A Point of View: Behind the veil
Why do some people fear the veil, asks Will Self.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - so said
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural speech as US President. These
words sound down through the years, a tocsin awakening us to that most
grievous of failures - the loss of nerve. Roosevelt was alerting
Americans to the necessity of that unprecedented expansion of the range
and extent of the federal government that became known as the New Deal.
What Americans feared was that such measures would usher in to the
feasting upon their tax dollars an unwelcome guest - the spectre of
communism. It was this fear - groundless in Roosevelt's view - that
would keep America trapped in its paralysis of economic depression.I wonder whether Roosevelt, or his speechwriters, were aware of the provenance of this resonant line. It is in fact a reconfiguration of a sentiment expressed by Francis Bacon in one of his essays: "The only thing that is terrible is fear itself." Bacon's thought lacks the rhetorical flourish furnished by repetition, but in essence it's the same. I only draw this out, because it might be the case that an American politician would feel a degree of anxiety about the cultural influence involved in adapting the words of an English natural philosopher. Personally, I have no such anxieties, so let me return the compliment by reiterating: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - and specifically our fear of cultural influence.
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- A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on BBC Radio 4 at 20:50 GMT and repeated Sundays, 08:50 GMT
- Will Self is a novelist and journalist
This is a fear that is seldom
openly admitted to - or, rather, no sooner is it acknowledged than it is
countered by an appeal to some incontrovertibly estimable aspect of
what we take to be our own cultural heritage. There are manifold
examples of this strange and neurotic dialectic, but let me concentrate
on just one - the recent furore surrounding the admissibility of Muslim
women giving evidence in British courts while veiled. I say furore,
rather than controversy, because I don't think that many people - except
hard-line adherents of political Islam - actually believe there's
anything at issue here at all, and these same people don't believe in
the jurisdiction of British courts anyway. For those of us who do accept
this the assumption that truth-telling is best expressed by a steady
gaze and an open face is so ingrained that it has never needed to be
articulated - or, rather, no witness or defendant in a trial who wished
to be convincing has heretofore considered it a good idea to stand up in
court with their features obscured, whether by wearing the niqab or a
joke-shop horror mask.
So, a very British storm in a teacup, but one that is really an excuse to indulge in a lot of grandstanding about all of the following - the splendid impartiality of our legal system, the ineffable tolerance of our society, the truly democratic character of our political system. All of which may to a greater or lesser extent be true, but that doesn't stop it from sounding suspiciously like the fearful whistling in the dark of a culture that isn't altogether secure in itself. Still, to admit the cultural influence of an Irishman, Laurence Sterne, they order these matters worse in France, where the wearing of the Muslim headscarf or hijab (let alone the full veil) is banned in all state contexts, whether legal, educational, or medical.
French Muslim women protest for their right to wear the hijab
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Baruch Spinoza 1632-1677
- Dutch philosopher, whose posthumous work, Ethics, is considered key work of philosophy
- Opposed the idea of "mind-body duality" popularised by his contemporary Rene Descartes
- "The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free"
I teach at Brunel University on
the outskirts of London. We have one of the highest proportions of
British Asian and Afro-Caribbean students of any British university - in
excess of half the total. Many of our students cleave to the Islamic
faith that so many others imagine is a threat to our institutions and
our liberties. I teach classes in which heads are covered with hijabs,
but I'm not particularly taken by those. What does detain me is the
expressions on the faces underneath the headscarves.
Introducing these
young people to the Western philosophic tradition I am colour-, faith-
and gender-blind. What I look for is whether they're paying attention.
Attention to (for example) Baruch Spinoza's monist metaphysics, and its
dependence on St Thomas Aquinas's ontological proof of the existence of
God. The arguments can be complex, and I'm making no great claims for my
exposition, but time and again I am struck by this reality - that there
is absolutely no correlation between the ostensible cultural allegiance
of a student and her interest or engagement with the matter at hand.
To be blunt, do I think it likely that someone who shows
evidence of a deep engagement with Western philosophy is likely to end
up standing idly by while her daughters' genitals are mutilated, or her
sons are inculcated with a violent and apocalyptic religious ideology?
No, I do not. On the contrary, I think that thousands of teachers are
engaged in schools and universities the length and breadth of the
country, on a daily basis, in the business of promoting not an anxious
and self-lacerating kulturkampf, but a culture of confidently evolving
and genuine enquiry. It is this that the students - whether in hijabs or
hoodies - hearken to. For me, the argument about whether British
society should respond to its multicultural reality by becoming a
super-heated melting pot or an un-tossed salad bowl is based on a false
opposition. Both positions bespeak an attitude to culture that is
inherently ossified.
Of course British culture will be changed by the cultures of our recent immigrants, but surely our greatest desideratum is precisely this - to be the heirs, possessors and transmitters of a legacy that is ready and able to adapt. Spinoza would undoubtedly have understood this, but then he was a child of the Jewish flight from the Spain of the Inquisition, who in Amsterdam suffered excommunication by his own co-religionists for a philosophical position itself vitally informed by the founding father of modern Catholic theology, who in turn was crucially influenced by the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who in turn imbibed the thought of Aristotle, as transmitted to him, in Arabic, by the great Muslim philosopher Averroes.
To paraphrase FDR then, the only thing we have to fear is indeed fear itself - but running a close second to this corrosive cultural timorousness is another windy nag of the apocalypse, and its name is rank ignorance.
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