Islam, humiliation and recognition. posted by Richard Seymour

Interesting discussion over at Dead Men Left about the victory of a Muslim schoolgirl who wanted the right to wear full Islamic dress in school, even though it contravened the school's own uniform policy (which allowed the hijab, but not the jilbaba).

The author, known as Meaders to enemies and acquaintances, is right to laud this decision, but I think he puts slightly the wrong spin on it, and I also think I guess the reason for this. He sees it as a "Woman's Rights" issue, and my guess that this is in part a reaction to a certain kind of liberal Islamophobia which can only see the hijab or, say, the burqa, as an obliteration of personal identity etc., and therefore can only see Islam as repressive of women. The reason I don't think it is about women's rights is that, although it involved a woman in this case, the case resonates far beyond its own borders - it involves a universal claim about what kind of rights a person is allowed to claim against those aggregated to a community or institution. I won't hassle Meaders any further on this, since he has been sand-bagged by another two of my favourite bloggers, Kate and Shuggy .

I want to have a look at this case in the context of a few authors who have been interested in this kind of topic. Avishai Margalit has, in The Decent Society, been interested in interpreting questions of identity and oppression through what he claims is a universal feature of humiliation. Among examples he provides of this are the degradation of Jews in concentration camps, second-class citizenship for blacks, the banning of headscarves in a French school (the book was written some years before the new legislation), the degradations of homelessness and extreme poverty, and the treatment of hired Arab workers by Israeli kibbutzniks. Specifically, Margalit is not talking of the kind of humiliation tha might result from a random insult, but of "the humiliation of encompassing groups by the institutions of society". It is a macro-ethical, rather than a micro-ethical concept.

The kind of humiliation that would seem relevant here is humiliation as loss of control, "the symbolic element which expresses a victim's subordination". Religious symbols in particular have the power to define who is and who is not a member of this or that community, and since they are subject to contesting interpretations there is a question of how to decide which is the sound interpretation and how therefore to act on it. (Is the burqa an oppressive garb or an expression of an identity that one feels to the bone? Etc). The question then is how a non-humiliating society treat these 'encompassing groups', and Margalit's solution is cultural tolerance with a presumption in favour of the interpretation given by vulnerable minorities.

Steven Lukes, in Liberals and Cannibals, takes issue with this for a number of reasons which I think are compelling. First, the heterogeneity of the list of examples of humiliation that Margalit provides suggests that there isn't a real unifying principle involved. And I agree with Lukes: the concept of 'humiliation' is so elastic in Margalit's hands as to be practically meaningless. In the old days, Marxists dealt in such concepts as oppression, exploitation and so on, which I consider to be more useful in characterising these matters, because it is part of a universalising and not a particularising apparatus. And, most importantly, these concepts involve a materialist and not a subjectivist universalism.

Another problem is that there are certain 'encompassing groups' which may not merit toleration at all. Margalit offers examples of this - Nazis, the criminal underworld - but no principle or method for designating such groups. Lukes counters this by offering the concept of ascriptive humiliation, that is "mistreating people by means of ascription, in the classical sociological sense of the term: that is, by reference to statuses that are assigned to individuals, identifying what individuals are, not what they do". The two forms of this are discrimination, which can be both intentional and structural, and cultural imperialism or hegemony, which consists of the universalisation of a dominant group's or nation's experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm, "rendering invisible the perspective of the oppressed while simultaneously stereotyping them as 'other'". "Ther culturally dominated are thus paradoxically both marked out by stereotypes and rendered invisible".

On the basis of these conceptual provisions, Lukes tries to answer his own question - on what basis may we deem a particular group's cultural claims illegitimate? There are two ways to identify such groups. First, if they themselves are official constructs and "ascriptively humiliate". Secondly, if they act unjustly, by restricting the civil and political liberties of their own members or of others. Some groups need to be restrained from enforcing restrictions on their own members. Another consideration is that, some groups will apply for special protection on the basis of being targeted, and we need a means of deciding which claims are legitimate. For instance, some groups may claim offense at a cultural product or a politician's remark. What if they are vulnerable to offense because of their own dogmatic beliefs or because such moments of offense offer an opportunity for mobilisation? Hence, respectively, some Sikh leaders reaction to a play and some Jewish leaders reactions to a comment made by Ken Livingstone to a journalist. A good deal of culture is given to offending, and satire can hardly avoid it. So, shall we dispense with Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce because some Jewish people found them offensive?

I think this provides a good way of thinking about the 'incitement to religious hatred law', which could potentially protect homophobic clergy or imams from criticism. Similarly, it clarifies the hijab issue and a few others besides. Identitarian politics are clearly inadequate in such cases, merely empowering the self-pitying rhetoric of some groups - including, by the way, the far right. It is not an accident that the name of the BNP's in-house magazine is Identity. Their new way of articulating their racist ideology is to complain about alleged injuries done to white people and their culture by the presence of other groups whose values are incommensurable with theirs. What matters is not 'recognition' by the 'Family of Man' as Margalit has it; it is social justice.

Some people are under the curious misapprehension that the claims made by Muslims for the right to wear the hijab are precisely of a kind that would be deemed illegitimate by Lukes. I had an e-mail correspondent who was persuaded of exactly that: namely, the hijab was a kind of infringement on personal liberty enforced by patriarchical Muslim families, and therefore any attempt by the state to curb this oppressive practise was progressive and secular. In this case, there is a confusion between a micro-ethical problem and a macro-ethical one. That some families may impose the hijab on an unwilling daughter is one thing, and it may result from some attitudes widespread in a social group (namely, working class immigrant communities living in French banlieus). But it isn't true to say that this is something inherent in the 'encompassed group', particularly since the hijab is optional and not mandatory in Islam. It is a matter of one's identity, and there need be no coercion involved in the decision to wear it. Few could miss the absurdity of the state deciding to intervene and restrict the right to wear a hijab for all Muslim girls on the pretext that some families may be forcing the child to wear it. (This, indeed, was one of the factors involved in the recommendation made to the French government to ban it).

I might add that the fact that this occurred in a society in which Islamophobic behaviour on the part of the state is widespread compounds and accentuates the injustice. For instance, in October, two fashion shows featuring the hijab were banned by the mayor of a Paris suburb. At the end of 2003, the French bank Societe Generale refused admittance to a Muslim woman on the grounds that she wouldn't remove her hijab. No law against wearing it there, but the security guards chucked her out. Some French doctors now say they will not treat veiled women, and another Parisian mayor has insisted that if a Muslim woman wants to be married, she has to remove her hijab and only then will she be allowed to wed at the local city hall. There is no objection to the bridal veil of Christian tradition. These are some egregious examples of what I suggest is structural discrimination, and the hijab ban is a reflection of this.

Britain, too, marginalises and oppresses Muslims in a variety of ways - usually by denying them employment opportunities, housing them inadequately, subjecting them to the rough end of the state's monopoly on violence. There is here a legitimate claim by British Muslims in response to this, which is that those who want to are entitled to reinforce their identity as Muslims. Since they are subject to 'ascriptive humiliation', targeted for who they are not what they do, they have a right to demand the fullest cultural expression that is commensurable with the human rights of others and those within their 'encompassed group'. It is on these and like grounds that I maintain the right to wear the hijab or jilbab is a matter of universal human rights.

Anyway, I fucking hate school uniforms.