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Issue 227, Friday 28 March 2008 - 20 Rabi' al-Awwal 1429

From another shore - The calumniator credited: ‘Honour’ and spin in Islamophobic times

By Fauzia Ahmad

‘Honour’ crimes bring nothing but shame,’ ‘Family of teen Muslim invited men to rape her,’ ‘British women are already suffering from Islamic law’ were just some of the headlines with which the mainstream press greeted publication of the Centre for Social Cohesion (CfSC) report ‘Crimes of the Community: Honour-based violence in the UK’. CfSC claims that the report, written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, is the “most comprehensive study of honour-based violence ever conducted in the UK,” and refers to over 80 interviews with community activists, women’s organisations and victims of honour based violence. While it makes for sober reading, for one cannot dismiss the severity of the cases highlighted, some serious questions impose themselves as to the report’s methodology, credibility and especially the media attention that it attracted.
The bizarrely titled Centre for Social Cohesion, it may be worth remembering, is an arm of the right wing think-tank, Civitas. CfSC’s website states that it aims “to promote new thinking that can help bring Britain’s ethnic and religious communities closer together while strengthening British traditions of openness, tolerance and democracy.” To this end, apparently, one of its particular specialisms is in “analysing the impact of different forms of Islamism on social cohesion.” Indeed, there is even an ‘A-Z of Muslim organisations’ with a ‘useful’ guide to each organisation. Although it claims non-partisanship, a closer look at the Centre’s Advisory Council reveals a stellar array of right-wing thinkers and commentators such as Dr Denis MacEoin (author of the discredited Policy Exchange report on extremist literature in mosques), The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, and historian Andrew Roberts (who among other things, believes that colonialism was good for India). Its Chair is none other than Douglas Murray, recently seen on several news programmes at the height of Archbishop-gate hysteria, excitedly goading Muslim contributors with his self-professed authority on aspects of Shari’ah, particularly, it seems, in relation to Muslim women’s rights and our obvious need of protection. The report itself was perfectly timed to coincide with all the hysteria surrounding Shari’ah-gate, which it further fuelled, and Environment Minister, Phil Woolas’s comments on cousin marriages among Pakistani Muslims which was sensitively scooped in the right wing press as degenerative ‘Muslim inbreeding’.
Essentially there are two stories here. One, concerns the research findings, the validity of the report and its methodology. The other, relates to the way the media echoed the report’s findings, uncritically reproducing and sensationally wording them in headline grabbing ways that promoted yet more negative stereotypes of Muslims, Islam and, especially, the very Muslim women whose interests they claim to champion. The Independent on Sunday even usefully supplied an accompanying story with an alleged warning from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that there were an estimated 17,000 honour-based crimes a year. Titled ‘A question of honour: Police say 17,000 women are victims every year’, the article carried a close-up photo of a niqab-wearing Muslim woman, thus suggesting that this was a ‘Muslim problem’. A closer look beyond this headline reveals a shocking example of deliberate media distortion.
According to the Muslim Safety Forum, their discussions with Commander Steve Allen, the ACPO’s Lead for Honour Based Violence and Forced Marriage, to whom the figure was attributed, confirmed that the 17,000 cases estimate cited by the article was irresponsibly over-exaggerated. The interviewing journalist multiplied the 500 or so actually reported incidents of forced marriage quoted at the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into Domestic Violence and Forced Marriage in January 2008, by a factor of 35 (the estimated number of experienced incidents of domestic violence before a victim reports a crime) in order to produce the maximum impact headline that was globally reproduced across the internet. It, in turn, then prompted further reports of significant numbers of Pakistani Muslim schoolgirls in areas such as Bradford regularly ‘disappearing’, presumably forced into marriages overseas. Joan Smith, an Independent columnist not exactly known for her informed views on gender rights in Islam, swallowed these manipulated statistics and findings of the CfSC report without question as part of her ongoing racialised, anti-Muslim discourse, even suggesting that Shari’ah was responsible for crimes against women. Nevertheless, the issues discussed in the report – forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honour crimes and domestic violence – are serious indeed. So much so that one would expect equally serious and rigorous care and attention to be paid to ensuring that the report was framed with appropriate reference to the existing research literature and debates on perspectives and terminologies. Of significance is the detailed debate around how women from Asian and Muslim backgrounds are ‘ethnicised’ in discussions of domestic violence by the use of labels such as ‘honour’, whilst comparable incidents in white communities are glossed over by the media as ‘crimes of passion’. This point is lost on the CfSC report’s authors whose lack of expertise and experience in this area is reflected in the study’s few, poor, irrelevant and outdated references, and their evident ignorance of or failure to engage with much of the newer literature or contextualize their work in relation to debates and research around domestic violence.
‘Crimes of the Community’ argues that excessive patriarchalism within Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Jewish communities disadvantages vulnerable women, citing horrific examples of abuse, many of which have already hit the headlines, to make its point. There is little to argue against in these explicit examples of abuse let alone that such abuse requires addressing, but the ‘Muslim/Asian woman as victim of her own culture and religion’ approach framing the report and informing it throughout is deeply problematic and negates the possibility of any form of female empowerment or agency through religion. Similarly, the reliance on the ‘multiculturalism has failed’ model is not helpful and fails to hold state-based structural inequalities accountable for anything other than political correctness.
Not surprisingly then, there is no discussion of the ways in which existing welfare provisions and legal structures impact on and marginalise women. This would explain why the section on divorce is superficial and one-sided, with its reference only to the unhelpful attitude of ‘the Islamic Sharia Council’ as if there is just one. It further obscures the fact that many of the expert contributors represent organisations known to employ models of support for women that are rooted in Islamic principles of gender equality and also liaise with and refer women to female-friendly Sharia’h councils. Some recommendations, such as the vague notion of ‘accelerating integration’, and ‘tackling chain migration’ by raising the minimum age for those entering on a marriage visa from 18 to 21, are bizarre. Of the more constructive contributions, the authors acknowledge the impact of Islamophobia in silencing Muslim communities (something their Chair ought to take note of), the need to disentangle Islam from customary practices, the unsuitability of Government partners/advisors such as Southall Black Sisters, the need for more education around ‘honour-based violence’, and support for existing women’s organisations. However, these do not excuse further distortions including misattributing the Muslim Council of Britain as one of the groups who attempted to ‘block’ the passage of the Forced Marriage Bill when its position, along with that of several Muslim women’s groups, has been to make use of existing legislation and thus avoid irretrievable breakdowns in family relations.
Surveying the reception and impact of the report suggests serious concerns around the complicity of certain sections of the media and their willingness to reproduce and perpetuate negative stories around Muslims. One need only compare the almost wholesale acceptance of such reports with the derision that greets any report from a Muslim organisation that talks of Islamophobia or highlights ways that Government structures might better accommodate Muslim needs and rights, for the grating disparity. When it comes to Muslims, it would seem wilful suspension of disbelief applies to even the most elementary tasks of investigative journalism’s reception of think tank reports, statistics, methodology and bias. At issue is not the political spin to which research, academic no less than think or thinkless tank is subject; nor naive assumptions of its ‘value-free’ nature, but a need to question why the mainstream British media seem willing to give inordinate amounts of space to obviously politically biased reports by think tanks who are all too willing to sacrifice research validity and integrity for cheap and easy propagandist headlines, when there are so many other, better researched, better informed studies that are more conducive to serve and safeguard the interests and lives of Muslim women.
Fauzia Ahmad is a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol.