I'll begin with a story: I am sitting with an elderly relative at her kitchen table, discussing life, the universe etc. She is working at some stitching. I am thinking about eating a piece of fruit, and eventually I choose an apple. As I eat it, the conversation comes around to clothing, to what young people are wearing in their leisure time. My relative suggests: "It's no wonder that young girls are getting assaulted, with some of the things they wear." Pausing briefly, she corrects herself: "My daughter tells me that this is not the right view, and that rape is the fault of the man no matter what the woman is wearing." I do not suggest an opinion one way or the other, and we continue to talk about other things.
While we are reaching the point of media saturation over the issue of Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly's comments, I wonder whether we should spend some time actually discussing what was wrong about what the Sheik is reported to have said. It is my contention that the way in which the comments are reported implies that they are self-evidently extreme, without any recourse to explanation of why this might be the case, or how it is different to 'mainstream values'. This is a case of 'liberal' public reason posing the limits of its own applicability in the face of the moral repugnance of the other (see Povinelli, 2002). In doing so, public reason evacuates the scene, leaving only the essentialised 'self-evidence' of the other's degradation to be endlessly repeated.
In thinking about this, I haven't pursued every last story, confining myself largely to what has been reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (this, this and, from the ever-reliable Paul Sheehan, this).
The comments the Sheik is reported to have made are:
"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."
So, firstly, this is a fairly vulgar metaphor, particularly in this English translation. The alignment of 'woman' with 'meat' is an image that jars the current sensibilities of a white middle class reader (and no doubt, many other readers), even if the argument itself isn't particularly novel. In a Christian context, perhaps we could think of this as the rhetoric of the old school lay preacher. Certainly the comment is being offered in the context of protecting women from male sexual predation through adherence to a particular way of life, a particular dress code which are understood by the Sheik, and presumably his actual audience (rather than the national audience now imposed upon the sermon), to be properly Muslim. You'll also notice that in the quotation above, rape is not mentioned, even if it may be implied, and discussed elsewhere in the sermon. The Sheik has since explained that his comments were about premarital fornication rather than rape as such.
In this image, men are imagined as cats - which is to say, as predatory animals drawn to a meal that they are seen to naturally seek out where it is available. So although the Sheik says here that "the uncovered meat is the problem", there is also a recognition, albeit implicit, of the cats being a problem of a different kind. The meat is simply the site at which moral agency is seen to be applied, whereas the self-evidence of feline appetite is not open to such an application. So there is a very common schema at work here where women are designed as passive, attractive, visceral; and men are defined as active, attracted, lustful. Both of these gendered positions are being assumed as self-evident in the rhetoric, but it is the woman that is positioned as the site where moral agency can be applied. So this is a patriarchal (indeed paternalistic) argument, and therefore can be contested on those grounds.
Now that I've started to think about what might be wrong with the Sheik's comments, I'm struck by a very important question: how does this differ from other formulations about gender that circulate in everyday life and speech in Australia? Certainly I have heard similar ideas on gender expressed by white Australian men and women in many different contexts, rarely with a considered retraction. The substantive difference is that their arguments did not conclude with the idea that women should wear the hijab. Is the moment of reasoned self-correction that I depict in the story that opens this post really substantial enough of a difference to provoke moral outrage at those who do not, or are not given the opportunity, to publicly engage in such reflective moments?
Paul Sheehan has argued that the Sheik "has also done us all a favour by exposing the denialism favoured in academic, legal and media circles, and by some members of the NSW Government, that there is no problem reconciling community standards about the way women are treated and the attitudes of many Muslims living in this society." I also think the Sheik has "done us all a favour", but only if we take this situation as an instance in which to interrogate what exactly is wrong with patriarchal presuppositions, and also to think about what the purported differences between "community standards" and "the attitudes of many Muslims" actually are. Instead we see the scapegoating of Sheik Hilaly, and by extension Muslim men, in advance of any of these questions truly being posed. That is the real "denialism" circulating in this country, at the expense of a public reason that is no longer being actively demonstrated, but instead increasingly asserted as the minimal difference that separates "us" from "them". I can't help but feel, in this context, that it is liberalism itself that is being 'eaten by cats'.