The Conspiracy against Progress

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, “Religious Identity Crises”, the province of Quebec has been recently divided over the government’s attempt to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols by public employees, particularly those in positions of authority. About half the population is opposed, on the grounds that this would infringe on freedom of religion and minority rights. The other half of the population supports the move, believing that government employees should be neutral and avoid trying to win everyone over to their cause by showing off their own religious affiliations in public.

Unfortunately, the entire debate has been undermined by several factors, not the least of which is the enormous difficulty governments always have in trying to control people’s religious behavior through legislation. This time around, the government initially weakened its own case by refusing to ban the crucifix attached to the wall behind the speaker in the National Assembly, as well as the Christian prayers that still often precede meetings at the municipal level of government. The constitutional division in Canada also interferes in a clear understanding of the debate, with most federalists opposing the government’s position and most separatists upholding it.

Among all the various religious symbols targeted by this initiative, the one that seems to upset most government supporters is the head scarf (hijab) worn by a minority of Muslim women, as well as the far less frequent face mask (niqab) and the even rarer burqa that covers a woman from head to toe. This particular practice of hiding various parts of the female body from public view has also divided the feminist movement. The more orthodox feminists think that all those garments are in fact religious symbols of female oppression, rather like the yellow Stars of David that Jews were required to wear  in Nazi-occupied Europe. The more revisionist feminists, on the other hand, think that banning those garments among public employees would simply isolate those particular Muslim women even more than they are now (a minority within a minority).

Opponents of the government’s point of view, as well as some of its supporters, also believe that it is wrong to focus on such superficial issues, instead of controlling much more serious problems involving mainly immigrant minorities, such as female excision, female infanticide, attempts to impose sharia even when that would mean breaking dozens of Canadian laws, virginity checks being performed on young girls, religious schools refusing to cover the government curriculum even when they are being highly subsidized with public money, and so on and so forth. In other words, so far as religion is concerned, should we have majority rule or minority rule?

Many of the government’s adversaries on the religious symbols debate are also upset because they think that many of those supporting the ban are racists. According to them, too many people assimilate all Muslims with religious fanatics currently terrorizing many of the world’s Muslim majorities. They say that it may be necessary to condemn fanaticism in those countries, but it is irrelevant to do so in secularized Christian countries where Muslims are as yet still in a small minority. Even in today’s globalized world, they refuse to admit that everything that Muslims do in any country necessarily affects other people’s attitudes towards them everywhere just as much as everything that Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists do anywhere at all also affects everyone else’s attitudes towards them.

Unfortunately, the millions of people belonging to any one of the world’s major religions do not have all that much control over their fellow believers’ behavior. Most Muslims, like most other believers, tend to support anyone from their community who is being attacked by outsiders, just as anyone who believes in such “secular religions” as patriotism or libertarianism also tends to react in the same way. The world-wide reluctance among all believers to criticize anyone from within, even when those other believers are doing something that is not recommended by their religion, is in fact very similar to the patriotic maxim: “May my country always be right, but my country right or wrong.”

As a result, Muslim majorities often refuse to condemn Muslim terrorists even though the Koran apparently denounces terrorism quite specifically. At the same time, in the case of women wearing coverup clothing, moderate Muslims often refuse to criticize such garb even though it seems that the only relevant reference in the Koran is an admonition that women should strive for modesty when appearing in public. Do those Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab, along with tight-fitting clothes and a lot of makeup, really expect others to believe in their hypocritical attempts at modesty?

On the other hand, it is certainly true that many of those wearing such clothing are probably doing so for reasons of personal identity with their culture, as I pointed out in my previous article on the subject. However, it is insulting everyone’s intelligence to ask anyone to believe that those women are not aware that covering up like that is part and parcel of the message of all ultra-conservative religious factions, for which any kind of feminism is anathema. Even more laughable is the recent attempt by some Quebec feminists to claim that hijab wearers have somehow chosen to follow their own separate (but equal) path toward women’s liberation!

Many of the problems caused by this kind of cultural identity all over the world, including the much more serious problems already mentioned, are also greatly exacerbated by the incomplete conversion of many ethnic populations to most of the world’s official religions. As I pointed out in my autobiography, when various peoples previously holding to some animist or polytheist religion were converted to such religions as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, much of that conversion was incomplete. Often, cultural characteristics from the prior religious affiliations were not totally eradicated, with the result that millions of people nowadays in fact adhere to hybrid, or syncretic, beliefs.

The most commonly recognized example of such hybrids is in Haiti, where millions of people adhere simultaneously to two very different forms of religious belief, Catholicism and voodoo. But dozens of other such hybrids also exist in many other countries, with the result that hundreds of millions of people all over the world who are supposed to be Christians or Muslims or Buddhists, in fact simultaneously believe in pre-conversion deities, or magic, or some other practice that is not at all consistent with what is normally considered to be characteristic of those official religions. “Even” in the USA, “even” nowadays, millions of people officially call themselves Christians, while also believing in such totally un-Christian ideas as magic, sorcery, speaking in tongues or the use of amulets to ward off evil spirits.

As a result of this, many of the cultural practices referred to earlier in this article do not in fact exclusively belong to the religions with which they are often being associated. Everyone knows that head scarves, veils and total body coverings are not just worn by some Muslim women, but also by some women of other religious affiliations, such as the more traditionalist orders of Catholic nuns. However, in most Muslim societies, it seems that most women who choose to wear those garments do so mostly for cultural reasons that in fact predate the arrival of Islam, and were not originally imposed for strictly Islamic reasons. The same argument applies to excision in various parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as to dozens of other cultural practices such as forced marriages, female infanticide and so on. It is quite possible that many of the founders of those religions would be horrified to find out how many such “tribal” practices are currently being identified as part of their faith, in today’s world.

Another very important point in this whole debate is that the fundamentalist sects that promote those reactionary forms of behavior owe a lot of their current support to Western counter-insurgency. As far back as the nineteenth century, the British empire often promoted Islamic fundamentalism in particular as part of its attempt to take and to hold onto power in many different Muslim countries. This was all part of the empire’s “Negro king” strategy, incorporating militarily defeated kings or chieftains of indigenous populations, not only in Africa but also in many other parts of the colonial world, as local administrators of conquered ethnic groups under ultimate British rule. After the Second World War, the USA took over this counter-insurgency strategy to help control dozens of other countries, using local collaborators and religious traditionalists to help defeat world communism, as well as every nationalist economic strategy adopted at one point or another by practically every Third World country.

Islamic fundamentalism under various different disguises has also been actively promoted by well-heeled, ultra-conservative, comprador countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose enormous wealth usually comes from supplying industrial countries with natural resources and financial services. So the fact that Islamic fundamentalism has become almost as powerful in today’s world as Christian fundamentalism, is largely dependent on huge supplies of money rather than on its own intrinsic attraction to millions of ordinary Muslims. All over the Muslim world, it has become practically impossible for local dissent to support severely weakened nationalist or communist movements, leaving ultra-radical Islam as the only useful alternative to comprador (collaborator) governments.

Like the Tea Party movement in the USA, Islamic fundamentalism has become immensely powerful largely because of its “inherited” wealth from outside sources. Popular organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah also run large social-welfare schemes for their peoples because every local government is under some kind of foreign control, for which “socialism” or “government intervention” have become very dirty words. Christian fundamentalism, as well as Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism, have also become popular for similar reasons in dozens of other countries.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that many immigrant Muslim women in Quebec, and many other countries, find identification with Islamic fundamentalism to be so intoxicating? The multicultural lobby in Canada is also egging on the more extremist factions of all the major religions as part of its ultra individualist strategy. At least in this country, multiculturalism has taken on a libertarian stance, encouraging the recent trend among religious believers to decide for themselves which sort of religion they want to support. Instead of expressing their religious faith in the original sense, through submission to a higher authority, today’s believers can themselves decide, individually, what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Quebec government’s initiative is therefore being challenged by constant references to the universal charter of rights and freedoms (1948), as well as its more recent Quebec (1975) and Canadian (1982) versions. Freedom of religion is now being interpreted not as a choice among several collectively constituted, authoritarian religions, as was originally envisioned, but as a personal choice, in which each individual believer gets to choose whichever religious idea he or she considers to be most satisfying. Since religious beliefs are supposed to be much more deeply felt than non-religious beliefs like nationalism or socialism, everyone expressing sacred beliefs gets to be protected by the charters, even when such individualized beliefs have no particular grounding in any established religion.

Debates like the one in Quebec have now become a universal phenomenon, every country in the world being forced to adopt some particular attitude toward this kind of controversy. Curiously enough, in some countries, apostasy is still punishable by death, while in other parts of the world, people get to cherry-pick whatever kind of religious permutation or combination that satisfies their own personal egos.