When
I was first asked to profile Irshad Manji, I recoiled
after reading one of her articles in the New York
Times. Abhorrent as her position seemed to be I
struggled with myself to defend on principle her
right to hold it. It seemed she had committed an
act of profanity against one of those sacred ideas
that rests inside a tabernacle deep within our minds.
With a little more diligence I could have spared
myself the angst. The problem was basic: I had allowed
myself to be influenced more by the title, which
she did not write, than the article which she did.
The title left little room for ambiguity - Irshad
Manji had come to love the Israeli apartheid wall.
Despite having experienced shoddy sub-editing, on
this occasion leaving me without any recourse to
the fool's pardon, I was taken in and subsequently
called Manji to account for a position she did not
in fact hold. Nothing in what she wrote remotely
suggested she was having a love affair with the
apartheid wall.
No,
she made no claim whatsoever to love the apartheid
wall, merely saying that she had reluctantly come
to see it as a necessary measure to protect Israeli
civilian life. While there seems no reason to object
to the sentiment of protecting civilian life, Israeli
or otherwise, this is not, it seems to me, the primary
purpose of the apartheid wall. For that reason it
is still a source of irritation to find that Irshad
Manji, who demands the right to be free from what
she calls Islamic totalitarianism, can endorse,
albeit in qualified terms, the fiendish construction
that is the Israeli wall. While I have difficulty
trying to reconcile her admirable belief in universal
human rights with her perspective on that diabolical
wall, I can find no intellectual or ethical reason
for seeking to deny her the right to air the view
that it protects civilian life.
For
freedom of political expression - which means something
other than freedom to agree with 'us' - is a vital
ingredient within any democratic culture. It is
even more vital when forced to operate as part of
a democratic subculture within a wider societal
apparatus that seeks to close down space to any
perspective that is not its own. Here such expression
is at the heart of any democratic and enlightened
challenge to authoritarian and obscurantist systems
that try to impose draconian regimes on the people
they seek to rule over. There are enough reactionaries
working 24/7 to invent new forms of censorship without
those supposedly progressives complementing them
by seeking to corral free speech in accordance with
some doctrinaire formula, for which they have developed
an addiction.
This
is why the debate about the Danish anti-theocratic
cartoons has seen the left divide on opposing sides
of the dispute. Fragmenting, admittedly, is hardly
a new phenomenon for the followers of Trotsky, as
well as fellow travellers. Some of them, sensing
with orgasmic pleasure yet another golden opportunity
to split and scream 'deviationist', have rushed
the breach with gusto. All quite normal behaviour
for the residents of Trot town.
Some
on the left have remained faithful to the values
of the enlightenment, out of which the Marxist tradition
grew. Others have opted for the absolutism of the
pre-enlightenment world, where faith rather than
reason prevails, because it holds out the possibility,
if only in their own minds, that they might yet
become the new priesthood leading the one true church
of the party faithful. That true church has been
historically ordained by the immutable iron laws
of class struggle to rule over the 'uneducated'
proletarian masses who labour under the burden of
false consciousness, until such times as the second
coming of Trotsky heralds a Marxist renaissance
which in turn will pave the way for a Nirvana Commune.
All
tripe and they alone profess not to know it. When
they tell us they find the publication of the cartoons
inexplicable, the only response is to laugh and
think, 'well, it would be inexplicable to them,
wouldn't it.' Yet, thankfully, we live in a world
that still allows all types, and if your goal is
to be inconsequential the irrelevant left can chalk
up at least one unmitigated success. Most who know
the type prefer to give them a wide berth, comparing
their ability to impact on events to that of the
French cow standing in a field with its 'blank stricken
stare … watching a train go by.' The cow directs
the train in the same way the irrelevant left direct
events. By logical extension what position they
take on the debate is hardly going to matter one
way or the other. By siding with the obscurantists
and theocrats against women demanding universal
human rights they are trapped in a dilemma of their
own making which exudes both hypocrisy and latent
racism. Abandoning the modernism of Marxism they
have slipped into a postmodernist vortex in common
cause with so many Western liberals. Their sole
response was best summed up by Martin Hollis: pursued
to its conclusion the only terminus awaiting them
is an intellectual quagmire, signposted, 'liberalism
for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!'
Racism, how are you?
For
those still eager to protect free speech, on this
occasion in the face of those who think women should
traipse around as veiled second class citizens -
allowing its opponents rather than its advocates
to find the boundaries - there is awareness that
to encroach upon it is a double edged sword. To
decommission the one weapon in the armoury of those
opposed to war, poverty, injustice - our freedom
to critique the systems responsible for perpetrating
such inhumane practices - hands to those who wish
to bomb the Iraqis to smithereens, who contemplate
making Iran the new killings fields, who never rest
in their wicked support for a repressive framework
that unceasingly abuses the human rights of Palestinians,
who coordinate and synchronise torture on a global
basis, a lever with which they can joyously tighten
the thumbscrews. And those of us who speak out will
be silenced and reminded that free speech only means
free speech 'but'? As one of Irshad Manji's co-signatory
to the Manifesto Against Totalitarianism, Maryam
Namazie, so forcefully argues, 'that is why the
defence of free speech and expression are so intrinsically
linked to the defence of other rights. You cannot
defend one without the others.'
Irshad
Manji believes passionately in protecting the speech
that allows us to go on criticising those who wage
war on Iraq and oversee global inequality, while
her so called anti-war critics would have the founds
of that critique unearthed below us all in order
that they may remain true to their own bizarre interpretation
of some obscure Marxist tenet. At a time when Donald
Rumsfeld is determined to muzzle the media in order
to allow the war on Iraq to be prosecuted more vigorously
she, not the Trotiban, firewalls the intellectual
space in which critique and opposition flourishes,
without which the powerful and the unjust shall
remain unaccountable.
