… Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”
… No longer free to exercise it myself [Judt has Lou Gehrig’s disease], I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right — and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.
***************************
Scathing Online Schoolmarm found a good example of nospeak in reading blogs that were responding to the recent Saudi fatwa advising women to breastfeed men.
There is of course strict gender segregation in Saudi Arabia; but if a woman suckles a man, he becomes ‘family.’ Thus, as a Saudi woman, I will now be able to interact with men unrelated to me, so long as I first breastfeed them.
Here is how one blogger responds to this grotesquerie.
I am certainly not an expert in Islamic law or religion, nor do I write this in order to contribute to the stereotypes propagated in the West or claim cultural superiority. There are cultural differences I don’t understand, thus I try to reserve my judgement.
One wonders what sort of pronouncement from a community leader would be bizarre enough for this writer to respond with something other than politically correct vacuity. What sort of statement, what sort of policy, might prevent her from retreating into know-nothingism (cultural differences I don’t understand)? Does she understand anything about how women live in Saudi Arabia?
If she really can’t understand the difference between women told to breastfeed all unrelated men with whom they come into contact and women not told to do that, I think it would be better for this writer to retreat all the way, into silence. Certainly if she thinks withholding any judgment of this fatwa is enlightened, that judging a cleric who tells women to do this would express an unacceptable sense of cultural superiority, she would best say nothing at all.
As it is, her nospeak conveys not merely the intellectual insecurity Judt describes. It conveys the utter erosion of moral capacity.
Bravo, Ben Gurion University, whose faculty said a collective fuck you to Israel’s ridiculous ultraorthodox population and its gender segregating ways.
None of it means much, though, because one of their leaders has just announced that they’ll all pack up and leave the country if the government dares ask them to defend it.
If America would prefer to keep out of the country a large number of riot-prone, bigoted, anti-vax, welfare-cheaters, it might want to pay attention to this developing domestic story.
Lise Ravary, in the Montreal Gazette, weighing in on the hijab thing, reminds us that there are important differences between French and English Canada.
In 2016, a developer wanted to build up to 80 homes on the South Shore of Montreal intended specifically for Muslims. He had even specified that women should dress modestly when outside their home. Pressure from all sides, even the local imam, quickly put an end to that. A separate religious neighbourhood would be heretical to Quebecers.
But in English Canada, it seems, most people don’t … have a problem when public schools close their cafeterias for prayers, with the sexes segregated and girls relegated to the back of the room. I can’t understand why such nonsense is tolerated.
Recall what happened in a British university a few years ago when an Islamic student group set up separate seating areas (women in back, and keep quiet) at an on-campus event. People always seem shocked when it turns out that – as in this latest case in Quebec – the public realm of secular egalitarian cultures actually matters to secular egalitarian people.
The high court judgement also condemned some books found by Ofsted inspectors in the library [of a Muslim school in Birmingham], despite a previous inspection and ruling that the books should be removed.
The judges opined, the books were “derogatory towards women,” nonetheless “clearly some members of staff were in agreement with the teachings of the book – hence why they remained.”
Haroon Rashid, a parent at the meeting said that the … books should have been placed away, out of sight from the inspectors.
This, he believed, was incompetence on behalf of the teachers. Additionally, “inspectors did not understand the context in which the rules [about beating and imprisoning your wives and daughters] were allowed in Islam.”
The answer to a British judge’s question about a co-ed school in England that systematically and humiliatingly discriminates against female students is obvious: It’s crucial to communicate to girls as early as possible in life that they are worth a bucket of spit.
The other question is whether British taxpayers should pay for daily lessons in female servitude and worthlessness.
Apparently, after some thought, the courts of that country think not.
*****************
And then there’s the school’s library:
[Library books] contained comments such as: “The wife is not allowed to refuse sex to her husband.” Another book said that a wife “cannot go out of her husband’s house without his permission and without a genuine excuse”.
It stated that a man can beat his wife “without causing any mark”. One book, called Islamic Family Guidelines, said that the husband is in “the position of leadership over the family” and that “women have thus been commanded to obey their husbands and fulfil their domestic duties”.
Well, yes, there was a seven-foot high screen keeping me and my sisters away from the men… But if it weren’t there, our London School of Economics brothers would rape and ravish us and that wouldn’t be lovely, would it? I mean, for us. For the sisters hidden behind the curtain. That wouldn’t be lovely.
I thought it was a very tasteful way of keeping them from raping us. I so look forward to next year’s dinner. Maybe place the curtain a tad higher and put more layers of clothing on us.
… or bans on women driving, England seems to have woken up to the fact that it’s a democracy. It is actively fighting back. Last year it beat back the segregationists, and now it seems to have beaten back the woman-annihilating wahhabis. Or rather the haredim.
Don’t think for a minute that the gender apartheid we’ve seen in British universities isn’t an ongoing issue in the United States. Don’t think that our homegrown equivalents to the segregationists over there aren’t always trying – trying to segregate buses, trying to segregate parks.
His office has entered the fray because of the “massive public backlash” against the original segregationist document.
And how do the original segregationists dig themselves a deeper hole? They say things like this:
“It is very hard to see any university agreeing to a request for segregation that was not voluntary and did not have the broad support of those attending.”
Broad support, you see.
I mean, ol’ UD walks in and sees that friendly little SISTERS MAY ONLY ENTER BY THIS DOOR AND MAY ONLY SIT HERE sign, and let’s say she sees several burqas in her mandated section and you know she’s actually strongly opposed to full veiling; she actively supports the French law banning it…
So how awkward. Really, how awkward to find herself in a setting forcing her to identify, to sit only, with this particular group of people who turn out to be her sisters…! Most events of this sort just have people in them – fellow students, faculty, interested locals – but this event turns out to be a family event, and UD is enjoined to regard her fellow segregated women as her sisters.
Yet these women are not her sisters; she is in fact appalled at the way the organizers of the event have forced her into a profound lie about her deepest familial as well as social identity.
Finding it totally unthinkable that she would ever sit in a room and accede to these constraints and manipulations, UD flees.
Still, there’s broad support for the segregation, you see…
Yes, well, the Telegraph just a few minutes ago reported that the “backlash” against sanctioned sex segregation in British universities is getting rather intense. Opponents to enforced segregation (which turns out to be almost everyone who has weighed in, except, of course, the suddenly very very quiet people at Universities UK) are going to
send … teams to meetings and use the kind of techniques that were pioneered in countries like the US and South Africa in terms of black segregation.
…The prospect of groups deliberately provoking the organisers of gender segregated events, raising the prospect of tempers flaring, will be a matter of concern for vice-chancellors whose guidelines were intended to defuse tensions rather than enflame them.
It’s easy for the vice-chancellors to get a glimpse of what fun awaits. They need only Google Beit Shemesh.
*************************
More commentary.
… in front of the offices of hapless Universities UK, the organization that, in a recent document, told that country’s universities that they can enforce segregation of men and women at public, university-sponsored events.
The news clip starts with invited speaker Laurence Krauss [scroll down] expressing disgust, and leaving the room, when he scans his audience at a recent university-sponsored forum on religion and realizes he’s been tricked into appearing at a separate but equal event. The clip continues with coverage of yesterday’s well-attended demonstration in front of UUK’s offices.
Krauss’s disgust and exit were spontaneous, the instinctive reactions of a decent human being to indecency. The various forms of protest at sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities – a petition, the demonstration – are planned, organized responses. As long as both forms of response continue to be expressed – instinctive disgust on which one is willing to act, and considered political strategies – democracy will win through.
… “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”
The petition condemning sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities is here.
Amel Grami, an intellectual historian at Manouba University, whose campus was besieged last year by Salafi activists opposed to women’s equality, says the Arab Spring has “triggered a male identity crisis” that has strengthened the ultraconservative positions taken by Islamist parties. In Tunisia, he has noted, fundamentalists have called for girls as young as 12 to don the hijab and niqab, veils used by observant women. An Ennahda lawmaker has called for “purification of the media and purification of intellectuals,” while another Ennahda deputy, a woman, has urged segregation of public transportation by gender. Some Islamists have spoken of legalizing female genital mutilation, a practice largely foreign to Tunisia.
Tunisia’s Manouba University is a major site of resistance to Salafist activity in that country.
Students, faculty, and administration are fighting back strongly, and the government, after first remaining silent about the Salafists blocking classes there until women can attend in full veil, has now condemned them.
Coverage here from the university’s website (in French).
If Tunisia’s not careful, it’s going to start looking like Israel.