Thebit comments on "secular fundamentalism", in this case, over the head scarf bans in Turkish universities. I suppose my friend Randy McDonald could be charactized as a "secular fundamentalist" because he came out in favor of the ban on head scarfs in French schools, which he justified on the grounds that it was a move toward the empowerment of women and relaxation of the control their menfolk have over them. The fact that most French women of North African origin favored it certainly gave the position some credibility. Thebit of course alludes to this when he suggests that liberals often believe behind every head-scarfed woman is an 'evil' Muslim man.

I don't believe this is true. As we've noted on this blog before, a significant fraction of women want to be slotted into a 'traditional' social structure where their lives are fixed and constrained within certain parameters that would give less latitude toward individual choice, but more security and entail less risk [1]. In the United States, the "gender gap" in voting often comes down to a tendency for women (unmarried women in particular) to vote for the Left party and men to tend to vote for the Right party, and I think this skews our perception of the male/female cultural divide. In much of the rest of the world this is not true, as women often vote for the more socially conservative party that is less hostile to religious values. Behind this is the reality that cross-culturally women tend to be more religious and so more attached to traditionalist values than men [2]. I recall a few years back that the religious & liberal parties in Kuwait were in a bind of principle & practice, while the former opposed female suffrage and the latter favored it, there was a widespread suspicion that giving the vote to women would have favored the religious parties! [3]

The general point is that sometimes people must be forced into having no choice but liberalism from the perspective of liberals! (imagine a religion that asserted that all humans must convert and they should force others, certainly a liberal order would impose tolerance by being intolerant). An omnipresent hedonistic pop-culture and an avante guarde mass media tends to push public values and norms toward a more "liberal" mean set point as the generations progress in the atomistic West. But this does not mean that there isn't a natural countervailing tendency, and that on the mass level, this tendency isn't actually stronger. In more traditionalist cultures the mass media and pop-culture are not as oppositional.

Over a year ago, Ikram and I got into an argument over at Suman's blog over the Uniform Civil Code in India, that is, preventing Muslims and other religious minorities from having separate laws in certain areas from the majority Hindu population by simply having the same law applied to all and one. I tended to favor a Uniform Civil Code for a variety of reasons, but the key point that I want to highlight is that Ikram's position was that it just wasn't practical in a country like India to take a doctrinaire individualistic stance on this and pretend as if communal feelings were not relevant or salient. I will admit that he was being more realistic, communal and religious passions in a Third World nation have more salience than I would prefer, but that is the reality on the ground that one has to grapple with, and in such contexts hewing to points of principle can have counter-productive consequences. I bring this up because in a case like Turkey, I suspect that many "secular fundamentalists" suspect that left to their own free will Turks would express a far more conservative and religiously traditionalist world-view. Keeping displays of religiosity in the private sphere preserves the secular atmosphere of the Turkish culture, even if this preservation is artificial to some extent. So, while many liberals might couch the issue in terms of women's rights and idealistic principles, they are making very ends-oriented decisions. Societal interactions are dynamic, and by diminishing the freedoms of some, in the end they believe that they will push their culture to a different energetic state from which it can not climb back over to the hill toward traditionalist conservatism (or that is the hope). There are nations where majority rule seems to slide toward anti-individualist autocracy, look to Russia. And yet the idea of a "liberal dictator" who imposes freedom is in a sense paradoxical. Freedom of choice is to some extent a luxury for a people who have been weaned away from coercion and social ostracism as a means of imposing change on those who differ in outlook [4].

Related: See Randy's recent post on Iraq & Islam.

[1] Can anyone think of a suffrage movement that wasn't middle-to-upper-middle-class? I don't know much about the movements outside of the US (like England), but here it seems suffragettes were heavily slanted toward the affluent classes of society, and the freedoms that they and their feminist descendents attained tended to accrue to that class of women. In contrast, the lower-middle-class to lower-class women seem to have gained more insecurity. Ironically, the mean satisfaction of women with their state may be no different than 100 years ago, though the variance might have increased somewhat (though subjective perceptions of satisfaction always seem to re-calibrate themselves to take into account any current context as the norm rather than exceptional. A more accurate way to state it might be that actual freedom of choice still remains constrained for women below the middle-class, while they are exposed to various risks because of "liberation," while the middle-to-upper-middle-class women reap the rewards of more practical freedoms).

[2] I was struck that 2/3 of active Christians and 2/3 of temple goers in Korea were listed as women in one book I read. Of course in places like Japan or many Latinate Christian cultures women take care of the religious duties, whether that be attending to a family shrine or attending mass. The main exception to this is in the Muslim world where male public practice of faith is more dominant than female practice because the latter are often cloistered in the home (that is, the more religious a family, the more likely a woman is to be isolated from public life).

[3] Related note, my girlfriend listened to a show on NPR where the male partners of women who had been through female genital mutilation encouraged them to go through reconstructive surgery. The women were far more cautious about this, and seemed to wonder how they would be viewed by other women in their culture. This was in the context of immigrants to the West.

[4] Social norms are more than just the weight sum of all individuals, rather, inter-individual interactions tend to play a strong role. Imagine a university class where 25% of the women wear head scarfs, and 75% of women do not. Imagine that the 1 out of 4 who wear head scarfs starts to call the 3 out of 4 who don't sluts, and begins to spread rumors about their sluttiness. One can imagine pretty soon that most of the 3 out of 4 who aren't head scarfed will begin to wear them simply because the cost (mild discomfort) is worth eliminating the daily venom they might be subject to. This takes into account the reality that mob mentality can work in a way that highly motivated minorities can take over the steering wheels of a culture.

Godless comments:

My view on this issue is that a lot of people are seeking out universalist justifications for a particularist action. That's not unusual, of course, but let's say what most polemicists and politicians won't say: this head scarf ban is popular because it resists the encroachment into France of an alien, often hostile culture.

And that is not such a bad thing.

The alternative is lacking the cultural fortitude to stand up and assert the primacy of Western Civilization. And that ends up here:

Sharia law in Canada? Yes. The province of Ontario has authorized the use of sharia law in civil arbitrations, if both parties consent. The arbitrations will deal with such matters as property, marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance. The arbitrators can be imams, Muslim elders or lawyers. In theory, their decisions aren't supposed to conflict with Canadian civil law. But because there is no third-party oversight, and no duty to report decisions,no outsider will ever know if they do. These decisions can be appealed to the regular courts. But for Muslim women, the pressures to abide by the precepts of sharia are overwhelming. To reject sharia is, quite simply, to be a bad Muslim.

The problems with Islam in the US are not so great as they are in France, as American Muslims are considerably better educated and more assimilated. (Which is not to say that there is *no* problem, of course). But if I were a Frenchman, I'd realize that Islam has to be brought to heel in France. It is too assertive and presumptuous a religion; give its adherents an inch, and they'll take a mile.

All the universalist justifications in the world don't change the fact that you would never have seen such universal support for a yarmulke ban (for example).

Addendum from Razib:

Well...this is a complicated issue, but let me stipulate that tolerance of an obnoxious and aggressive minority is OK in a liberal order below a certain threshold. For example, Christian Reconstructionists in the USA want to impose Biblical Laws on everyone and revoke citizenshp from non-Christians. They are a small enough minority that persecuting/banning/stamping them out would probably cause more harm to liberalism than the gain to be had at having removed the threat. In general free speech is totally acceptable as long as everyone tends to respect the "non-aggression principle" and even those who really don't accept it can be ignored at when they exist at sufficiently low levels. The problem crops up when an aggressive minority can start attracting followers because it is the "rational" thing to do and the liberal majority has diluted its dominance to the point where it can't "impose tolerance." In other words, an aggressive and coordinated minority can be prevented from disturbing the liberal order so long as people of liberal inclinations have an overwhelmingly dominant position within the society, whether through control of the "commanding heights" (military, media, etc.) or a high frequency representation in the population. On the other hand, when an aggressive minority reaches a certain threshold of social impact and power, a snowball effect may kick in and you could reach an inflection point in the social dynamic as "rational" liberals abandon ship and try to join the perceived victors before all is lost (this might be the dynamic of conversion to Christianity in Ireland or Islam in Indonesia, where the monotheists began as a minor cult with international connections and were a long-term presence, but once they rose to a certain level of power they quickly affected a social "take-over" and it was almost as if the previous age did not exist aside from mythological tales and legends).

The problem in the Turkish scenario is that from what I gather, 10-20% of Turks might be fundamentalists or aggressive in inclination in imposing their norms on the rest of society. As a reaction, the other 10-20% are imposing their norms on the public sphere. In a choice between fundamentalist public norms and liberal public norms, most would side with liberalism if they were liberal, even if an element of coercion is involved in the latter. The catch is those who assert that liberal norms are not threatened by the relaxation of their imposition on the non-liberal minority. If fundamentalists were below 5% of the population, I would tend to agree, but when they are 10-20% of the population I am more cautious (projecting from the dominant influence fundamentalists can have on Muslim families that I have seen personally).

Thought experiment from Razib: Christian Reconstructionism based on the extreme interpretation of Calvinist theology becomes big in the Appalachian uplands. The lay ministers of this new movement compromise with the evil Satanic government and do not sanction the stoning of adulterers and disobedient children, but, they insist that men can beat women and children at will, that their women will not be seen by "gentiles," and so forth. What would the reaction of a liberal be to this sort of behavior? What if it became the norm throughout large sections of Appalachia? I know that there are plenty of rational/analytic issues here, but what would be the emotive reaction of Blue State elites in the United States? The "race card" can be pulled out in a variety of ways, sure, one can interpret the preoccuptation with some symbolic issues (which might be indicators) on the part of white liberals as "patronizing Victorian attitudes towards non-whites," but, I do not doubt the reaction of Westerners if whites were to behave in such a fashion, and, I suspect if there wasn't some concern/intrusion into Islamist social norms other non-white activists would complain that white elites neglect the needs of vulnerable Muslim women. Can't win either way.