionary, otherwise s/he is not a true Muslim. Isn’t
that racist?
Maryam Namazie: Universities UK
has even gone so far as to say that denying segregation
may violate the free speech of those speakers who cannot
speak except to segregated audiences due to their
strongly held beliefs. Is this really about free speech
or for that matter the right to religion?
Marieme Helie Lucas: This is
the very old and always successful story of blaming the
victim.
When professor Krauss walked out of
the debate at a UK university, although he had announced
in advance that he would not participate in it should it
be segregated, he was shouted out by Muslim
fundamentalist students as ‘intolerant’; he was a little
surprised…
At the beginning of the 70’s in
Algiers I had two similar experiences:
I was in a queue waiting to vote when
the man before me handed eleven (11, you read well) ID
cards for all the women in his family whom he was voting
for to the voting booth authority. I objected that this
was illegal; the staff at the voting booth, the very
person who was supposed to guarantee the respect of law
accused me of being against the right of women to vote.
These women, he said, could not get out of the house,
hence their only way of voting was by giving their IDs
to the male in the family. And who was I, a woman,
objecting to women's rights as citizens; how dared I?
Also in the early seventies, when for
the first time a non-indigenous form of veiling appeared
in the streets of Algiers, in fact an early Iranian
style of chador that women in Turkey still wear, a sort
of long rain coat on trousers, with a tight head scarf,
it was labelled 'the students' dress'. Most female
students in Algiers, especially during the first decade
after independence, usually wore western clothes and did
not cover their heads. It was clearly an offensive from
Muslim fundamentalist groups; they were doing a lot of
social work and, together with other goods, would
distribute to poor families the so-called students'
dress, in fact the early model of what was to become
'the Islamic dress'. Orhan Pamuk described the same
thing in Turkey, saying that it was virtually impossible
to refuse this 'gift' while accepting all the others
indispensable ones.
When I raised the issue of veiling
young women, I was told that I was preventing women
access to universities; that I was denying women the
right to study! Without this outfit, fundamentalists
said, fathers would not allow girls to go to university
(a blatant lie, as Algerian fathers after independence
were most willing to send all their children to
university, boys and girls alike; schooling was entirely
free and lunch was provided), hence I was depriving
girls of their right to education by questioning their
alien outfit…
By the way, how come we haven't heard
the devotees of untouchable cultures speaking up against
this brand new dress code? Wasn't this costume that we
had never seen before alien to our culture?
While attacking our most basic
rights, fundamentalists managed to put the blame us, the
victims of their manipulation, just as in rape cases:
“yes I raped her, but what was she doing at this time of
the day/or night in this place? And what was she
wearing; how was she dressed? She was actually looking
for it, she is the culprit and I am the innocent…”
We have no more reason to accept this
reversing of responsibilities from Muslim
fundamentalists than we did from rapists.
Maryam Namazie: There is often a
problem in addressing issues such as sex apartheid,
“Sharia” courts or the niqab as the links between these
and Islamism is often kept hidden and it is portrayed as
a matter of choice and rights. We often see the use of
rights language to push forwards restrictions on rights
in the name of religion. Your views?
Marieme Helie Lucas: Our
friend Cherifa Kheddar, herself a survivor of an attack
on her family by armed fundamentalist groups in the
nineties in Algeria is often quoted by Karima Bennoune
in her book and her articles. She says that it is
useless to fight 'terrorism' without fighting its root
cause: 'Islamism' i.e. the ideology which engenders
terrorism.
There is an ideological battle going
on, as well as very concrete ones. Introducing parallel
legal systems, making one's political presence visible
thanks to more and more women wearing a so-called
'Islamic dress', gender segregation, the revival of
medieval forms of punishment such as beheading ( let’s
not forget it happened in Woolwich not so long ago) or
stoning or flogging or amputation of limbs - all this
does not come in a vacuum. There is a correlation
between all these demands; and there is a deliberate
political will behind it. I cannot believe that there
are blue-eyed do-gooders who do not see the links, even
if they may not analyse this phenomenon politically.
The very sad and very dangerous part
of the story is that only the classical racist far-Right
organisations in Europe seem to identify the problem.
And they use it to further their xenophobic anti-
Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-others agenda.
Our betrayal and abandonment by the
Left, its denial of the right-wing agenda of Muslim
fundamentalists, its hiding behind anti-imperialism, is
what causes most difficulties for us
anti-fundamentalists from Muslim-majority countries
living in Europe. While denouncing fundamentalists, we
have to constantly strive to avoid getting used
politically by the classical racist far-Right.
Had the Left in Europe had a clear
political analysis regarding the rise of the
Muslim-Right, we would not be stuck with the perverse
manipulation of liberal language. It is in the name of
rights that Algerian anti-fundamentalist resistance has
been abandoned to its fate – 200,000 victims mostly at
the hands of armed fundamentalist groups. It is in the
name of rights that the Iranian theocracy has been put
in place. Theocrats being hailed by the Coward Left;
what more can one say about the absurd dreadful
situation in which we are?
The theory of priorities still
operates, as well as that of the “main enemy” and the
“secondary enemy”: we are being eaten up by our
secondary enemy, whilst the main enemy, US imperialism,
is quietly allying in Afghanistan and elsewhere with the
secondary enemy, Muslim fundamentalist forces which own
and/or control gas and other natural resources…
Maryam Namazie: Gender apartheid
is hugely contested in places like Iran, Algeria and
Tunisia. Isn’t ironic that it would be promoted at UK
universities as a right? What are the links between the
fight in the Middle East, Asia and North Africa against
gender apartheid and those at British universities?
Marieme Helie Lucas:
We
are fighting the same battle, except that the issue
seems much clearer when one lives inside a
Muslim-majority country than when living in the diaspora
in Europe. The list of signatories to the petition
against UUK guidelines shows that women fighting
fundamentalist forces in Muslim-majority countries are
very much aware of the fact that it is a common.
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