'The newest wave in the battle against the West?'

Wednesday, 19 August 2009 07:06

While Alex Massie on Spectator blogs uncovers the flawed and frenzied arguments of Eurabia-mongers, his fellow Spectator contributor, James Delingpole (pictured), adds his own Eurabia style thoughts in a comment piece in yesterday’s Daily Express.

‘Is this the newest wave in the battle against the West?’ Delingpole asks in a piece that critiques the wearing of the burkini in public swimming pools.

Delingpole refers to the burkini as 'spreading like a rash across Muslim communities the world over – everywhere from the beaches of Oz (which now has burkini-clad lifeguards) to the strands of Gaza and Saudi to Britain’s municipal baths where it’s becoming de rigueur during those special segregated, Islamist-friendly time slots laid on by imbecilic local councils who think they’re doing their bit for community relations.’

‘Islamist – friendly’? Is Delingpole able to infer a Muslim woman’s political orientation from a burkini?

He explains: ‘Islamism is not the same as Islam but a perversion of it. It is a political movement – as dangerous in its way as Stalinism or Nazism – which seeks to impose on the whole world a particularly extreme form of Islam – Wahhabism – born in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and now being exported through a mix of terror, big money and aggressive proselytising to Muslims from much gentler traditions.’

There’s that invisible ideological hand again with Muslims, women usually, bullied into observing codes of religious conduct not of their choosing and far removed from their ‘gentle’ [read: secular Muslim] traditions. Who’d have thought a swimming costume designed to allow Muslim women to avail themselves of swimming in mixed pools or beaches would be considered not gentle but threatening? Or even a ‘political’ statement?

Delingpole tells us it’s because ‘the burkini [is] not really about religious observance. It’s about politics.’

Oh really? And how many burkini wearing women did Delingpole speak to before arriving at that conclusion? Not many, it would seem if this comment is anything to go by:

‘When a British Muslim girl chooses to wear a burkini (or, as likely, is bullied into doing so by her menfolk), she is both defying the accepted cultural norms of secular British society and also sending out a intimidating signal to fellow Muslim females that this is the only acceptable way to dress.

[T] he more British Muslims are encouraged to feel they are different from the rest of the country – be it through special sharia law dispensations or the kit their womenfolk wear at the local swimming baths – the less social cohesion there will be.’

The point of the burkini is to allow Muslim women to swim in places that might otherwise be off limits because religious observance necessitates covering all except the hands and the face when in the company of those not of immediate family. Far from being an insidious invention, demarcating boundaries and dividing Muslims from others, the burkini allows Muslim women to be present in and engaged with public spaces. It neither threatens nor ‘seeks to destroy’ other cultures. It affords cultures, in the plural, to come into honest, respectful, contact with each other in the public sphere. It sets no hierarchies between them, nor does is set a hierarchy of observance within Muslim communities where women are pressured into adopting the burkini as the ‘only acceptable way to dress’.

Muslims well know the Qur’anic verse that ‘There is no compulsion in religion’, and whether with the burkini, the headscarf (hijab) or the face veil (niqab), no meaningful observance and respect for the practice can flow from coercion.

Delingpole’s conflation of religious observance with both ‘aggressive proselytising’, and ‘political’ statements in his comment piece on the burkini reveals more about his own political disposition than it sheds any meaningful light on religious traditions in public spaces. Not surprising then that the comment piece started out as a blog post, 'How the West Was Lost: The Burkini', on Delingpole's eponymous website.

It is befitting to Delingpole’s line of argument and prejudice that he should stake an interest in speaking out for Muslim women who would choose not to wear a burkini more readily than he would, in fine British liberal tradition, accept and defend the right of those Muslim women who would choose otherwise.

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