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We can't just pick and choose what to tolerate

David Edgar

WELL, WHO would have thought a bit of black cloth could have provoked such anger and such anguish. The anger is part of a growing and alarming trend. The general consensus in the United Kingdom among the anguished is that, in Cabinet Minister Jack Straw's words, "there is an issue here."

Certainly there is. The veil question has exposed a staggering level of thoughtless illiberalism, and not just where you'd expect to find it.

Hot off the mark, The Daily Express consults its readers about a ban on the veil: "An astounding 97 per cent of Daily Express readers agreed a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony." It's not quite clear how this ban would be implemented. (Policemen ripping veils from women's faces? Restraining orders? Flinging wearers in jail?)

Clearly there are precedents: the Dutch parliament has voted for a ban on wearing burkhas in public places, and three Flemish towns have actually instituted a ban. In the U.K., columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown supports a burkha ban on feminist grounds, and the "progressive nationalist"

David Goodhart, who edits the left-leaning Prospect magazine, calls for a ban on the burkha in schools and public offices.

The problems attendant upon such a policy are demonstrated by the Belgian municipalities, which had to define burkha-wearing in a way that didn't criminalise carnival masks (and it is very hard to see a way of defining the burkha that wouldn't incriminate the niqab).

Dangers of nativism

That liberalism can so easily collapse into nativism is clearly seen in Rotterdam, where designs for mosques are rejected as "too Islamic" and a citizenship code makes it compulsory to speak only Dutch in the street. That Muslims will not be the only victims of cultural proscriptions is seen in Flanders, where the bans on burkhas in public places have been followed by one on speaking French in schools.

That bans on veils don't end there is shown in Germany, where several States are seeking to ban civil servants from wearing the hijab, including Baden-Wurttemberg the first German State to bar headscarf-wearing teachers from the classroom.

So this furore has exposed the double standards of the liberal anti-Islam agenda. Like the controversies surrounding the play Behzti (which offended Sikhs) and Jerry Springer the Opera (which offended Christians), the Danish cartoon affair was spun as a contest between universal western liberal values of tolerance and particularist religious fundamentalists who wanted to impose their sensitivities on everybody else. Now many people who defend free expression to the death want to stop other people wearing what they want, in order to protect themselves from cultural offence.

Many Muslim women have pointed out they would be accused of rampant Islamofascism if they asked women with short skirts or naked midriffs to cover up.

There is, one hopes, no call for Britain to follow the U.S. State of Virginia in banning visible underwear from its streets. But you can't have it both ways: I can disagree with what you wear, but — if I am to remain true to universalist Enlightenment values — the other half of Voltaire's formulation has to click in too.

However, the question of the veil does put liberals on the spot. For most of the past 30 years, being in favour of free speech meant being in favour of good things (notably honesty about sexuality) and against denial and repression.

Most of the causes celebre of the battle against state censorship, from Lady Chatterley to the gay play Romans in Britain, were works of worth even where the worth was questionable, there were persuasive arguments that the work was either harmless (as in pornography) or progressive.

Tolerating intolerance

Now we are having to defend things we disapprove of, such as the glorification of terrorism or, indeed, calls for censorship. The conundrum that one of the things liberals have to tolerate is intolerance hasn't needed to be at the forefront of debates on free expression before. It is now, and it should be.

So, yes, it's fine and right for Dutch gays to walk hand in hand in public, and for Dutch women to walk topless along beaches but it's not okay to insist that prospective immigrants to the Netherlands be quizzed on their response to DVDs containing those images. Yes, it's good for immigrants to learn the language of the country where they live, but it is wrong to ban any language from being spoken in public.

Yes, it is bad for wives to have to obey husbands, or for parents to renounce gay children, but such attitudes were common among Europe's indigenous peoples until relatively recently — and people coming to live in Europe should not be asked to disavow them as a condition of entry, any more than they should be forced to express opinions on any other matter.

And yes, the veil can be alienating to people trying to communicate with the person wearing it. But if we want to have a leg to stand on when we stand up for The Satanic Verses or Behzti or Jerry Springer, we must defend to the death the right to wear it. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(David Edgar is a playwright and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.)

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