feeds from sacw.net
print versionThe Observer, 15 December 2013
Segregation by gender has no place in our public realm
The appeasers have much to learn from those Muslim women vehemently opposed to discrimination
by Catherine Bennett
London Protest Against Sex Segregation in UK Universities
A protest at Universities UK office against their approval of segregation by sex at university talks by visiting speakers. Photograph: Peter Marshall/ Demotix/Corbis
It may or may not be lawful, depending on future lawsuits and revised advice from Universities UK, for academic institutions to compel submission to speaker demands for gender apartheid where this is the outcome of "genuinely held religious beliefs". All we can know for sure, at the time of writing, is that those with phoney or inadequately fanatical religious beliefs are unlikely to be granted the privilege of segregation in our universities. Unless they are very good liars.
Even as ridicule and condemnation of UUK advice on guest lecturers reached a climax last week, this eminent body asked Fenella Morris QC to confirm its approval of gender segregation "if not allowing it would prevent the speaker appearing". So, whatever the prime minister’s considered reaction of the day, nervous and law-abiding academies may still want to refer to UUK’s original advice on the sacred dispersal of bums on seats, alongside its recommendations on health and safety and – hilariously, given the response to its own speakers – "reputational risks".
Naturally, much speculation, not all of it fanciful, has addressed the further privileges that intolerant faiths might soon, with the support of UUK’s useful idiots, be extracting from academe. Some speakers, for example, feel equally incapacitated by the prospect of women’s faces in a university audience, or "congregation" as a Muslim chaplain, Saleem Chagtai, referred to it last week on the Today programme. Can they, too – lawfully, and with the continued backing of Fenella Morris QC – demand that women cover up, be screened from sight, or evicted altogether, supposing, of course, this is consonant with genuinely held religious beliefs?
As much as this episode promised to endear our universities to certain clients, there must be reputational fears when their representative body, having considered all the evidence, concludes that sexual regulation by a controlling, all-male religious elite has nothing to do with sex discrimination. Like the Saudi driving ban, it just looks that way. "There does not appear to be any discrimination on gender grounds merely by imposing segregated seating," the report concluded, instantly facilitating further religious appropriation of publicly owned university spaces. "Maintain segregation between brothers and sisters" is how the Federation of Student Islamic Societies advises student organisers, "keeping interactions between them at a minimum."
Segregation supporters also cited, in its defence, religious institutions where female worshippers actively choose to be concealed and silenced, challenging non-believers to dismiss their choices as internalised sexism. In fact, in a week when Britain’s senior female politicians delegated the entire segregation backlash to a gang composed of Jack Straw, Chuka Umunna, David Cameron and the father of a new generation of faith schools, Michael Gove, it is clear that these appeasers have much to learn from Muslim women such as Sara Khan, Maryam Namazie and the admirable Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who vehemently oppose gender segregation. In response, adherents to UUK’s gender apartheid indicated the welcoming "mixed-seating alternative" that universities were advised to make available where that did not conflict with genuinely held religious beliefs.
Moreover, UUK could point out, there remained the option of watching many of these speakers on the internet. YouTube abounds in films of men shouting about faith. In fact our more sensitive – and genuine – religious speakers may want to consider if anything can be done to make online audiences conform, like those in law-abiding British universities, with their own values.
Although I am naturally at pains to drape a dark cloth over the screen if one of these holy men appears when I am immodestly dressed or drinking chardonnay or in mixed/gay company, it could be that others do not observe a similar protocol. At this moment millions of unclothed and unmarried people could be listening to music or engaged in lewd activity at the same time as they watch a well-known scholar, music-hater, hammer of homosexuals and popular university speaker explaining why the niqab is compulsory for women, especially the hotter ones: "Pretty women, attractive ladies and even, some scholars say, young women should cover their face."
Elaborating on her organisation’s impatience with secular values, the chief executive of UUK, the former lawyer Nicola Dandridge, argued, correctly, that segregation is not completely "alien to our culture", even beyond the requirements of sport, modesty and sanitation. It is not only that we still tolerate the Garrick club and the dwindling number of single-sex schools founded when British patriarchy was better organised; only a century has passed since the suffragettes were being locked up for wanting to live on equal terms. Not until shortly before the Great War, Leonard Woolf recalled in his memoirs, did his circle of friends cease to be entirely male. "What was so new and exciting to me in the Gordon Square of July 1911, was the sense of intimacy and complete freedom of thought and speech," he says, "above all including women."
Conscious that this might sound ridiculous to younger readers, Woolf, writing in the 1960s, dwelt on "the intellectual and moral pressure of Victorianism" they would never have to endure; the "feeling of fog and fetters that weighed one down". But, as Dandridge says, fetters were in use long after 1911, after the vote, even after 1920, when women were first allowed to graduate. In the 70s, her interview reminded me, it was still legal for the five newly co-ed Oxbridge colleges to impose limits (usually about 20), on the intake of female students, whose reception was apt to be guarded, when not overtly resented.
Prior to our rebellion, young women joining my – notionally co-ed – institution, many of us from mixed comprehensives, were herded off on our first night as undergraduates to be lectured by the resident cleric and doctor on our responsibility not to get impregnated. At least, back in the institutionally sexist day, we did not face intervention by a 70s version of Nicola Dandridge, drawing on her considerable legal education to argue, on behalf of the college, that treating women like brainless temptresses was a traditional feature of the academic culture.
But perhaps it is too hasty to depict religious segregation in universities as a retreat to a different set of "fog and fetters" – as well as a staggering betrayal of equality campaigners. For Muslim speakers continually refer, when challenged on religious prejudice, to sublunary laws, individual choice, even peer-reviewed science.
If a cleric such as Saleem Chagtai, whose Islamic Education and Research Academy blanks out female faces on its website, can assure BBC and Channel 4 audiences that separate seating is justified by "psychological studies" as well as equalities legislation, presumably he is open to a change of heart when scientists such as the physicist Lawrence Krauss (who walked out of a segregated lecture) and advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission dictate the exact opposite?
Less promising, being inexplicable and beyond rational argument, is the matching enthusiasm on the part of British universities to find space for "genuine belief" and the supernaturally ordained. Although UUK has promised to review its guidance, it is not legal advice it needs at this stage so much as complete religious deprogramming.
