I do apologise for my brother: he didn’t go nearly far enough!
ARIVAL columnist on another newspaper wrote last week that even though the burka was ri diculous and made women look like letterboxes and bank-robbers, he still wouldn’t ban it. Well, I happen to know that what that columnist would ban like a shot is me writing anything about this, or him, blonde on blond.
Bad news, bro. Despite l ast week’s evidence to the contrary, we do live in a free country.
If you can say what you think – and, the polls show, what most of the country thinks – about the burka, the niqab, and the right of women to wear the full-face veil in the UK, it’s only fair I can, too.
After all, he says that if he learnt one thing after two years travelling the globe as Foreign Secretary, it is this: that most problems can be solved by treating women equally. Still, I am aware that anything I write could annoy not just him but anyone and everyone.
Our great- grandparents were Jewish, Muslim and Christian. My name is Rachel (that’s Hebrew for ‘ewe’) Sabiha (meaning ‘dawn’ in Arabic) and Johnson (that’s American for the male member).
I could go on. My brother Leo has a Muslim wife born in Kabul and two half-Afghan Muslim daughters who all speak Farsi. If I had a pound for everyone who has said to me since the referendum, ‘Oooh, must be interesting around the Johnson Sunday lunch table’, I’d be a rich woman, and all I can say is, imagine the conversations now.
So maybe best to get in my allpurpose apology for what I say well in advance. Sorry everyone!
Now that’s out of the way, may I be permitted to put in a few words for the former Foreign Secretary and my forever older brother?
I read his piece. It read like a column written on a Sunday morning while on holiday in Italy, with a bottle or two of Asti Spumante chilling in the fridge for lunch.
If I’d been phoning it in, as it were, I might have changed the word ‘ridiculous’ and cut out ‘bank robbers’, but apart from these two or three words, it seemed fine and fair – in fact, it didn’t go far enough to express, in my view, how oppressive the garment is.
When I see a woman wearing one, I don’t try to ‘other’ her. The reverse. I try to imagine myself in her shoes. On the street. All the rest of my family are in casual shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, but I’m a faceless, unidentifiable ghost in a suffocating black shroud. On the beach, my man in skimpy Speedos (OK, please no) me in hot dark fabric from head to toe, having to eat an ice cream by posting the pudding into my mouth from under a flap beneath my chin.
I wasn’t triggered by what he wrote, then, but many people (some of them friends) have felt entitled to call my brother a racist, a creep, and other names that are far more insulting, and nasty, than anything he wrote.
THE main charge of his critics seems to be this. His sun-lounger piece was a nativist dog whistle to t he shaggier Tory grassroots in the overgrown outfield of the shires; it was subliminal antiMuslim messaging meant for a Right- wing audience to reach beyond the thought-policed, wellgroomed boundary of ‘the bubble’.
In objection to this, 100 Muslim women have written – minus their surnames – to protest, and there are street demos in his Uxbridge constituency. Within the Tory Party, Lord Sheikh and others have called for the whip to be removed. There have been calls for an inquiry. The PM’s request for an apology was seconded by Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories. Remainers threatened to leave the party.
But it all smelt to an outsider like infighting – a pathetic bout of blue-on-blue, fuelled by rage that Burkagate interrupted the Labour Party’s epic self-destruction over anti-Semitism. To me it felt like this: he wrote what he thought, and probably in a hurry.
It happens to be what a lot of people think when they see a woman in a burka, but coming from a former holder of one of the great offices of state, and not a comedian, his words failed the political-correctness stress test. Is that a crime? Cressida Dick, the Met boss, says no, and I agree with her.
Yet many of his gleeful critics declared themselves deeply offended, but still managed to stick the boot in with abandon. They accused him of ‘ criminalising’ women by comparing their appearance to that of bank robbers (surely a bit strong?)
They accused him of dehumanising women, completely missing the main point which is that the burka/niqab dehumanises women. They do not express individuality, they suppress it.
I would like to make it very clear I loathe the idea women will be harassed or abused in the street as a result of any of this. I very much hope they aren’t. The thought that it licenses xenophobia is horrifying. But clothes have a language, a meaning, and a message. And what the full-face veil wearer conveys is that she is subscribing to a ‘toxic patriarchy controlling women’.
Not my words, by the way – the words of one leading imam, who also said that the fact that many younger women say they choose to wear it and assert their right to hide their faces is proof they have ‘internalised this poisonous chauvinism’.
Other notables – such as Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable – have wondered whether Boris would be ‘derogatory’ about nuns and Orthodox Jewish women’s costume.
ICAN answer: only, Vince, if these faiths became so extreme that they also demanded the obliteration of the identity of only one sex in the public realm ( I might also tell him our aunt Sarah, my mother’s sister, was a Catholic nun. She wore a steepling black habit and wimple for 17 years. We called her Auntie Nun).
My brother’s crime, if that’s not too strong a word, was to use some ill- advised and, as it turns out, unoriginal comparisons (the letterbox gag was from the old jokes home and has been used by a Muslim woman in The Guardian as well as the BBC) while being too impeccably liberal in not supporting the Danish niqab ban.
He argued the law should not tell ‘a free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear in a public place when she is simply minding her own business’. I don’t agree. I’d go along with the Danes, and France, Belgium, Bulgaria and Austria, in banning them.
These countries are not imposing a ban – they are lifting one on the rights of women to feel the sun on their skin, the water on their bodies, and for their children to see their mothers’ full faces in the street. They are lifting a ban on the rights of women to be seen without the fear their brothers and husbands and uncles will object that they are ‘dishonouring’ them in some way.
No, Boris did not go too far – he did not go far enough.
For that I can only apologise.
A faceless, unidentifiable ghost in a suffocating black shroud