清楚解析當前英國社會的穆斯林議題：面紗、犯罪者、伊斯蘭法、伊斯蘭銀行與清真食物。
In Britain, there is now a cycle of Islamic scare stories so
regular that it is almost comforting, like the changing of the seasons. Sadly,
this rotation is not as natural, or as benign, although it is beginning to feel
just as inevitable. We had the niqab winter last year, as the country lurched into the
niqab debate for the second time in three years. Now we are in the spring of
halal slaughter.
Add to this schedule the routine reports
about gender segregation in UK universities and Muslim schools (as
if the concept of gender segregation was somehow exotic to non-faith schools
in the UK), claims of grand plans to
"overthrow" non-Muslim heads of certain schools and you
have a steady flow of creeping sharia messages, stoking a fear of a stealthy, incremental
Islamicisation.
Channel 4's Ramadan coverage last year drew 2,011 complaints,
the majority objecting to the broadcast of the call to prayer, a two-minute transmission.
This reflects an increasing nationwide umbrage towards visible British Muslims,
informed by repetitive stories that inaccurately amplify their religiously
motivated activity.
Underpinning it is a common theme: that there is an ever more
muscular and intimidating Muslim minority demanding special rights from a cowed
and pandering, lily-livered body politic muzzled by "multicultural
Britain" – rather than simply attempting to adapt and integrate, as
immigrants of all religions have been doing in the UK for centuries. It's not
hard to see how this constant blurring of facts generates the mood music of
anti-immigration rightwingers and establishes common misconceptions about
Muslims.
But the threat of a creeping sharia never seems to materialise. It seems to be more
of a crawling sharia, so slowly has the Islamist takeover of Britain been, in
contrast to the constant media warnings of its imminent arrival.
The focus far outstrips the size and political activity of the
minority, which number 2.7 million (less than 5% of the population), not all of whom are
practising Muslims. The Islamic scare story plays to a nexus of easy media
sensationalism, a portion of the public primed and ready to believe the worst,
and an interested rightwing element for whom it is a convenient vehicle for
their anti-immigration views, xenophobia, or just Islamophobia.
But
with each reincarnation of a creeping Islamic threat, the gulf between the
facts and what is reported widens. The following are some of the most popular examples
– and the facts that discredit them.
The niqab
One of the most helpful exercises is to present some estimation
of how many women actually wear the niqab, the face veil, in any given European country
in which there is controversy about it. The estimates are so small that they cool a
usually heated debate. In France, which banned them in public in 2011, it is estimated as
between 400 and 2,000, ie not even 0.1% of the population. In the UK, approximations
suggest that the numbers are "extremely low". Among
practising Muslim women, niqab wearers are more of a minority than women who do
not even wear the hijab, the head scarf. You are far more likely in the UK to
meet a Muslim woman in jeans and a T-shirt than you are to meet one in a niqab.
It seems embarrassing that politicians and media professional should dedicate
so much time to agonising over the issue.
Politicians are the worst culprits for recycling the niqab debate. Philip Hollobone, a member of
parliament, was
so moved by the plight of women in niqabs that he proposed to
ban them from his constituency office. Security concerns over ID and
testifying in
court are utterly unfounded: women are required to take off their
niqabs for identification purposes – for drivers' licences etc – and they
overwhelmingly comply. Once the security concerns are dispensed with, the last
retreat of the niqab botherers is that the debate is out of anxiety for
these women. But there has not yet been a single incident where the niqab
debate was instigated by Muslim women themselves.
Muslim grooming gangs
In 2012, nine men were
convicted of child exploitation and grooming of vulnerable young girls in Rochdale.
Similar grooming gangs were identified in Derby,
Rotherham and Oxford.
Rather than the colour or religion
of the assailant being incidental to the crime – which is taken for granted
when they are white or Christian – the fact that these grooming gangs were
Asian and Muslim, and their victims white, became central
to their offences in public discourse and media coverage.
How was this done? Newspaper articles,
radio shows and TV panel discussions
adopted, discussed and repeated the claim of Muslim grooming and abuse. By popularising
a notion that their crimes were somehow mandated by a sharia law that condoned
sexual exploitation of non-Muslims. That is, not only is their religion
relevant, it is blessing their crimes, or at least informing their culture. This was simply not true
but it was repeated and sublimated into fact. Rod Liddle in
the Spectator approached this pivotal point, the purported reasoning
for the entire grooming phenomenon, by saying: "Is there something within
the religion or ideology of Islam which somehow
encourages, or merely facilitates, extremist Muslim maniacs to maim
or kill non-Muslims? I think there probably is. But you can't say
that."
There you have it. He thinks there probably is. Never mind reports that
Muslim girls were abused as well. Conveniently, this worldview
chimes with the politically correct liberal somewhere out there who would
rather your daughters were sexually groomed than dare call something out
as related to religion.
Since
Operation Yewtree started, there has been a healthy debate about sexism in the UK – the impunity
of male celebrities, the cultural tolerance of sexual activity with minors
and so on. But this nuance was not applied to the "Muslim grooming
gangs", a description about as unhelpful as the "Christian paedophile
Jimmy Savile". It was a scenario in which a factually erroneous
religious justification was used to explain an anomalous episode.
Sharia courts
There have been two recent flare-ups of the sharia courts and
"parallel Islamic law" scare story. In 2011, a bill was tabled in
parliament to address concerns over sharia arbitration, and in early 2014
solicitors were allowed to draw up sharia-compliant wills, leading the Sunday
Telegraph to pronounce that "Islamic
law is adopted by British legal chiefs".
Since 2009, there have been sharia court investigations by the Independent,
the Telegraph
and the BBC. The political momentum
against these courts is primarily from Baroness Cox,
a crossbench member of the House of Lords and self-proclaimed "voice of
the voiceless" Muslim women, who she claims are being victimised.
Of all the Muslim threats, this seems the most potent. It actually has
"sharia" in the name. UK law has some scope to acknowledge the customary or religious laws of both
Jews and Muslims. But going by the coverage, it would seem it is only
Muslims that have both demanded and been granted exception. On closer inspection, it
is clear sharia courts only have jurisdiction on civil matters and everyone
must opt in to a sharia court. They only have an advisory capacity and address mainly property and
financial matters, and rulings are then only enforceable by civil courts. In many cases, they
are understaffed affairs, where one official settles petty disputes and draws
up rudimentary documents.
The
creeping sharia courts' "astonishing
spread" was first reported by the Daily Mail in 2009. At the
time, there were reportedly "no fewer than 85". In the most recent
Daily Mail report on the issue in 2014,
the number was, despite the warning about the pace of change whereby Islamic
law was cannibalising British secular law, still "no fewer than 85".
Islamic banking
The most recent episode of this was a report that Lloyds TSB in
the UK had reduced or eliminated overdraft fees on its Islamic bank accounts.
This apparently "special treatment" might suggest that banks are
overturning their commercial interests to keep customers happy. This alone
should be a clear alert that the story is bunkum. When have you known a bank to
do that? The
reality is that Islamic bank
accounts are, in fact, on average more costly for customers. Interest rates (yes, they are charged on
Islamic bank accounts, under different mechanisms, usually fixed transaction
fees) are often higher than the secular high street. More crucially, as
Lloyds itself has explained, Islamic accounts "do not offer credit
interest or other features that are available on our other products. A
comparison with the overdraft charging structure on other accounts is
meaningless." The question shouldn't have been, "Want to avoid
overdraft fees? Open an Islamic bank account", but: "Want to avoid
overdraft fees? Open an Islamic bank account where you will not receive any
interest on savings or deposits." Again, this is a recycled story from
2009, so it is not an exposé.
Halal slaughter
According to recent tabloid newspaper "revelations",
halal meat is being slipped into food at major supermarkets, and Pizza Express
has been "exposed" for stealthily replacing its chicken
supply with halal poultry. Halal meat must come from animals that were killed
with a cut to the throat, allowing all the blood to drain from the carcass. In the past four years,
the UK media has broken the story to the British public at least a dozen times,
warning about the widespread use of halal meat, yet somehow every new headline
presents it as a new finding. In the latest Pizza Express episode, where the claim
was that the chain was surreptitiously slipping halal chicken on to its menu, there was no
secrecy at all: the chain's website clearly states it uses halal
chicken.
The "secret" element, a popular angle in the halal story,
serves to support the alarm that people are being hoodwinked by Muslims
sneaking their way of life into the mainstream.
The supposed objection is that halal slaughter is a less humane method
of terminating an animal than the supposedly more palatable
methods of stunning, electrocution and gassing. But according to a 2012 Food
Standards Agency report cited by the RSPCA, 97% of cattle, 96% of
poultry and 90% of sheep slaughtered using the halal method in UK abattoirs are
stunned first, desensitising the animal to pain. If the objection were really
about the distress of slaughter, it would therefore apply to only a tiny
proportion of halal meat.
The
most recycled of stories, the halal debate began in earnest in 2003, with a Farm Animal Welfare Council report
that recommended stunning for halal and kosher slaughter. Since then, every
time the issue of religiously compliant slaughter has been resurrected, the
kosher element has been less and less prominent, rendering it less an animal
rights issue, and more an irrational rejection of halal slaughter as something
tainted with something intangibly Muslim. In a nation that has been enjoying
halal meat for years in curries, kebabs and shawarmas, the halal debate has
distorted and hijacked the welfare dimension, in order to channel nasty
resentment that a minority you don't like is being accommodated.
沒有留言:
張貼留言