People don’t half talk a lot of dross about the burka. Or rather, the burka doesn’t half make people talk a lot of dross, about everything else. Nicolas Sarkozy, the four-foot-tall French President, has decided that his countrywomen don’t have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. Damian Green, our own, taller, immigration minister, has decided that British women do have a ‘right’ to wear the burka. I haven’t a clue what either of them are on about. I wonder if they do.
It’s easy to get bogged down in this one. There’s altogether too much going on. Popular consensus is confused, but seems to be veering towards the view that all women in Islamic dress are actually nurturing secret desires to dress like Beyoncé, but afraid that their menfolk, who are rapists, might bury them up to their necks in sand and throw rocks at them until they think better of it. I daresay there’s a whiff of truth in this, but it’s striking that similar arguments are rarely made about other women who habitually feel inclined to conceal their femininity with scarves and whatnot, such as Orthodox Jews, Christian nuns, very ugly people, or the Queen.
That’s what makes me think that, whatever is going on here, it’s not really a feminist thing. And nor is it a security thing. I mean, sure, there are some places where its senseless to allow people to cover their faces (airports, Jobcentres) but plenty of others where it really doesn’t make much difference. Really, it’s about some people seeing other people looking altogether too Muslim and minding, and other people minding that they mind, and everybody trying to incorporate all of this, one way or another, into law.
It’s daft. I’m pretty sure that I, for example, have both a moral and a legal ‘right’ to go out into the street with pants on my head. Not necessarily even my pants. Anybody’s pants. Skimpy pornstar panties; austere sensible gentleman’s briefs; vast voluminous Victorian bloomers that flap around over my ears, like an anaemic Dumbo. I suppose somebody like David Blunkett might have passed a law about it that I’ve just forgotten, but I’d be surprised. And I’m pretty sure there’s nothing about it in the Bible, or the Torah, or even the Koran. Although, you know, do write in if I’m wrong.
Duly be-panted, I can go into a Post Office, a Jobcentre, a school, a church or a mosque. I could even, should I be minded, go into a constituency surgery with Jack Straw. Such is my right, as a freeborn Brit, and nobody has the right to force me to take them off.
Although, they can ask, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. That’s the thing that everybody seems to forget. I might have the right to wear pants on my head as much as I like. But I don’t have the right to not be told by people who see me that I look like an idiot. I don’t have the right not to be asked if I wouldn’t perhaps mind growing the hell up, and taking them off.
All sorts of very clever people don’t quite appear to grasp this. Such as, for example, the nameless Cylons who write the Economist. They had a big piece about potential burka bans last month, and they kicked it off with that hoary old anecdote about Jack Straw asking Muslim women who came to see him to take theirs off. ‘Liberal opinion was scandalised,’ droned the hive-mind. ‘He had no more right to request this than he did to ask a teenager to take out a tongue-stud or anything else that might offend middle-aged men.’
It’s not exactly wrong, that sentence, but it’s right for the exact opposite reason it’s supposed to be. Because Jack Straw has every right to ask teenagers to take bolts out of their faces, whether it’s because the metal is making them spit all over him, or just because he finds it a bit icky. They, in turn, have the right to say ‘no’, and think him a ridiculous old fool.
When did the world suddenly decide that the right to do something necessarily entailed the right not to be politely asked to stop doing it? It’s a dangerous nonsense. None of this is about ‘rights’ at all. It’s about manners. Security concerns aside, of course, women should have the right to wear the burka, anywhere they like. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an inherently repellent garment, the wearing of which, in Britain, is basically just rude. So stop it.
As I write, I’m coming to the end of a long weekend in Portugal, a country about which I have, thus far in life, learned almost nothing. It always sort of passed under my radar, overshadowed by its bigger, similar neighbour. Belgium to Spain’s France. That sort of thing. It’s my fault, Portugal, not yours. I know you’ve made an effort, historically speaking. With Brazil, and suchlike.
Having been here for two days, and having spent all my time in a villa, a deserted village, a supermarket or a garage, I don’t know it much better. Except for one entirely striking fact. They have Cadbury’s chocolate here. It makes me feel rather proud.
The wife, effectively a German, is furious about this. At the very lowest, her tastes tend towards Milka and Kinders; a Dairy Milk might as well be a potato. This is conclusive proof that she’s wrong. We’re all chocolate patriots. The only true testing ground is a nation without chocolate pretensions of its own. Such as Portugal.
It’s no surprise that we win. American chocolate, for all that Hollywood does to pretend otherwise, is poor stuff. The strange, bleached nothingness of a Hershey bar; the way their M&M’s are somehow, indefinably, too pale, too sugar, too bleak. Continental chocolate, if anything, has the opposite problem. It’s too small, too sweet, too inclined to think that what matters is having a hefty price tag and dressing up like a Prussian general. Those Belgians, those Swiss, it’s like they think we’re fools. I bet their watches aren’t actually much cop, either.
I spent a while in India once. The chocolate wasn’t great; it melted in the heat and solidified white. But it, too, was Cadbury’s. The wife insisted it must have been an empire thing. Now I don’t think so. A whole world of chocolate to choose from, and they choose ours. Whoever owns it these days.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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