How about rights of Muslims in secular western states? Here's a contract for you to sign, prefaced by some relevant context: https://medium.com/discourse/we-always-live-by-social-norms-rules-12e765ab9bcf
Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and 2004 film “Submission” got her exiled from the Netherlands after the assassination of the film’s producer Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist. Afterwards the government put out a DVD as part of a civic integration exam to tell prospective immigrants that the Netherlands wasn’t for puritanical theocrats:
“The new test for foreigners who want to apply for Dutch residency is, well, very Dutch. It features a DVD that illustrates various aspects of Dutch life, including, most notably, a topless woman frolicking in the surf and two men kissing warmly. The message couldn’t be more explicit: This is who we are; if you don’t accept it, don’t come. Although the DVD doesn’t single out any particular group, the intended target of the message is clear. Growing numbers of conservative Muslim immigrants are seen by many Dutch as posing a threat to the Netherlands’ liberal consensus and easygoing lifestyle.”
“For would-be immigrants to the Netherlands, this film is a test of their readiness to participate in the liberal Dutch culture. If they can’t stomach it, no need to apply. Despite whether they find the film offensive, applicants must buy a copy and watch it if they hope to pass the Netherlands’ new entrance examination. The test — the first of its kind in the world — became compulsory Wednesday, and was made available at 138 Dutch embassies. “As of today, immigrants wishing to settle in the Netherlands for, in particular, the purposes of marrying or forming a relationship will be required to take the civic integration examination abroad,”
On a trip to Istanbul in December 2012, eons ago in the Islamist regime of Erdogan, we talked to a Turkish English literature professor from Ankara on our hotel terrace. He complained of the dirty looks and criticism he was now getting when he hugged or kissed his wife in public — in what was one of the most secular states of the Muslim world. See the pattern: theocratic thugs win, reformist innovators lose.
The Contract
The Arabs and Muslims I’ve known know they don’t need what George H.W. Bush called westerners’ “soft bigotry of low expectations” with regard to Islam’s fraught relationship with secularist freedom of inquiry, female empowerment and the dismantling and deregulation of their authoritarian patriarchal family life. The secular Syrian refugees I met when teaching in Stuttgart and Berlin and travelling in Prague agreed with me. They also agreed with the ideas embedded in this contract for assimilation into secular societies for refugees.
Here are the clauses in the contract that all theocrats, of whatever religion, will find difficult to swallow. Only a contract can solve the 2015 New Year’s Eve plague of sexual assaults on women that marked a Culture Collision in Cologne that Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud wrote about: “People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.”.
To treat Daoud’s Disease and avoid culture collisions, have Muslim immigrants sign this contract:
1. Groups don’t have rights, only individuals.
2. Secular constitutions supersede all religious law (Sharia, Koranic, Catholic canon law, Mosaic law). All satire of religious belief is protected speech. Religion as an ideology and belief system enjoys no special exemption from satire, ridicule, insult and open debate. Blasphemy is not a valid legal concept.
3. Absolute freedom of conscience in religion. All individuals, including all your family members, have the right to convert to another religion or no religion.
4. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is illegal and criminal.
5. Women have equal rights under the law. Your female children over the state’s age of consent have the right to marry, partner and have sexual relations with whom they choose, of a different religion or of no religion. Your female children have the right not to marry. Coercive arranged marriage is illegal. Child marriage is illegal.
6. Family honor is not a valid legal concept. Muslims in the West must explicitly renounce family honor as a legal concept and acknowledge the illegality of honor killing.
7. Wife-beating is illegal. Wives, and daughters over 18, have absolute freedom of choice in dress. Male relatives have no legal right to limit female family members’ freedom of choice in dress. (Only this taboo-breaker can solve the problem Daoud wrote about: “Clothing is also given to extremes: At one end is the burqa, the orthodox full-body covering; at the other is the hijab moutabaraj (“the veil that reveals”), which combines a head scarf with slim-fit jeans or tight pants. On the beach, the burqini confronts the bikini.”)
8. Homosexuality and homosexual relations are legal and homosexuals have equal legal rights. If you own a business you have no legal right to refuse employment to a qualified homosexual applicant or service to a homosexual customer because of his or her sexual orientation.
9. Holocaust denial is illegal hate speech.
10. Antisemitic speech, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition accepted by over 40 countries, is a hate crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. The IHRA defines anti-Zionism as anti-semitic hate speech. Accepted by 40+ countries, it defines “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” as anti-semitism.
This last clause would land the manuscript director of the UNESCO-financed Alexandria Library in jail since he included the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the library’s exhibits:
“the manuscript museum director, Dr. Yusuf Zeidan, in the November 17, 2003, edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu’, he “decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.” For Zionist Jews, he explained, the Protocols is more important than the Torah, as it informs their every action.”
But this contract can’t work unless it’s voluntary and the initiative for it comes from the Muslim citizens of secular western states and recently arrived Muslim refugees. The Syrian and Egyptian refugees I’ve known have all agreed that Islam’s tight prohibitionist governance of patriarchal family hierarchy and girls’ and women’s choices needs more of this therapy than other religions. Assuming all Muslims are snowflakes who can’t take a cartoon’s joke about their BELIEFS is a form of what Bush senior called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”.
If you’re Muslim, would you sign the contract? If not, which clauses do you object to? If you object to any, you belong in this cartoon:
If you object to the contract or disagree with the Canadian Muslim immigrant’s view of cultural norm adherence, you have 52 Muslim countries to choose from.
The survey data show what the secularized west will import without the contract. I’d apply a modified version of this contract to the mostly cold civil war between more secular urban and coastal America the metastasizing white Christian nationalist and anti-feminism in the small town and rural heartland and south. But that’s a question about what politics becomes when groups with conflicting social norms must live together in the same polity.
