HPR staff writer Eli Martin has a piece in today’s Crimson criticizing European “Islamophobia.” I don’t want to baldly disagree with Eli that “outright discrimination toward Muslims in Europe is becoming a reality.” But I do want to complicate things a bit.
Eli implies that burqa bans and the like could only be products of Geert Wilders-esque prejudice, neglecting a serious left-wing (and, by my lights, unprejudiced) argument for them. In her famous essay, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” , Susan Moller Okin argues that a good liberal has to care not only about inter-group inequalities, but also intra-group inequalities. In other words, before we get too excited about multiculturalism and “group rights” designed to protect traditional cultures, we have to look at whether all of those groups’ practices are really worth preserving.
This seems presumptuous on first glance, but think about it: for almost any liberal there will be certain practices so abhorrent that they could not be tolerated in the name of multiculturalism (e.g. genital mutilation… I think we can agree on that one). So the question becomes where you draw the line between acceptable group practices and unacceptable ones. Reasonable liberals, I think, can draw that line in different places, which is why I’m not going to come down hard on one side of the debate about Europe’s “Islamophobia.”
But it is surely plausible to argue that many Muslim women are not donning the burqa voluntarily, as Eli assumes, or even that they are under the sway of some sort of false consciousness. Feminists made the some sorts of arguments and assumptions way back when, and they were thought presumptuous for suggesting that many women actually didn’t want to stay at home their whole lives. But you know what? The feminists were probably right about that one. And I’m not so sure that liberals like Okin are wrong about certain Muslim customs.
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