SACW - 17 Dec 2014 | Sri Lanka: Teachers oppose militarisation / Pakistan: Peshawar school Massacre / Bangladesh: Oil Spill Disaster in Sundarbans / India: Hindutva in Delhi; Sterilisation deaths in Bilaspur / Protest in Spain / Ataturk's legacy undone / Freedom From Religion
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Tue Dec 16 18:25:58 EST 2014
South Asia Citizens Wire - 17 December 2014 - No. 2843
[since 1996]
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[This dispatch is dedicated to the memory of the children of Peshawar who were massacred by the fascist Taliban and in solidarity with all those in Pakistan who are standing up firmly against the fundamentalists.]
Contents:
1. Pakistan: The 16 Dec 2014 Massacre in a Peshawar school - statements from human rights groups, media commentary and editorials
2. #StandwithPeshawar | via Beena Sarwar
3. Bangladesh - India: Dec 2014 Oil Spill Disaster in the Sundarbans - Selected Reports and Commentary
4. Sri Lanka: Jaffna University Science Teachers’ Association report on council appointments and militarisation of Education
5. In Defence of David Bergman: Statement by Concerned Journalists, Writers, Historians and Activists from South Asia
6. Bangladesh: The sacrifice of intellectuals | Meghna Guhathakurta
7. How Pakistan's women are punished for love | Yalda Hakim, BBC News, Pakistan
8. India: A Report on Communal Mobilisation in Delhi - Nagrik Ekta Manch
9. India: Camp of Wrongs – A fact finding report on Sterilisation deaths in Bilaspur
10. Video: Yes an abusive system locks up mentally disabled women and girls but are communities the answer in India? - sacw comment
11. India: RSS' reconversion project | Bharat Bhushan
12. India - Pakistan: Courting yet more nuclear danger? | Praful Bidwai
13. India: Twisted texts - Saffronising education | T.K. Rajalakshmi
14. Sama Zubaan's latest release “Reconfiguring Reproduction: Feminist Health Perspectives on Assisted Reproductive Technologies”
15. India: Godi Gardens Moral Police - A poster
16. Recent Posts on Communalism Watch:
- Easy to Convert - Aapsi mein baato Amul Cartoon
- India: Narendra Modi's Warning Grossly Inadequate the face of the communal statements his party colleagues
- Hindu Mahasabha all set to install a statue of Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse in Delhi
- Pakistan: In the Name of God and a Just War Taliban Fascists Kill 126 in Peshawar School
- Ghar Wapsi for roti, kapda and ration card and becoming Hindu, Muslim, Christian (Cartoon by Satish Acharya)
- India: Whittling down the 15 points for the minorities (Mustafa Khan)
- Withdraw the HRD Order - CPIM statement re interference in the schedule of schools which go on Christmas vacation
- Saffronising textbooks: Where myth and dogma replace history (Danish Raza, Hindustan Times)
- India: With BJP-led government in power, the Indian Right is gearing to occupy the centre stage
- India: RSS branches sprout on Punjab border
- India: Muslims and police (A.G. Noorani, Frontline, 26 Dec 2014)
. . . and more
::: FULL TEXT :::
17. Flamenco's Repression and Resistance in Southern Spain | Yossi Bartal
18. Turkey: Overturning Ataturk’s legacy | Radhika Santhanam
19. Stepford Wives in Chechnya | Elena Petrova
20. Book Review: Michael Denning on Nikil Saval, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace
21. Book Review: Freedom From Religion - Stephen Rohde On Why Tolerate Religion And The Children Act
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1. PAKISTAN: THE 16 DEC 2014 MASSACRE IN A PESHAWAR SCHOOL - STATEMENTS FROM HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS, MEDIA COMMENTARY AND EDITORIALS
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A short compilation of statements from Human Rights Organisations and Media Commentary and Editorials on 16 Dec 2014 Massacre in a Peshawar school by Pakistani Taliban
http://www.sacw.net/article10183.html
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2. #STANDWITHPESHAWAR
via Beena Sarwar
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Devastated at the news from Peshawar. Unless and until Pakistan doesn't get out of this confusion of ‘good Taliban' and ‘bad Taliban' and treat every single criminal act as a criminal act and move to punish those who perpetuate it, whether in the name of religion or for whatever justification, we will not begin to move out of this morass. Sharing a statement from Malala Yousafzai that was just released: “I am heartbroken by this senseless and cold blooded act of terror in Peshawar that is (...)
http://www.sacw.net/article10186.html
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3. BANGLADESH - INDIA: DEC 2014 OIL SPILL DISASTER IN THE SUNDARBANS - SELECTED REPORTS AND COMMENTARY
a short compilation of selected reports and commentary in the Bangladeshi and India Media
http://www.sacw.net/article10180.html
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4. SRI LANKA: JAFFNA UNIVERSITY SCIENCE TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION REPORT ON COUNCIL APPOINTMENTS AND MILITARISATION OF EDUCATION
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Looking back at developments over the last few years, most of us academics have been complacently blind to the sea of change that has overtaken our institutions, beginning with the courts from 2006, paving the way to militarisation of our academic life.
http://www.sacw.net/article10119.html
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5. IN DEFENCE OF DAVID BERGMAN: STATEMENT BY CONCERNED JOURNALISTS, WRITERS, HISTORIANS AND ACTIVISTS FROM SOUTH ASIA
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We, the undersigned journalists, writers, historians and activists from South Asia, are deeply concerned about the use of ‘contempt of court' law to curb freedom of expression. The conviction and sentencing on December 2, 2014, of Dhaka-based journalist David Bergman by the International Crimes Tribunal 2 on charges of “contempt of court” for citing published research on killings during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, is a serious set-back to Bangladesh's commitment to free speech and independent scholarship.
http://www.sacw.net/article10172.html
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6. BANGLADESH: THE SACRIFICE OF INTELLECTUALS | Meghna Guhathakurta
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Bangladesh stands out among many nations as one with a special day that commemorates the sacrifice of the Intellectuals.
http://www.sacw.net/article10155.html
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7. HOW PAKISTAN'S WOMEN ARE PUNISHED FOR LOVE | Yalda Hakim, BBC News, Pakistan
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In a country fighting to preserve patriarchal and tribal traditions, Pakistan's women can face brutality - and even death - if they fall in love with the wrong person.
http://www.sacw.net/article10160.html
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8. INDIA: A REPORT ON COMMUNAL MOBILISATION IN DELHI - Nagrik Ekta Manch
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On November 14, 2014 some of us responding to communal conflagrations in parts of Delhi — notably Bawana, Trilokpuri, Ghonda, and Madanpur Khadar — called a meeting of concerned citizens, groups and organisations while tensions still prevailed. The narratives that came forth at this meeting made it clear that communal violence was set deliberately to simmer in the city as Delhi’s assembly elections were announced. This is in tune with the recent trends during general and assembly elections which were turned into offensive exercises in communal polarisation.
http://www.sacw.net/article10116.html
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9. INDIA: CAMP OF WRONGS – A FACT FINDING REPORT ON STERILISATION DEATHS IN BILASPUR
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The recent tragic deaths of the 13 women, following procedures of laparoscopic sterilisation in Bilaspur district, Chhattisgarh, have flagged clear violations of ethical and quality norms in the health care system. Following these appalling incidents, a team of women's and health rights activists from Sama, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan and National Alliance for Maternal Health and Human Rights from Delhi and Chhattisgarh initiated a fact finding towards exploring and unravelling the gross violations that had taken place.
http://www.sacw.net/article10171.html
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VIDEO: YES AN ABUSIVE SYSTEM LOCKS UP MENTALLY DISABLED WOMEN AND GIRLS BUT ARE COMMUNITIES THE ANSWER IN INDIA?
- sacw.net comment
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A video from Human Rights Watch, argues that the abusive system that locks up women and girls with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities in India should gave way to communities to take control. But it is precisely these so called communities that want the people locked up.
http://www.sacw.net/article10173.html
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INDIA: RSS' RECONVERSION PROJECT | Bharat Bhushan
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The new-found aggression of the RSS organisations in reconversion is their understanding that under the Modi dispensation, their time for expansion has begun an expansion which is not only political but also social and cultural
http://www.sacw.net/article10145.html
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INDIA - PAKISTAN: COURTING YET MORE NUCLEAR DANGER? | Praful Bidwai
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Eighteen years after it rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Indian government remains implacably hostile to it, and bristles even at attempts to raise the issue of its entry into force (EIF). This was demonstrated again last week when a member of an eminent persons' group, established by the Preparatory Commission for the CTBT Organisation to promote EIF, visited India.
http://www.sacw.net/article10146.html
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INDIA: TWISTED TEXTS - SAFFRONISING EDUCATION | T.K. Rajalakshmi
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A series of steps taken by the government in the name of reforms lay bare its motive to saffronise education and educational institutions at all costs. By T.K. RAJALAKSHMI (Frontline 26 Dec 2014)
http://www.sacw.net/article10162.html
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SAMA ZUBAAN'S LATEST RELEASE “RECONFIGURING REPRODUCTION: FEMINIST HEALTH PERSPECTIVES ON ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES”
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Assisted reproduction is a complex phenomenon, located at the intersection of patriarchy, medicalization and commerce. These technologies create both challenges and opportunities, and responses to them have sought to balance questions of ethics, rights and politics. The essays in this volume map the journey of ARTs in different countries, examining the global industry and the challenges it poses in the context of markets, and look at regulatory framework in diverse setting. Together they bring a feminist lens to the examination of the now-established ART industry.
http://www.sacw.net/article10124.html
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INDIA: GODI GARDENS MORAL POLICE - A poster
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a cartoonists take on where we may be headed in India. A poster by solo with text in Hindi and English.
http://www.sacw.net/article10147.html
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22. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
- Easy to Convert - Aapsi mein baato Amul Cartoon
- India: Narendra Modi's Warning Grossly Inadequate the face of the communal statements his party colleagues
- Hindu Mahasabha all set to install a statue of Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse in Delhi
- Pakistan: In the Name of God and a Just War Taliban Fascists Kill 126 in Peshawar School
- Ghar Wapsi for roti, kapda and ration card and becoming Hindu, Muslim, Christian (Cartoon by Satish Acharya)
- India: Whittling down the 15 points for the minorities (Mustafa Khan)
- Withdraw the HRD Order - CPIM statement re interference in the schedule of schools which go on Christmas vacation
- Saffronising textbooks: Where myth and dogma replace history (Danish Raza, Hindustan Times)
- India: With BJP-led government in power, the Indian Right is gearing to occupy the centre stage
- India: RSS branches sprout on Punjab border
- India: Sangh-backed bid to 'Indianise' school curriculum
- Conversion a Shameless act of anger (Rajeev Dhawan)
- India: Muslims and police (A.G. Noorani, Frontline, 26 Dec 2014)
- The Hindutva project: Distorting history, manufacturing culture (Frontline 26 December 2014)
- Method in Madness - Sangh Parivar has earnestly started pushing its communal projects in various spheres of life in India- Frontline, 26 Dec 2014
- India: Hindutva moral police in Goa want ban on smoking and liquor on New Year's Eve at places of pilgrimage, historical places and tourist spots
- India: Consultation on 'Save Constitution-Save Democracy' Campaign (Dec 22, 2014, New Delhi)
- India: Forced conversions in Agra and call for anti-conversion bill - Statement by IAMC
- India: Sowing saffron in the north east (Furquan Ameen Siddiqui, Hindustan Times, Dec 13, 2014)
- How th Hindutva Nuts work on `ghar wapsi' re-conversions, Identifying `Targets', Generating Funds
- India: Separate commission for minority women mooted in Telangana
- Pulped: Why have publishers failed to stand up to Dina Nath Batra? (Hartosh Singh Bal)
- National Holy Book? Perish the Thought! (Shashi Tharoor - Dec 12, 2014)
- Saffron rising: Will PM Modi be able to escape the RSS Chakravyuh? (MK Venu Dec 13, 2014)
- India: Now the rightwinger Tavleen Singh is getting worried about the Modi govt's image
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
::: FULL TEXT :::
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17. FLAMENCO'S REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE IN SOUTHERN SPAIN
by Yossi Bartal
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(truthout.org - 14 December 2014)
Recently recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and increasingly used by communities in southern Spain to attract tourism, flamenco music and dance seem to enjoy an unprecedented revival all around the world. But the public spaces and social centers that play a major role in the formation of flamenco culture are increasingly threatened by gentrification, newly legislated municipal ordinances and heavy policing.
On a rainy Friday this March in front of Seville's city hall, more than 50 people, most of them middle-aged, circled a man playing guitar, joining with accompanying hand-clapping, while women of all ages occasionally entered the circle and broke into dance.
Although many of the tourists passing the square had mistaken the gathering for another street spectacle, this public Tertulia was in fact a political demonstration organized by members of the Peña de los Torres Macarena, an association dedicated to the performance of flamenco in response to being shut down by the police for noise violations.
Flamenco Peñas such as the Torres Macarena are a relatively new phenomena in the history of flamenco. These neighborhood associations of flamenco adherents popped up all around Andalusia as Spain transformed into a democracy in the '70s, and since then they have played a significant role in teaching the traditions of music and dance to younger generations, providing crucial space to rising artists and strengthening the social fabric of flamenco in a noncommercial way.
Small Cultural Clubs for Preservation
Although sometimes criticized by younger artists for being conservative and resistant to new styles, these small, voluntary clubs are more commonly viewed as indispensable for the preservation of flamenco culture.
Located in the working-class neighborhood of Macarena for more than 40 years, the Peña de los Torres Macarena is the oldest to exist in Seville and is praised by flamenco aficionados from all around the world for its open atmosphere. Its local and international fame notwithstanding, the Peña was the target of constant complaints by a neighbor who moved to the vicinity a few years ago and who since then has frequently called the police because of the noise. Even expensive sound-blockers, paid for by the association, didn't stop his complaints. Although commercial venues can pay their way around the law, this was impossible for the Peña.
Now denied the right to assemble in their own space, members of the Peña started a campaign to fight the decision of the police. They have called for numerous actions in front of the mayor's office, bringing their community's music and dance to the streets, in what is for many members their first political demonstration. Furthermore, with the help of younger activists, they have produced a YouTube clip featuring some of the most well-known flamenco artists, such as Israel Galvan, Cristina Hoyos and Ricardo Miño, among others, all protesting the closure of the Peña.
The story of the Peña Torres Macarena is not an isolated one. As members of the federation of Peñas in Andalusia confirmed, many such associations were forced to close down in recent years due to newly passed municipal noise ordinances. A suggested readjustment for the law to exempt live and non-amplified shows played in non-commercial venues is still being tossed around between the regional government of Andalusia and the municipality of Seville, while more Peñas and other cultural centers are confronted with steep fines and police repression. This fight is especially difficult for some of the elderly Peñ -members who, since the worsening economic crisis, have found themselves struggling to make ends meet.
Singing Prohibited
Noise ordinances are not the only challenges put on non-commercial flamenco by the newly-enacted municipal laws. Passed with the declared aim to rid the streets of noise, criminality, alcoholism and prostitution, to make cities safer and more tourist-friendly, the very basic social interactions that enabled flamenco to exist in public space have come under scrutiny by the state.
So, for example, the regulation against drinking alcohol in public has set out to destroy one of the most popular rituals of Spanish youth, known as the botellon: sitting with friends, chatting and playing music while sharing bottles of alcoholic beverages, usually bought in the nearest corner shop.
Seen as highly hypocritical by many, this new regulation has led to fines and police violence against people simply sitting on a public bench in the street with a bottle of beer, while excluding bar patrons who are taking over the very same public spaces (often privatized for sole usage of such establishments).
Nowadays, several years after the enforcement of this regulation, it is still common to see such gatherings of youngsters and anyone else who lacks money to drink in a bar (of which there are many since the crisis). Yet fear of the police and the need to not bring attention to oneself have made such gatherings less lively and much less musical.
Consider other recent regulations against street musicians, for example, empowering cops to confiscate musical instruments and levy aggressive fines for playing or even just singing in public, and one can begin to appreciate the rising concern that the squares of Andalusian cities are gradually losing their musical vitality.
A Twisted History
The actions of the local government and municipalities toward flamenco, promoting professional artists and institutions and using it as a tourist attraction, all the while suppressing its local and non-commercial variations, is especially cynical considering the origins of flamenco as a cultural expression of the racially marginalized and the poor. This fact is still evident in the content and style of its songs, which typically express the hardness and violence of life in poverty, especially associated with the Gitanos - the Romani people of Spain.
Yet the split between communal and commercial flamenco and its ironic twists have actually existed ever since the genre rose to fame in the 19th century, as aristocrats and tourists paid Gitanos to perform their deep songs and exotic dances. Later, Café Cantante, Flamenco Operas and Tablaos presented flamenco aesthetics to middle-class audiences all around Spain, while still claiming popular and "gypsy" authenticity, which many have disputed.
Under the Franco regime, flamenco gained the status of a Spanish national symbol, while secret police simultaneously repressed any form of cultural dissent in lower-class neighborhoods, illegalizing many flamenco concerts and gatherings. And through the rise of tourism (which included the marketing of flamenco) and its impact on inner-city real estate prices, Gitano communities were expelled and thrown out of their houses and neighborhoods all over Andalusia.
The most famous example of such policies is the neighborhood of Triana, which lies on the opposite side of the river from Seville. It is still touted in many tourist books as a "Barrio Gitano," while most visitors are unaware that the majority of the area's indigenous Gitano community was forcibly kicked out without compensation in the beginning of the 1970s, in a brutal eviction campaign that led to the disappearance of a vast musical tradition. Unaware of that loss, tourists now walk through the picturesque allies to the river and gain easier access to the authenticity of the neighborhood by paying entry to packed flamenco bars serving expensive drinks.
Nevertheless, the story of flamenco is much more than just its appropriation and commercialization. Some claim it is exactly out of this contradictory position that it could have survived and developed, even though Spanish society has radically changed since it first appeared. Commercial and professional expressions of flamenco have fed back into its communal practices and vice versa, and both would have been unimaginable today without the other. But sadly, exactly the richness of praxis and spaces that evoked so many conflicting meanings of this art are now under attack by the laws of the state, which criminalize dissent and persecute non-consumerist ways of living in the midst of an economic crisis. As this dialectical process is being shaken out of balance by the politics of social and cultural repression, flamenco also rediscovered its fighting spirit as part of the rise of a popular anticapitalist movement throughout Spain in the last couple of years.
Resisting Bodies
Most notable are the actions of the group Flo6x8, an activist collective that decided to use the language of flamenco in political protests. The members of the collective, many of them professional flamenco artists, dance, sing and play inside financial institutions like banks, which symbolize the highly corrupted crisis management in Spain. Documenting themselves entering banks around Seville while breaking into song and dance, the group has reached millions of viewers in YouTube and received national and international media coverage. An anti-protest law, passed just a few days ago in the Spanish parliament with the aim to criminalize most protest forms associated with the Indignados popular protest movement, will additionally threaten the continuation of Flo6x8 activities with fines reaching more than $40,000.
Changing the words of known bulerias, fandangos and tangos to decry the crimes of the financial elite, these artists might mock the bankers; but at the same time, they take their political performances very seriously and consider themselves a part of a long tradition of flamenco condemning injustice and prejudice. Challenging the normative spatiality of flamenco by occupying the lobbies of banks or even the building of the local parliament, they also defy the legal and financial frames into which neoliberalism attempts to confine artistic expression.
Although their actions might irritate conservative flamenco aficionados, who vow to keep the true art of flamenco outside of the realms of politics, they have aroused interest in flamenco among younger political activists alienated from its old-fashioned and conservative aura. By putting flamenco to clear political use, they have transformed not only protest forms, but also flamenco itself, adding a new audacious and revolutionary form of expression to its multilayered manifestations. Their actions give hope for the survival of flamenco as a popular art that finds its way to the daily lives of a generation of young Andalusians.
Against the processes of artistic commercialization and gentrification, their performances seem to declare the known lines of Federico Garcia Lorca's poem: The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it.
(Yossi Bartal studies musicology at the Humboldt University of Berlin and actively works with queer, anticapitalist and Palestine solidarity movements in Germany.)
© 2014 Truthout
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18. TURKEY: OVERTURNING ATATURK’S LEGACY
by Radhika Santhanam
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(The Hindu, December 13, 2014)
DIFFERENT VISIONS: “Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist rule indicates a reversal of the secular state structure that Kemal Ataturk had succeeded in ushering in.” A file photo showing supporters of the AKP holding portraits of Ataturk and Mr. Erdogan in Istanbul. AP
By keeping secularists at bay and riding on his popularity in Turkey’s heartland, President Erdogan is trying his best to shake off Ataturk’s long shadow
There are two sights that the eye grows accustomed to in Istanbul: Turkey’s red flag that flutters just about everywhere and paintings and portraits of the man responsible for this overt display of nationalistic pride, the country’s first President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Turkey is a proud nation and a land of paradoxes — and both for the same reasons. For despite 99 per cent of its population being Muslim, the country has secular credentials; despite society, much like India, being collectivistic and traditional, cities are Westernised and modern, and despite being located near war-torn Iraq and Syria, Turkey is a relatively peaceful bridge between Europe and Asia.
Everywhere we go, Istanbul, Safranbolu or Ankara, the Turks are always ready with a joke or a Bollywood reference when we tell them that we are from India — or what they call “Hindistan.”
“The Turks seem a happy lot,” we tell a cheerful looking tea shop owner in Cappadocia. “Not at all,” he shrugs as he offers us hot salep. “We have lots of problems. And they are only growing.”
The sentiment seems to be shared by other Turks too. Concerns regarding the erosion of secular values by a pro-Islamist government and the inability to fully adjust to modernity can be found in some pockets of the country.
Over the past two months, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s 12th President, has, true to his style, courted more trouble with some controversial statements that point towards a vision far flung from Kemalism — more than ever before.
Controversial statements
First Mr. Erdogan chose what could only be called the most inappropriate platform, a summit in Istanbul on justice for women, to preach to his country that women are not equal to men. “Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women: motherhood,” he said to an audience that included his daughter. “You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.”
The President didn’t stop there, but proceeded to provide an explanation for this: it’s simply “natural.” He opined that “the laws of nature” prevent equality and the “delicate” frame of women obstructs them from working like men.
Mr. Erdogan’s remarks come exactly a month after a Hürriyet Daily News report stated that “287 women were killed in the first ten months of 2014 alone,” a fact that sought to provide context to the gender equality report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development just the previous day. According to the OECD report, Turkish women are treated the worst in Europe and the Central Asia region, which includes 46 countries. That a report on this finding ran across four columns of the front page of the newspaper, sidelining even reports on advancements by Islamic State militants in Kobane and details on the mine disaster in Karaman province, is of great significance.
“Turkey is becoming a terrible place for women,” a restaurant owner said to us one evening in Istanbul. “It’s worst in rural areas. Can you believe a woman is not even allowed to smile at her father?”
This is in stark contrast to the Turkey that Ataturk had envisioned for women. There is widespread consensus that women under Ataturk’s rule had enjoyed a better place in society: a secular civil code replaced Sharia law, polygamy was replaced with monogamy, and unequal rights regarding divorce, ownership of property, custody of children, etc. were replaced with equal legal rights. Women were not represented in politics earlier; Ataturk granted them full suffrage.
Mr. Erdogan also sparked outrage among historians last month. He stressed at a conference that “Muslim seafarers” had discovered America — a good 300 years before Christopher Columbus had set foot there — and that “Islam had developed and spread on the continent even before Columbus had arrived.” He claimed that Columbus himself had recalled “seeing a mosque at the top of a hill [on] the shores of Cuba.” He added that if permission was granted, “a mosque would be fitting for that hill today.”
And on December 9, he again stirred up a hornet’s nest when he proposed that lessons in Ottoman, an old form of Turkish that uses a version of Arabic script and that was replaced by Ataturk with the Latin alphabet, be made mandatory in high schools.
But Mr. Erdogan’s contentious statements, often laced with religious overtones, are far from new. On several occasions he has proposed that more mosques be built in Turkey. Under his rule, secular schools have been converted to religious ones, public offices are seeing more headscarves than ever before, and Turkey’s long-standing problem with its Kurdish minority could be solved, he once said, by appealing to “common Islamic values.”
It’s not just his conservatism but also his autocratic tendencies that are earning him brickbats. His defence of the gargantuan presidential palace in Ankara, reportedly bigger than the White House, the Palace of Versailles and the Buckingham Palace, bears testimony to this. The lavish structure, which sprawls across 50 acres of forest land and which reportedly costs a whopping $615 million, was once Ataturk’s private estate. Surveys show that more than 60 per cent of Turks consider the self-indulgence (though he claims it “belongs to the people”) a waste of money. “This palace amply testifies to Erdogan’s megalomania, his lust for rank and opulence and his yearning to revive the ancient Ottoman imperial wealth and glory, with himself on the sultan’s throne,” Sayed Abdel-Meguid wrote in Cairo-based Al-Ahram. But the President is undeterred by all the negative reportage in both national and international press. “You don’t cut corners when it comes to prestige,” he said in Istanbul. “Let me tell you, it [the palace] has 1,150 rooms, not 1,000 as people say.”
Economic reforms
Yet Turkey’s belief in Mr. Erdogan’s abilities as a leader is staunch. The country has placed faith in him repeatedly since he founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001. This is not entirely surprising given his vision for a “new Turkey,” one that is under way. Ever since he came to power the first time on the heels of a banking and currency crisis, economic growth has averaged 5.5 per cent, GDP has tripled, exports have quadrupled, living standards have improved and it is believed that he has worked much harder than his predecessors to bring Turkey under the European Union’s fold. By 2023, the President has promised, Turkey will secure a spot in the world’s top ten economies.
But economic growth often comes with a cost: Mr. Erdogan attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to “ban twitter,” journalists are increasingly being censored, civilian protests have been stymied through police force, attempts have been made to suppress the Army — considered the bulwark of secularism— and the government is slowly trying to gain control over the judiciary.
“This is not Ataturk’s Turkey,” the restaurant owner shook his head. “We find this new government scary and we fear for our children’s future.”
This authoritarian and Islamist rule indicates a reversal of the secular state structure that Ataturk had succeeded in ushering in. But is that really the primary concern of Turks today, given that the majority of them, as polls show, find Mr. Erdogan’s conservative values appealing? Are they really proud of the paradoxes? With mounting criticism has also come growing praise for his vision to place Turkey prominently on the global map. So we won’t know till the next election. But what is abundantly clear is this: by keeping secularists at bay and riding on his popularity in Turkey’s heartland, Mr. Erdog˘an is trying his best to shake off Ataturk’s long shadow.
radhika.s at thehindu.co.in
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19. STEPFORD WIVES IN CHECHNYA
by Elena Petrova
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(Open Democracy - 12 December 2014)
Chechen women have to be very careful about what they wear because of Ramzan Kadyrov’s ‘virtue campaign.’
'Don't wear too little but don't wear too much’ is how one could sum up Chechen women’s situation in terms of clothing. They are now obliged to wear a headscarf in official buildings but forbidden to wear a head covering that hides their forehead and their chin (as it would allegedly show sympathy with the Caucasian insurrection). For young women in particular, feeling that they have to cover up while remaining ‘sexy,’ the dress code puts them in a seemingly absurd position. But what does it tell us about their life?
Stepford Wives
A woman wearing a long flowing dress covered in bright yellow, green and blue. While social pressures dictate Chechen women dress modesty, the women of Grozny still enjoy wearing bright colours.The first time I went to Chechnya I got it wrong, clothes-wise. Friends who had been there had told me to cover up, so my suitcase was full of dark, loose-fitting clothes. Little did I know.
Young women in Grozny like bright colours, bold prints, make-up, and very high heels. They also have a soft spot for exuberant accessorising – big earrings that say YSL, leather pochettes, glittery phone cases. They can't wear trousers, sleeveless tops, or short skirts, but they still often favour tight clothes. Looking good is very important, especially if you're young and unmarried.‘Have you ever watched The Stepford Wives?’ asked a cheerful young Chechen girl, as we browsed through dresses in a shop called Domodo. She continued: ‘Well, Chechen women are Stepford Wives. We're expected to be perfect, to do everything in the house and when the man comes home, to go: “here's a cookie honey.”’
Young women in Grozny like bright colours, bold prints, make-up and very high heels.
In Chechnya, the way women dress has been in the spotlight for years. After the brutal Second Chechen War and the access of Ramzan Kadyrov to power, the authorities engaged in a ‘virtue campaign’ for women – with the headscarf policy at its core. They enforced a compulsory dress code on women in public institutions, including schools, government offices and hospitals.
Dress codes
The slow evolution of prescribed dress codes has worked because women don't have any choice. Everyone here knows that the orders came from the central government and then trickled down. The restrictions on women's clothing are contrary to Russian law, but female students are aware that security guards won't let them into the university if they don't respect the dress code, while government workers know that they could lose their job. These rules are often referred to as the ‘modesty laws’, though they are in fact not enshrined in legislation and are unconstitutional.
The fiercest critic of the modesty laws, Natalia Estemirova, a leading researcher for the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Chechnya, was abducted and murdered in July 2009. A couple of months before, Ramzan Kadyrov had dismissed her from Grozny City Human Rights Council and threatened her, following the airing of an interview in which she criticised the headscarf policy. Her killers still haven't been identified.
The slow evolution of prescribed dress codes has worked because women don't have any choice.
Chechen women are often ambivalent about the dress code. I spoke to Layla, who remembers the whole evolution of restrictions on women's clothing, which happened while she was at university. ‘It started with the headscarf when I was a first-year student,’ she says, ‘and then it snowballed. I remember the first time I heard I needed to wear a headscarf to enter the building. There were lots of people outside and my girlfriend told me about it. I just didn't understand.’ By 2011, at the end of Layla's fifth year in college, women had to wear long sleeves and long skirts.
Clothes as performance
Even though dress codes have been invented and enforced by Kadyrov's government, many women have come to see them as being justified by Chechen traditions, a posteriori. ‘Chechen women always dressed modestly,’ says Khadija, a government worker. ‘Married women always covered their head. The traditional outfit for women consists of long sleeves and a long skirt.’ Young women don't remember Soviet times, when Chechen society was more secular and more mixed (when lots of non-Chechens lived in Grozny), and women had more freedom to choose the way they dressed.
Having to change throughout the day can be an interesting experiencet, an occasion to test the performative value of clothes. ‘Wearing a headscarf, long sleeves and a long skirt makes me behave in a different way,’ Khadija told me. ‘I'm more feminine. I can't run. It's actually very impractical for my work, but still, I got used to it.’ Assia, who is younger and remembers with fondness the time when she was able to dress the way she wanted because she lived in exile abroad during the second war, wears other clothes underneath her work clothes. She changes as soon as she leaves her office. ‘It's as if they were trying to kill all your personality,’ she says. ‘I feel like that, as if they were trying to kill me. I think choosing what to wear is our last freedom but they try to steal even that.’
‘It's as if they were trying to kill all your personality.’
Some women have to put on a headscarf when they come home. They have become experts at tying it really fast at the last minute, when they are one street away. It often feels playful, like a game you have to play in order to pretend that you are the woman that your parents or your brothers want you to be. Sometimes, however, if their relatives are abusive, it feels creepy, as if this little piece of cloth was a symbol of everything that is wrong with this place. Other women are happy to be seen wearing a headscarf, and do it as a sign of religiosity.
Clothes policing
On the clothes policing front, things have actually got better in Chechnya. In summer 2010, there were reports that in the capital, unidentified men, including law enforcement agents, had attacked women who weren't wearing headscarves, shooting at them from paintball guns. This has stopped.
But something else has started happening. This September, there were reports that a woman wearing a hijab had been abducted by government officials in Grozny and held somewhere for a short period of time. Responding to the media outcry this event had caused, Kadyrov made a statement where he said women in Chechnya should wear a head covering of a traditional Chechen type but not one that, in his view, showed a different practice of Islam, and expressing possible sympathies with the North Caucasus insurgency. ‘In Chechnya, women shouldn't be wearing black and a head covering that covers their forehead and their chin. (...) As for men, if they wear a beard in Wahhabi style, we will not only shave it but we will cut their heads off!’
Women from Chechnya's ministry of culture displaying 'ideal' Chechen dress. Behind them is a picture of President Kadyrov. Women from Chechnya's Ministry of Culture displaying 'ideal' Chechen dress in front of a large portrait of President Kadyrov.
In a video, which recently appeared on Kavkaz Center, the news portal of the Caucasian Emirate, a young Chechen man used these recent events as an excuse to justify the 4 December attack on Grozny by a group of Caucasian Emirate fighters. ‘We are coming for our Muslim sisters,’ he said. ‘No one can lay a hand on them!’ Women thus seem to be caught in the middle of a PR battle enacted by men.
‘As for men, if they wear a beard in Wahhabi style, we will not only shave it but we will cut their heads off!’
A dire situation
‘This creates a very difficult situation for women in Chechnya,’ Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch told me, ‘where they are not free to decide whether to cover their head or not.’
Lokshina explained that, ‘Human Rights Watch is not an organisation that is either for headscarves or against them. But we are for the right of women to choose the way they dress. We are equally critical about restrictions on secular dress for women in Chechnya, and restrictions on head covering in a number of European countries,’ she added.
When we spoke on the phone about the situation of women in Chechnya, Lokshina remarked that ‘Kadyrov at least seems to have managed to quash bridal kidnapping, putting pressure on the mullahs so that they would no longer wed underage women. So this is one improvement which seems to have been achieved by authoritarian means.’
‘Aside from this,’ she continued, ‘the general situation of women in Chechnya, not only dress, is very dire. There is a serious issue with domestic violence, which is very much a taboo and is very difficult to talk about. What contributes to domestic violence is that, according to traditional Chechen law, in case of divorce, children remain with the father's family. As a result, many Chechen women who are beaten up and abused by their husbands remain in these abusive relationships because they know that if they walk away they will lose their children. And this is not fair...’
When I asked her why she thinks Kadyrov has led a blatantly aggressive campaign against women, Lokshina said she thought ‘he tried to bolster his popularity in a way similar to the way Putin has tried to bolster his popularity, by mobilising the conservative majority.’ She added: ‘If you look into the way he rules Chechnya I think it's fairly obvious that he wants to control every aspect of public life in Chechnya, including what we view to be private life. He blatantly intrudes in the realm of the private, explaining to women how they should dress, what their head covering should look like, how they should comport themselves, and then punishing them for not complying.’
Once, I went to one of Grozny's women-only swimming pools, in one of the big shopping centres. There, I met a young girl, who was so taken by my breast-stroke she asked me to teach her how to do the same. Like many Chechen women (and men), she hadn't really learned to swim. I tried to teach her the breast-stroke, and she became quite good at it, except for some reason she was only able to do it underwater. I thought she was 15 or 16. When we got out of the water, dried off and sat down, she told me about her life. She was actually in her early 20's. Although we weren't supposed to use our phones inside the pool, she showed me photos of her husband, and a photo of her, all dressed up, clad in a hijab, posing in a thickly-carpeted living room. Then she showed me a video of her and a baby boy, splashing water in a stream. It was on repeat, and I didn't understand why at first. ‘He was taken away from me after I broke up with his father,’ she said, ‘so I did this’ (showing me faint light scars on her wrist). We looked at the little boy for a long time; and he repeatedly kept laughing and splashing water in the stream, next to his mother.
Names for this story have been changed.
[Elena Petrova is a journalist based in Russia. Due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter, she has chosen to write under a pseudonym.]
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20. BOOK REVIEW: MICHAEL DENNING ON NIKIL SAVAL, CUBED: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORKPLACE
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(New Left Review 90, November-December 2014)
Michael Denning
DESIGN AND DISCONTENT
In 1977, I found myself—thanks to an accidental meeting in a bar—working in an office of the defence contractor Raytheon. [1] I needed the job, having failed to find a way to pay the rent while living in the ‘movement’, the flood of radical storefronts that was subsiding as quickly as it had risen. Compared to the romance of encountering the American proletariat in factories and mines that fired our imaginations—Barbara Kopple’s great documentary on a Kentucky miners’ strike, Harlan County usa, had just been released—the monotonous rhythm of subway commutes to the pacified dullness of the Charles River office building, where Raytheon paid us to blue-pencil government reports on subways, seemed as far from the vanguard of social change as could be imagined.
My guide to this office landscape—an endless seesaw between the warren of offices with young men, cutting and pasting with X-Acto knives on light tables, and the ‘typing pool’ of somewhat older women, fingers flying on the massive ibm Selectrics with their interchangeable ‘golfballs’—was not C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, which already seemed dated, but Thomas Pynchon’s cartoonish depictions of Yoyodyne (the fictionalization of his days as a technical writer at Boeing) and Joseph Heller’s endless office epic, Something Happened (in which, as far as I recall, nothing happened). But history happens where we least expect it: my Boston of the 1970s, I learn from Nikil Saval’s marvellous ‘secret history of the workplace’, had the highest proportion of office space to population of any us city, and the office I encountered would become, as Saval argues, ‘not just another workplace . . . but the signature of an advanced industrial society . . . the dominant workplace culture of the country’.
If I had been paying attention to the government reports I was editing, I might have noticed that a Nixon administration commission had already concluded in 1972 that ‘the office today, where work is segmented and authoritarian, is often a factory. For a growing number of jobs, there is little to distinguish them but the colour of the worker’s collar: computer keypunch operations and typing pools share much in common with the automobile assembly-line.’ This now seems a commonplace, and Nikil Saval’s accomplishment is to restore the strangeness of the common cube.
Saval, a young writer associated with the journal n+1, briefly mentions his own experience working in a cubicle, but Cubed seems to grow as much out of the cubicle narratives that he grew up with—the comic strip Dilbert, the cult film Office Space, the television programme The Office, not to mention the serialized costume drama Mad Men. Thus, though Saval claims that the book is a homage to Mills’s sociology of ‘The American Middle Classes’ (the subtitle of White Collar), it is more in the vein of Barbara Ehrenreich’s brilliant renderings of the ‘Inner Life of the Middle Class’ (the subtitle of her 1989 Fear of Falling). Saval’s work is less a work of a Millsian ‘sociological imagination’, than of what Ehrenreich once called the ‘history of bad ideas’, paddling through the waves of managerial, therapeutic and design nostrums that inform popular thought and shape work and daily life. Cubed is a compendium of all the ‘bad ideas’ that have gone into offices: from the ‘“motion-studied” mail opening table’ of 1920s Taylorism to the ‘cave and commons’ of 1990s Apple, from the dreams of ‘ergonomics’ and ‘Theory Y’ to those of the ‘team workroom’ and the ‘serendipitous encounter’. Cubed is, he writes, ‘a history from the perspective of the people who felt these changes from their desks’.
As Saval moves from Herman Melville’s Bartleby to Scott Adams’s Dilbert, he vividly depicts a number of familiar stories: the shift from male clerks with their detachable white collars in the mid-nineteenth century countinghouse to the female typists, stenographers, file clerks and switchboard operators of the twentieth-century office; the Copernican revolution in which the office moved from its former position as a satellite revolving around the factory and the mine to the centre of a solar system of information and service; and the migration of office space from the skyscrapers of modernism’s urban ‘downtowns’—separated from the city’s factory districts and figured by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s Lever House—to the suburban ‘office parks’ whose emblems included som’s Connecticut General.
Underneath these histories Saval weaves a dialectic of discontent and design. The vexations of ‘deskism’—a term Saval finds in Edgar Allan Poe—recur throughout this history, in the diary of an 1850s New York merchant’s clerk, in the ‘speak out’ of 1970s feminist office workers, and in office furniture manufacturer Steelcase Inc’s own survey of cubicle dwellers in the 1990s. In almost every case, the response to office discontent was new design. The office—and each generation of office reform—offered a promise of class harmony, of fulfilling and creative work, of natural light and well-conditioned air. This was a promise shared not only by office designers—‘anyone who works in an office spends an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the arrangement of offices’, Saval observes—but by office workers themselves: ‘The office chose women, but women also chose the office.’
Unfortunately, the promise was rarely kept, sometimes because of the failures of the designers—‘office planners and architects tend to imagine that the set-up of their own offices should be the way that everyone should work’—but usually because of the imperatives of profit: ‘Companies had no interest in creating autonomous environments for their “human performers”.’ Instead, they wanted to stuff as many people in as small as possible a space for as little as possible, as quickly as possible. Saval’s protagonists—a host of figures like architect Mies van der Rohe, workstation inventor Robert Propst, designer Florence Schust Knoll, secretarial school founder Katharine Gibbs, and advice writer Helen Gurley Brown—tend to be those who made powerful and persuasive promises, only to find them diluted and compromised. A brief and illuminating account of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building ends with Mies wondering ‘What the hell went wrong?’; Propst admits that his Action Offices have been knocked off as ‘hellholes . . . little bitty cubicles’; and despite the ‘prestige appearance’ of Katie Gibbs girls, Gibbs herself wrote that ‘a woman’s career is blocked by lack of openings, by unjust male competition, by prejudice and, not least, by inadequate salary and recognition.’ Design, however, springs eternal, and Saval can’t avoid a twinge of excitement as he visits the ‘re-enchanted’ offices of the future, tbwa/Chiat/Day, Google’s Mountain View, and Eric Veldhoen’s Interpolis.
Like other stories of enclosure, Saval’s Cubed ends with dispossession, as the dream of a corner office recedes not only to ever-smaller cubicles and ‘virtual offices’ but, in the wake of the white-collar layoffs of the 1980s and the 2008 crisis, to office-less office workers, the freelancers or precariat. Here too Saval’s dialectic yields, in some places, another turn: the phenomenon of ‘co-working’, where freelancers pay a fee for a shared office facility. ‘Flexibility doesn’t have to be one more trick in the managerial guidebook,’ Saval argues. ‘Flexibility . . . is a tool, an opportunity . . . it remains for office workers to make this freedom meaningful: to make the “autonomy” promised by the fraying of the labour contract a real one, to make workplaces truly their own.’
It is perhaps a sign of our wageless life that the only promise of workers’ control lies in the ‘flexibility’ created by the fraying of the labour contract. However, it might also be a product of Saval’s own ‘deskism’. Though he says his history ‘speaks through faceless, nameless workers’, it often seems to speak through ‘the typewriters and file cabinets they used and the chairs they sat in’. This has two powerful consequences that are not to be underestimated. He takes us deep into the interiors of office buildings usually celebrated for their architectural exteriors, as in his account of Florence Schust Knoll’s plan for Connecticut General; and he thoroughly disrupts any common sense that the office is a virtual or immaterial workplace by attending to the resistant materiality of the back and bum in desk and chair: from the high-backed wooden Wooton desk of the countinghouse to Steelcase’s flat metal Modern Efficiency Desk to the Aeron chair of 1994, ‘the most powerful symbol of the dot-com bubble’. But there are occupational hazards to this sort of design history. First, like other forms of art history, it tends to highlight the new and the innovative, and Cubed is a wonderful account of the avant-garde office: the ‘offices of the future’. But the offices of the mundane present are usually a mismatched jumble of once cutting-edge file systems and workstations with little memory of how they were supposed to increase creativity or efficiency. Second, the design history in Cubed is a tale of the homogenization of the ‘workstation’, the abstraction of a hierarchy of desks and chairs into flexible and interchangeable cubes. This design history is no doubt accurate, but it tends to underplay the divides among office workers and office labour practices in the name of revealing the ‘dominant workplace culture of the country’.
As the book develops, the story of office design crowds out the story of the office’s labour processes. It is as if one told the story of the factory from the viewpoint of Albert Kahn (the designer of Ford’s Highland Park and River Rouge factories) rather than that of Ford, his workers, or the United Automobile Workers. The strengths of this are considerable: the space of work matters—its bad lighting, noise, overheating, poor ventilation—and these forms of workplace injustice have often been trivialized simply as ‘working conditions’. But the office workers in Cubed tend to be eclipsed by their desks. In part, this is due to the scholarship: the rich labour history of early clerical workers that he draws on in the first half of the book is not matched for what might be called the ‘9-to-5’ working class. But it is also because Saval sees the revolt of the ‘secretarial typing pool’—figured by the Boston organization 9to5, led by Karen Nussbaum, as well as the 1980 popular feminist film 9 to 5 (bringing together the unlikely trio of Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin)—as a brief and passing event which ‘thanks to tremendous media coverage . . . began to seem like a groundswell’. Here I must differ: though I was only vaguely aware of sympathies for Boston’s 9to5 among the women of Raytheon’s typing pool back in 1977, within a few years, there was a groundswell among women working in offices that not even a young male office worker like myself could miss, not least in the university offices I entered after leaving Raytheon. Boston’s 9to5—which had become Local 925 of seiu in 1975—did mark a major social transformation: the wave of strikes and organizing campaigns that made the Service Employees International Union (and similar unions like unite here) the largest and only-growing section of the us labour movement, the contemporary equivalent of Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers in the era of Fordism. Of course, not all of seiu’s members were office workers (at one point they created a specific ‘Office Workers Division’). Or rather, not all of seiu’s ‘office workers’ worked at a desk: think only of the janitors and security guards who cleaned, maintained and guarded the buildings filled with cubicles that Saval writes about.
Like the rhetoric of the ‘service sector’—the idea that the vast majority of wage-earners are service workers—the notion that the office is the dominant workshop, that we are all office workers, may hide as much as it reveals, obscuring key differences and hierarchies inside the office. Service work is marked by at least two distinctive divides: the divide in labour processes between what is called in the hotel industry the ‘front of the house’ and the ‘back of the house’, the workers who deal with customers and the workers who cook, clean, and process data; and the divide between household services—the outsourcing and commodification of the unpaid women’s labour taking care of children and elders, cooking meals, cleaning the living quarters—and business services—the outsourcing of elements of the accumulation process to banks, insurance companies and retailers. Do these or similar divides mark the office landscape? Does the client-processing front office at all resemble the data-processing back office? Are the labour processes of offices conducting financial services at all akin to those that offer cheap everyday services to working-class households? And what of the international division of cubicles?
If the outsourcing of household service has taken the form of a massive international migration of domestic workers, the offshoring of business services has created a global office space parallel to the global assembly line, as digital communication lines allow the easy transfer of data services of all kinds, from financial accounting and payroll preparation, to medical records and customer ‘call centres’. Despite a few glances at other shores—the fascinating Weimar debate over white collar workers, the European revolt against the Bürolandschaft in the 1970s, the Electronic City of India’s Bengaluru, and the recognition that The Office, made originally for uk television, has been remade not only in the us but in Chile, Germany, Israel, and France—the fun and frustration of Cubed is that it manifests the strengths and weaknesses of a classic kind of American cultural critique; it unites novels with comic books, chairs with half-forgotten management bestsellers, revealing the secret history behind our taken-for-granted tales, even if those very tales leave us curiously fixed on the American office.
[1] Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Doubleday: New York and London 2014, $26.95, hardback 352 pp, 78 0 3855 3657 8
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21. Book Review: FREEDOM FROM RELIGION
STEPHEN ROHDE ON WHY TOLERATE RELIGION AND THE CHILDREN ACT
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(Los Angeles Review of Books, December 3rd, 2014)
Why Tolerate Religion
author: Brian Leiter
publisher: Princeton University Press
pub date: 08.24.2014
pp: 208
The Children Act
author: Ian McEwan
publisher: Doubleday
pub date: 09.09.2014
pp: 240
ARE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES entitled to special exemptions from laws of general application?
Consider that according to a 2006 decision of the Canadian Supreme Court, despite the fact that there is a general ban on weapons in public schools, despite the fact that the carrying of a kirpan, a Sikh ceremonial knife, is prohibited in airplanes and courts, despite the fact that a kirpan is a bladed weapon capable of wounding or killing people, and despite the fact that many devoted Sikhs wear plastic or wooden kirpan, the court held that a Sikh student had the right to carry the most dangerous kind of kirpan so long as “his personal and subjective belief in the religious significance of the kirpan is sincere,” including the belief that wearing a plastic or wooden kirpan would not suffice, since adherents of a religion “may adhere to the dogma and practices of that religion to varying degrees of rigour.”
Consider, on the other hand, that, to preserve the principle of French laïcité — ensuring a secular public sphere with people associating as equal citizens without regard to religious or ethnic identities — a 2004 French law bans conspicuous religious symbols — such as Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, or large Christian crosses — in public schools.
What’s going on here? How can the legal systems of two modern Western democracies adopt such conflicting approaches to the treatment of religious practices? Two recent books — one fiction, the other nonfiction — address these confounding issues, raising timeless questions and offering some provocative answers.
In The Children Act, author Ian McEwan, whose 15 previous novels have won the Booker Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among others, seriously grapples with drawing the line between respecting the free exercise of religion and protecting the best interests of children.
Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in London presiding over sad and difficult cases in family court, is confronted with a petition from a local hospital seeking permission to administer a life-saving blood transfusion to Adam Henry, three months shy of his 18th birthday, who is suffering from leukemia. Adam and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They have refused the transfusion because according to their faith it is a sin to accept blood products into their bodies.
Judge Maye convenes a hearing at which the competing interests are arrayed before her. The hospital calls a consulting hematologist who explains that Adam is producing no new blood cells but a transfusion administered immediately will give him an eight to ninety percent chance of a full recovery. Without it, Adam will suffer the sensation of drowning slowly, with potential internal bleeding, renal failure, and loss of sight. “The only sure thing is that it would be a horrible death.”
On cross-examination by the parents’ lawyer, the consultant agrees that freedom of choice of medical treatment is a fundamental human right in adults and that the transfusion without consent would constitute a trespass of the person, or indeed an assault on that person. To the claim that Adam is very nearly an adult and has expressed his views against the treatment intelligently and articulately, the witness responds sharply: “His views are those of his parents. They’re not his own. His objection to being transfused is based on the doctrines of a religious cult for which he may well become a pointless martyr.”
Adam’s father testifies that he and his wife found truth and peace through Bible study at the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall. They learned from Genesis, Leviticus, and Acts that God forbids the mixing of one’s blood with another’s because it is pollution and contamination. “The Bible is the word of God. Adam knows it must be obeyed.” But if refusing a blood transfusion would cause his death, the father responds, “He’ll take his place in the kingdom of heaven on earth that’s to come.”
Under cross-examination, the father concedes that if Adam agreed to the transfusion, he would be “disassociated” from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the father quickly adds, “But it isn’t going to happen. He isn’t going to change his mind.”
The last witness is Adam’s social worker. She testifies that in his notebook, Adam had written, “I’m my own man. I’m separate from my parents. Whatever my parents’ ideas are, I’m deciding for myself.” But when the judge asks the social worker what action she thought the court should take, she responds: “A child shouldn’t go killing himself for the sake of religion.”
¤
This suspicion of the dire consequences of religion and the deference it receives is at the heart of Brian Leiter’s thought-provoking book Why Tolerate Religion? A professor of law and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, and co-editor of the annual Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, Leiter brings an interdisciplinary perspective and insightful analysis to his perplexing subject.
Leiter’s book might better have been titled Why Privilege Religion? He quickly moves past the threshold question whether open and enlightened societies can punish or discriminate against religious beliefs and practices that do not cause harm (his answer: no, they should tolerate them) to the more intriguing question of why, beyond being tolerated, religion should be singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse, while other obligations of conscience are not. As Leiter puts it, why should the state “have to tolerate exemptions from generally applicable laws when they conflict with religious obligations but not with any other equally serious obligations of conscience?”
Leiter makes a powerful case that what “religion can no longer claim is that only the demands it places on conscience deserve special legal solicitude.” And he goes further. He argues that in the United States the law “has now moved to a dangerous extreme in its willingness to permit ‘religious believers’ to be exempt from the law.”
But first he must define “religion.” Since certain religions such as Buddhism do not include a belief in God, Leiter develops a definition that does not depend on a supreme being, and distills three essential ingredients from all religions. First, a religion makes categorical demands that must be satisfied no matter what an individual’s antecedent desires and no matter what incentives and disincentives the world offers up. Second, a religion requires beliefs based on faith, and these are insulated from ordinary standards of evidence and rational justifications, such as ones we employ in both common sense and in science. Third, religion offers existential consolation by rendering intelligible and tolerable the facts of life, such as suffering and death.
As soon as Leiter draws attention to these essential features of religion, he points out that throughout the world today,
nonreligious individuals find ways of achieving existential consolation — from philosophical reflection, to meditation, to therapeutic treatment — that do not run any of the risks of commitment to belief systems involving the potentially harmful brew of categorical commands and insulation from evidence.
Leiter concludes that while there are indeed compelling and principled reasons for the state to respect liberty of conscience, there is “no apparent moral reason why states should carve out special protections that encourage individuals to structure their lives around categorical demands that are insulated from the standards of evidence and reasoning.”
To put it more bluntly, why would a pluralistic and secular society single out for special treatment any system of belief?
Indeed, Leiter argues that if general compliance with laws is necessary to promote the “general welfare” or the “common good,” then selective exemptions from those laws for religion is a morally objectionable injury to the general welfare. Furthermore, Leiter argues that there are limits — he calls them “side-constraints” — to the toleration that society will tolerate, based on what John Stuart Mill called the Harm Principle.
The “only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” That same civilized community will tolerate ideas and practices unless they cause harm to the individual or others. But the problem is defining “harm” and “cause” and Leiter devotes little attention to these important questions except to note that when it comes to American law, the First Amendment protects the expression of even the most hateful ideas, which may “cause” offense and unrest, so long as they do not pose a direct and imminent threat of illegal action.
¤
All of this brings us back to the London courtroom of Judge Fiona Maye. She’s heard from the lawyers and witnesses, but she needs to hear from one more person, 17-year-old Adam Henry. She takes a taxi to the hospital and meets the young man whose fate may well rest in her hands. He’s bright and funny. The judge asks if he understands that without the transfusion he could die, and he responds “Yup.” She probes. “I’d like to know whether you’ve considered this carefully, that you may be ill and disabled, mentally, physically or both, for the rest of your life.” Adam responds, “I’d hate it, I’d hate it. […] But if that’s what happens I have to accept it.”
Judge Maye returns to her courtroom, where everyone is awaiting her ruling. After reciting why the case urgently demands an immediate decision, she respectfully explains that the parents of the young man (referred to as “A” to protect his privacy) “oppose the application on the basis of their religious faith, which is calmly expressed and profoundly held. Their son also objects and has a good understanding of the religious principles and is possessed of considerable maturity and articulacy for his age.”
While finding that A “has little concept of the ordeal that would face him” and “a romantic notion of what it is to suffer,” she declines to base her decision on these conclusions. Instead, she relies on the Children Act of 1989, which mandates that “the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.” Noting that the Christian sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses does not “encourage open debate and dissent,” and that A’s childhood has been “an uninterrupted monochrome exposure to a forceful view of the world,” the judge finds that his welfare is better served by his poetry and playing the violin and “by all of life and love that lie ahead of him.”
Consequently, the judge rules that:
A, his parents and the elders of the church have made a decision which is hostile to A’s welfare, which is this court’s paramount consideration. He must be protected from such a decision. He must be protected from his religion and from himself. […] In my judgment, his life is more precious than his dignity.
Given the unexpected turns this engrossing novel takes from there, it suffices for present purposes to leave the entwining lives of Judge Maye and Adam at this stage. While there is an inevitability to the judge’s decision, one is struck by the awesome power of the law to dictate that a person must be protected from himself, in the face of their sincerely held beliefs.
One can assume that Leiter would endorse Judge Maye’s ruling, since it refused to grant religion any special authority to overrule what the law considers to be in the best interest of the individual. But these two books reveal the persistent grip that religion has on believers and nonbelievers alike. Societies that claim to value a zone of personal autonomy must vigilantly guard against intrusions into that zone whether by the authority of government or religion.
Today, the United States is besieged by demands that religion is entitled to special treatment under laws that apply to the rest of us. Last June, in the controversial Hobby Lobby decision, the US Supreme Court voted 5–4 that a closely held for-profit corporation whose owners have “sincere religious beliefs” is exempt from providing certain types of birth control in their employee benefit plans.
In an eerie example of life imitating art, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stinging dissent warned that the Hobby Lobby decision could allow employers who are Jehovah’s Witnesses to deny their employees coverage for blood transfusions (and Scientologists could deny coverage for antidepressants, Christian Scientists could deny coverage for vaccinations, and certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus could deny coverage for medications derived from pigs, including anesthetics, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin).
Fifty cases are pending around the country filed by religious nonprofits seeking to be exempt even from the compromise option that those who object to providing coverage for birth control may turn the matter over to insurance carriers or third-party administrators.
Earlier this year, 150 conservative religious groups and leaders urged President Obama to include a religious exemption in his executive order banning discrimination against gay and lesbian workers in companies that contract with the federal government. He declined.
There is no reason to believe that these religious battles will diminish. Indeed, the Supreme Court appears quite amenable to entertaining them. Anyone who cares about separation of church and state, and about reducing the divisive impact of these religious conflicts, would do well to heed Leiter’s final words. “Toleration may be a virtue, both in individuals and in states, but its selective application to the conscience of only religious believers is not morally defensible.”
Stephen Rohde is a constitutional lawyer, lecturer, writer, and political activist.
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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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