Lauren Booth – Naked Society And Muslim Women – Thinking Muslim Podcast Part 1
AI: Summary ©
The guest discusses their experiences with the current unrest in France and how it has impacted their views on certain topics. They also talk about past experiences with men and how it has caused "ar neither" feeling. The speakers also discuss the "has been a pleasure to see women" and the "has been a pleasure to see men" in the "has been a pleasure to see men" segment. They also talk about the "has been a pleasure to see women" and the "has been a pleasure to see men" segment.
AI: Summary ©
...than the wearing of abayas in school.
You've raised it, and I've forgotten how surprising
that is.
Today you've got teachers who see it as
their duty to proselytise, to convert Muslim kids.
If we are very good to look at,
then we are stripped of our dignity.
Oh my god, I think I'm a misogynist.
This is a really deep podcast going into
society and politics in places.
Hope you enjoy it.
It's no exaggeration to say that in their
quest to malign Islam, some in the West
target Muslim women.
Her position within the family, her place in
society, and of course her dress, are placed
under the microscope.
And like colonialists in the days of empire,
her emancipation is seen to be a means
to a greater Islamic reformation.
In recent days, France's Minister of Modesty will
be banned from schools.
Apparently a piece of clothing is an affront
to Fench secularism, and yet again another sign
of separatism.
In the UK, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson
likened burqa-wearing Muslim women as those that
chose to look like letterboxes and bank robbers.
Young Muslim women are subject to a barrage
of what can only be called propaganda, producing
their religious dress and promising to liberate them
from their religion.
Now to help us understand how this works,
and to caution against some of the extremes
by which the community can handle this onslaught,
I'm delighted here on The Thinking Muslim to
invite the writer and activist Lauren Booth.
Lauren Booth is a broadcaster turned activist and
author.
She is known for her principled activism on
Palestine and regularly comments on Muslim affairs.
And she is also the author of this
memoir, In Search of the Holy Land, which
is available on Amazon and all good bookshops,
I think.
In fact, Lauren, I'm amazed that you've got
a recommendation here from Nicky Campbell, a fascinating
read.
I couldn't put it down.
I mean, Nicky Campbell often is characterised as
someone who doesn't really have a good word
to say about Islam and Muslim women.
How did you get that?
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
Thanks very much for inviting me.
I've wanted to come on The Thinking Muslim
podcast for quite a number of years now.
I really enjoy your content and your interviews.
Nicky Campbell, yeah, that was...
You've raised it and I've forgotten how surprising
that is and how it started.
So about five years ago, we were having
a spat on Twitter because he had said
something so obnoxious that I just had to
really pull him up about it.
We'd worked together previously, Radio 5, we'd got
on well in my former incarnation as a
non-Muslim broadcaster.
What did he say?
He said on Twitter, right?
He said, it was about the burqa not
being allowed in France.
And it was really, we knew that a
ban towards hijab, ban towards the veil, all
of these things were coming up in France.
And he said, I would rather my 15
-year-old daughter went mostly * on a
beach than she covered up like that.
And I'm sure he used something like a
letterbox or it was really obnoxious.
And so a lot of Muslims underneath had
commented.
And I just put out on my feed,
look, that is out of order.
It's a disgraceful thing to say.
It's awful on your daughter.
It's Islamophobic.
It causes all kinds of problems.
You have no idea about this and you
actually have no right to put your foot
into this.
And I said, everybody who agrees with me,
bombard Nicky Campbell right now.
Within the hour, his Twitter feed had almost
crashed with furious Muslims just really going at
it and saying, take this down, take this
down.
So he got in touch with me in
the DMs and he said, Lauren, I'm being
harassed online because of you.
I said, no, Nicky, you're being harassed online
because of your obnoxious views.
He said, okay, that's as may be.
Could you call off your attack dogs?
I said, don't call my people dogs.
But what I might do, oh no, then
he said something.
He said, I thought Islam was about being
polite.
And I'm like, dang, he's pulled the be
nice card.
What would the prophet do?
So I said, you know what, if you're
feeling harassed, I will ask people to tone
it down, but you and I need to
talk.
So we got into a discussion and I
tried to make him see, talked about the
hijab and he asked some really good questions.
He said, can you advise me?
And it led to when my book came
out, I said, Nicky, I feel you should
read this.
As a friend, we've come to a kind
of a very warm impasse and I'd like
to send it to you.
And he read it and I said, he
loved it.
And I said, I'm gonna use your review
on the front.
Is that okay?
He said, Lauren, go for it.
So it just shows that it'd be people
don't like to think of themselves.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes,
you know what, I'm really gonna annoy people
today.
I'm really gonna pour hatred out there.
Not if they're in any way ethically, morally,
not bankrupt and they have half a mind
for what words mean.
They want to be talked around.
So let's engage.
That's my message.
Now, I provocatively use the word onslaught against
the Muslim women or against womanhood in my
introduction.
And I suspect many may dispute this as
hyperbole.
How do you assess the current discourse surrounding
Muslim women?
Well, I look up first and foremost, we
use our own experiences as jumping off points.
And I know for certain that there are
arenas where I and my views, legitimate, well
-informed, journalistic views have no space anymore because
I dress as a Muslim.
Really?
Yeah.
So I used to work part-time for
the BBC.
I used to do reports on Sky News.
I mean, the newspaper reviews, et cetera.
And when I put on the hijab, that
ended overnight.
That's not a coincidence.
And that is the experience, more importantly, of
women across Europe.
There is something that the European Union and
the parliament there in a report has accepted
and acknowledged.
It's called the triple bind.
So if you're a Muslim woman in Europe,
you've got your degree and you want to
go into the workplace.
You have these three factors against you.
One, you're a woman anyway.
Two, you're in hijab.
And three, if you have a Muslim name.
And that means that that's three, pretty much
three strikes and you're out.
And that is a real difficulty.
It's a real prejudice.
And that's what we've been facing for a
long time.
Recently, we're talking in a week where the
French Ministry of Education has banned the abayas
in schools or banned the wearing of abayas
in school.
And that follows a series of bans.
The ban of the face veil in France
and on the streets is a fine for
someone who wears a face veil.
In fact, I remember they even passed a
law which prohibited Muslim women from asking for
a female doctor.
Potentially, they would get a fine if they
requested a female doctor.
So there is this obsession.
And of course, in France, there's a ban
on the hijab as well in public buildings.
So there is this obsession with women's dress
in France and across Europe.
What lays behind, what lies behind, rather, this
obsession?
You know what?
I'm going to agree with that, but I'm
actually going to extend it to a socially
unwell society.
Because I was on a plane yesterday coming
from Istanbul.
We were waiting for our plane, actually.
Everything had been backed up.
And I got into a conversation with a
woman who lives in France.
And I was saying exactly what you're saying.
What is this obsession with women's dress?
She said, hey, it goes deeper than that.
Her friend had taken her six-year-old
son to a swimming pool and he had
long shorts on.
And they said, no, you can't come in.
Why not?
Because you have to wear speedos.
And she said, are you seriously saying that
my six-year-old should be in budgie
smugglers?
Don't even think about what that means.
And that's an obsession with a sexualization of
the human body and a minimal amount of
dress so that everybody is accessible to everyone
else.
So on the one hand, if you're French,
sorry, if you're Muslim and you're living in
France, you know it's about being Muslim.
But if you're a French person who wants
a different level of modesty, you also know
that there is a catchment area where you
are different from the rest of the society.
So there's a sickness that really causes that
society to focus on the Muslims there.
But it goes deep into every arena.
I mean, to me, France is a failed
state.
It's a failing culture.
When you actually have to put a gun
to a woman who is modestly dressed on
a beach and tell her, take your clothes
off, you've lost your mind.
And when you're telling children, little boys, you
can only wear a strip of material like
this or not come swimming, you are really
in an unhealthy situation.
Now the online space and generally popular culture
is a very confusing place, I think, for
Muslim girls or young Muslim women in particular.
And I've got a daughter and I think
that unlike maybe my son, she is impacted
by a barrage of confusing messages about her
Muslimness, about hijab, about the obligations of wearing
certain types of dress.
And it just seems to me that there
is this deliberate attempt to target Muslim girls
in particular and to, dare I say, to
try to rid, try to make them move
off the path of Islam.
I mean, am I exaggerating this?
What's your perspective on this matter?
Can I ask how old your daughter is?
She's now 20.
She's 20 now.
So she's made her decisions, but all of
that time, probably from the age of eight,
she will have been really hyper aware of
being different in the public space, different at
school, spoken about, not spoken to, othered, all
of those things are really dynamic and drive
a lot of girls into saying, I can't
do this.
Most mothers of Muslim girls, say in the
UK right now specifically, they will meet a
point when one of their daughters will say
to them in hijab, perhaps at 13, I
don't know if I can do it tomorrow.
I just want a day off.
And at that point, you realize that society
is social engineering the Muslim community by criminalizing
the young men.
There are more new laws in the last
20 years, focusing on young Muslim men and
Muslim areas to make men less successful, boys
less successful.
You know, Muslims are dire in education and
yet we can get 34, a 16 year
old Muslim girl got 34 GCSEs at A
and the young men, you know, don't worry
about them.
Let them fail.
The pots of gold that go to Birmingham
are for secularized Muslim women's groups, by the
way.
So you have that big draw.
If I want to be successful, the Muslim
women's groups that the government likes are all
led by non-hijabi women and are not
diverse.
And we've been saying this for a long
time.
Come on, let us be represented even in
our own communities.
So I would say actually brother, it's gone
so far into making us insecure that you're
beginning to see workspaces run by Muslims.
And I've had this specifically with a convert
sister who was sacked.
Or no, she was told by the Asian
men she worked for, who are Muslims, don't
wear black all the time.
It really puts off the customers.
She's a convert to Islam, trying to be
modest in her way and learning her faith.
Yes.
Told by Muslim bosses, the way you look
is putting off white customers.
Right.
I mean, where do you go with that?
Right.
And why?
Why?
I mean, you're intimating that there is an
atmosphere that has been created, deliberately created, to
shoehorn, to push Muslim women in a particular
direction.
I mean, can you speak to that?
Why is this atmosphere being created?
I think it's clearly an insecurity in our
society about the strength of what our culture
is.
And when I say our, I say all
of us as British people, right?
You know, when you go abroad and you're
like, well, what is Britishness?
This has been something the Conservatives have wanted
to ask us for the last 20 years.
What does it mean doing British?
There's been lots of jokes about it.
I mean, for me, when I was 20,
you know what it meant?
It meant ska music, bacon sandwiches, and yeah,
Notting Hill Carnival.
That was Britishness.
Now to my grandparents, that would be apart
from the bacon sandwiches is an absolute anathema,
right?
So that what is being British doesn't allow
yet for a diversity of experiences.
And that's making everybody insecure.
I mean, you've got Rishi Sunak, who has
agreed to have an immigrant holding ship on
the Thames in order to go along this
anti-diversity, this fear of foreigners movement.
I mean, that really speaks to an insecure
environment, doesn't it?
Let me ask you about the hijab in
particular, because, of course, back to my daughter.
I mean, when she was growing up, she
had conflicting messages from everywhere about the hijab
to the degree that you had what seemed
like people who were being very much sponsored
by central government or at least sponsored by
NGOs that were linked to central government discouraging
her from wearing the hijab.
There's a lot of noise out there about
what is the appropriate, what is the correct
Muslim dress.
Now, of course, I know that some Muslim
women find it very difficult to wear the
hijab.
And, you know, that's not what I'm speaking
to here.
But I also know that there is just
general confusion that probably has never been in
Islamic history.
I suspect most of Islamic history, Muslim women
generally knew, OK, this is the requirements of
Islamic dress.
How does a Muslim girl navigate this noise
that seems to be out there, which is
discouraging her from worshipping Allah?
The first thing we have to do is
to really look at who we are following.
So each of us has our own individual
timeline.
Have you ever been shown some somebody in
your family has said, oh, here's my Instagram
feed.
And you're like, that is weird.
What is that?
It's like going into somewhere really strange.
Sometimes my husband will log in to his
account for some reason on my laptop and
I'll end up going through his feed for
half an hour of going, why is it
in Arabic?
Why is it so weird?
And go, I'm literally trolling my husband.
It's so different.
So their worlds are very, very different.
So number one, you have to look at
who are you following?
Is it hyper-sensualized pop stars?
Is it jokers on Instagram?
Is it women who cover?
And where are you taking your face from?
So none of us can legitimately say that
we're going to be as women taking our
face from a woman who looks like she's
in the Barbie film.
All right.
That would be like, OK, Harun Yahya tried
it a few years ago.
That's a strange cult leader in Turkey.
He surrounded himself with blonde women, hyper-sexualized
and said, this is the dean.
And everyone went, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You've lost your mind.
So if you're a young woman and you're
saying, right, on the one hand, I might
like this pop music and I like these
shows on Netflix and that, right?
That's just social culture.
But when you come to the dean, you're
not going to go to Netflix, right?
Because you know that that's outside our dean.
So when you put in, here's a little
thing you can try saying this straight to
your daughter and young women out there, put
into Google, female Muslim scholar, not influencer, not
celebrity or personality.
OK, we're talking about people who teach the
actual deep and the basics, the building blocks
of our Islamic dean.
Yeah, none of them will be uncovered.
Now, if these women know the prophetic model
and the Quranic model of expectations and they're
paid and endorsed to teach this by the
ummah, by the ulama, then surely that's enough
for me.
I'm a very simple person.
I have to be honest.
I don't need complexities.
I do something simple like that.
And I say, you know, your dean, you're
teaching me and you're all covered.
Then that tells me all I need to
know.
Right.
Yeah.
That's a very, very good, sound piece of
advice, I think.
There is a an argument or a discussion
that seems to have gained currency in recent
months and maybe even recent years about reinterpreting
the Islamic text.
Yeah, according to according to modern standards.
And one such strand of discussion is that
maybe some of the Sahaba may Allah reward
them immensely for their efforts and their struggles.
Maybe some of the Sahaba had an inverted
commas, a misogynistic mindset.
And so when they conveyed hadith, they conveniently
conveyed some hadith which would today be regarded
as misogynistic.
For example, I don't know, hadith that places,
you know, the man's responsibility to be at
the head of the household, for example.
Is that misogynistic or is that common sense?
Well, I wouldn't call that misogynistic.
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I remember
there was a Twitter and again, Twitter isn't
the real world.
And I think that's what you're what you
said in the previous answer.
But in one Twitter discussion, there was some
discussion about Abu Huraira r.a being someone
who was, you know, misogynistic in the sense
that he conveyed some hadith which the particular
person disliked.
I mean, how would you address this sort
of reinterpreting Islam from the modern lens?
Look, the first thing to note is there
is definitely being a deliberate collaboration of a
certain type of hadith telling people how to
behave in interpersonal relationships between men and women.
And it's Salafi publishing and it has been
very successful in the last 35 years in
telling us one version, one very harsh, basically
unlivable, I would say to a degree, version
of what it is to be a man
and a woman in a marriage, a marital
and housing relation, you know, a family relationship.
So there's been that editing.
Most of us don't have.
The Arabic, the thick, the sharia knowledge to
delve into these matters.
Who would I be right now to give
my even if I praise it in my
humble opinion on the on these very deep
matters?
I follow teachers and each one of us,
each of us needs to find a teacher.
And above all, our connection to Allah to
Allah, our prayers, our salah, our dhikr.
This is our connection to the truth of
the deen.
Going and doing some search and saying it's
all rubbish because I've seen the light.
I had a man come up to me,
funnily enough.
A lot happened in the last two days
at Istanbul Airport, apparently.
He came up to me and he said,
oh, you're a convert to Islam.
I know some truths about the Koran.
And I said, oh, he said, I said,
where are you from?
He said, I'm Iraqi.
I said, are you a sheikh?
He said, well, it depends what you mean
by sheikh.
I said, well, a sheikh is someone who
who learned from someone who learned from someone
who learned from someone who learned from the
the prophet, peace be upon him.
He said, oh, I know more than them.
I said, then you're very arrogant.
He said, well, I'm walking away from this.
I said, please do.
Right.
So I think we need humility.
And I think we need guides.
What do you think about the current?
I know you live in Istanbul and maybe
you've been immune to what's been going on
in the West in the last probably couple
of years.
And it's a discussion about womanhood and discuss
about gender and it's discussion about trans women
and their status in society.
And again, that's one of the complexities that
we've found.
We've had to navigate around as Muslim parents,
as as just Muslims in this community, like
how, you know, of course, we are minorities
and we we have to somewhat navigate lots
of complexities and challenges.
And as you, I think, said in an
earlier answer, it is it sometimes is a
it's a very it takes a lot of
bandwidth to be a Muslim in the West.
You've got to there's so much on the
road and you've got to just think about
lots of things.
But anyway, this this issue about womanhood has
has come along and it's a difficult subject
to broach.
I mean, how would you how would you
approach what's going on here in the West
in recent years?
You know what?
First of all, I'd like to say I'm
still a journalist and I'm married to a
journalist.
So if only we were out of this
awful, you know, the stuff that you're hearing,
the question being asked, what is a woman?
And people say, well, it's someone who thinks
that they might be and can be if
they choose would be to wear.
No, not to wear.
But it's me, you know, adult female human
is quite a simple answer to come to,
really.
We're looking at the erasure of women.
There's no doubt about erasure of the erasure.
That's quite a hard statement.
Explain that.
OK, well, I'm going to go back to
the fact that first of all, let's start
with women who are aging.
All right.
I've worked in TV for 30 years now
and about around since the last 20 years,
a host of TV presenters from the BBC
have complained about this.
Female presenters over the age of 40 saying,
hang on, I was the head of three
current affairs show.
Suddenly I was ditched and the BBC has
had to pay out record damages to a
number of women because this society, not the
Muslim society, but this secular society judges women
based on their appeal.
I just got off a plane.
How many times am I mentioning planes today?
I think I'm still in the airport.
Yeah, I was.
For our viewers, you were stuck in Istanbul
airport for two days.
Two days.
Yeah, yes.
It obviously had an impact on me, but
I was the way that women are used.
If we are very good to look at,
then we are stripped of our dignity and
put on posters next to a water bottle
going by this, it's pure, you know, and
it's filthy and it's horrible.
And I had to look for like, you
know, four hours at this.
And eventually I took it out, was on
the seat back and just turned it round.
And there was a man sitting next to
me.
I said, do you mind if I just
take that out and turn it round?
Because I did not want to look at
a naked woman.
So we're very visual as women in British
society, in European society, if we're attractive and
near naked.
If you're aging, you can feel already redundant,
ignored.
I live in Istanbul.
The women there are increasingly having duck lips,
terrible amounts of Botox.
They're looking ill.
And so along with asking, what is a
woman?
How should we look is an obsession to
everybody in this society.
And so when we have the guts and
the serenity and the sheer unbridled guts to
say, I'm not showing you anything today.
Oh yeah.
And you won't be seeing me tomorrow either.
You're just going to get my face and
what I say.
That is such a powerful statement.
So your argument is that the hijab in
a way, it liberates women in a sense,
it makes them into less of a *
object, someone that should be admired for their
beauty and that's it.
To someone who one needs to engage with
on an intelligent level.
But again, the counter argument about by many
in the West would be, well, where does
that exist?
I mean, you live in Istanbul, are women
in hijab treated in that way, that idealistic
way that you present?
Well, hang on a second.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
I lived in Qatar in 2015.
And the first time I went there, I
remember being, you know, you go to the
airport and there's the woman's line and I
was taken out by the soldier and he
goes, or the customs officer, he goes, oh,
over here, madam.
And there's nobody there.
And I walked through like royalty and I'm
like, OK.
And all the men are queuing over there.
And then I go shopping and I have
my bags picked up and carried to the
car.
And even now I go, I went to
Qatar for the World Cup.
And my husband, who's a lovely man, by
the way, he always complains that when we
go to Qatar, I expect to be treated
like a queen afterwards because I see the
women in the airport and I'm there.
They're just wafting along in black, you know,
and their husbands or their sons or other
people are carrying things.
My husband, he carries most things, but I
still carry something.
And I'm like, take my bag, you know,
because it does, it elevates us and gives
us a break.
There is a lot of beauty out there.
Does this happen all the time in Turkey?
No, but you know what?
Hijabis have a superpower.
We have a superpower.
I was told this by an Albanian girls
who don't wear hijab.
They said, you know what?
When we see you in the street, it's
like you're gliding along and we want, and
it's like you're surrounded by light and you
have a superpower.
And so as a hijabi wearing woman, you
have that, that extra meter of space.
You're either beautifully invisible because it's quite nice
to be invisible in the street or you're
just, you know, you're left alone.
Men don't press against you.
Men, men stay back a bit and that's
a nice experience because I've had the other
one.
I've been the woman in the, in the
short.
There was, there was a BBC presenter who
came to visit me after I accepted Islam.
She said, I can't believe you're the same,
Lauren.
I met at the election party eight years
ago.
I said, Oh, whatever I said, I'm sorry.
She said, I would describe you as the,
the, the woman with the biggest mouth in
the shorter skirts.
I went, yeah, that would have been me.
Right.
And no body space, no respect from the
men.
It's very different in hijab.
Mashallah.
It's a bonus.
It's a bonus.
So you live in Istanbul and anecdotally, it
seems to me that more and more Muslims
have decided to leave the West and to
move to Muslim countries like Qatar or to
Kuwait or to Istanbul.
I think in Istanbul, we've seen, you know,
a probably, I mean, last time I was
there, I saw a growth in a number
of Westerners, Western Muslims who've decided to, to
live there.
And most of them say they, they just
had enough of the, the criticisms they get
in the West.
They've had enough of the racism, maybe they
get or the Islamophobia, but also they fear
for their kids.
It's now common for Muslims here to think
about, if not moving to a different country,
to think about pulling their kids out of
school.
I mean, where do you stand on this
discussion about how intense it's become in education
and just general society towards Muslims?
You know what?
It's really interesting.
For 10 years, a friend of mine called
Anisa, she's an educator, mashallah.
She has been raising the alert, you don't
know what's in the books.
She's been on these education groups that I'm
on.
She's like, mums, wake up, ask to see
the books on your kid's curriculum.
What age?
Not 11, not 10, 7 and 8, ask
to see them.
And when you ask to see them, the
teachers say you don't need to.
Or now increasingly, you can't see them in
case you protest.
Because it is such disgusting content in children's
books at schools that they cannot show it
on the news.
The same nightly news that shows dead bodies
and bombs falling and explosions and horrendous things
going on cannot show the books that are
being given to our four and five year
olds.
This, interestingly, this is a sign of a
failing society.
There was a study done in 1936 by
a British academic, and he found the same
trigger points for each failed civilization that he
studied.
Yes, rise in androgyny, not liberation of women,
forget the word, but it's basically no protection
of the women.
Right.
And the sexualization of society, a rise in
homosexuality.
All of these things are happening.
It's a dire situation.
And I totally understand Muslim families wanting to
leave.
It is.
I thought about 10 years ago, actually, brother,
that and I still do, that if you
really wanted to get the Muslims out of
Europe, and you couldn't kill them like the
French did with the Algerians just 30 years
ago and then threw their bodies or 40
years ago, threw them in the Seine, that
what you do is you just make it
a little bit unlivable, a little bit unlivable.
Let's say in France, you can't have halal
meat at school.
Why is that?
No halal meat.
You have to eat pork if you're at
school or go without.
What if we, oh, I know they don't
like * with outside marriage, the Muslims.
How about we talk about that all the
time?
And how about we force, we say to
their children, homosexuality is an option.
And we do that at a young age.
That is kind of social engineering.
Now, I'm not saying this only affects the
Muslim community.
We're not paranoid.
This is a devaluation of the human spirit
across the spectrum.
But it really is helping us leave.
And I think it's a good leave.
I think it's a good thing.
Yeah, I think we should leave the sinking
ship and we should be building up our
countries and offering an alternative, which is what
the Ottoman and the Al-Andalusian societies did
was say, come over here.
We've got beauty here.
We've got fairness here.
We've got a way that you can move
up the ranks in society.
You're not trapped.
And for that reason, hundreds of thousands, millions
perhaps of Christians came and lived in our
Muslim communities and the Jewish community thrived for
centuries there.