All democrats and socialists should fight against the government’s plans to encourage university staff spy on “Asian-looking” or muslim students, says David Isaacson

The leaked document from the department for education and skills proposing that university staff spy on “Asian-looking” or muslim students and inform special branch of anyone who might be involved in islamic extremism underlines that one of the main causalities of the ‘war on terror’ is civil liberties.

Thankfully Paul Mackney, joint general secretary of the University and Colleges Union, has condemned the suggestion, warning against getting “sucked into a kind of islamic McCarthyism”. He also points out the implications for academic freedom and democratic rights. “McCarthyism” is right. These suggestions are all too reminiscent of the cold war and its attacks on democratic rights in the name of fighting the red ‘enemy within’.

They are made in the context of increasing pressure on the muslim ‘community’. Since Jack Straw used the issue of the full veil – or niqab – in a bid to boost his chances of becoming the next deputy prime minister, we have seen a marked intensification of islamophobia, with muslim women being stopped in the street by chauvinist bigots and told to ‘do as Jack says’.

We have to be clear. Women themselves should have the right to choose what they wear. This goes for those who choose to wear the veil – many do so not just for religious reasons, but also to make a political point. But equally women should be free to choose not to wear the veil, whatever imams, elders and family may say.

Many on the left ignore the fact that the veil, like other forms of clothing, can be both a tool and symbol of women’s oppression. For example, following Khomeini’s rise to power in the Iranian revolution of 1979, his first fatwa was to instruct all women, of all religions and none, that covering their hair was obligatory. It is not the case that these ideas are entirely non-existent in the UK. Unlike the comrade I listened to at an SWP stall in Leeds recently, we do not call on people to “defend the veil”. For us the issue should be defending a women’s right to freely choose what she wears.

Salma Yaqoob put it well at the October 14 Respect rally against islamophobia: “Since 9/11 there are pressures from wider society” not to wear islamic dress, she told the audience. But this “doesn’t mean that patriarchal pressures don’t exist. They do and we also need to deal with them.” Women who are in education and in work should not be forced back to the home because of a ban on the hijab or the veil. This “does not help women to be empowered”, she correctly pointed out. But she was also the only speaker to argue for the right of women not to wear certain forms of dress as well as the right to wear them.

In contrast, the official statement on this question featured on the Respect website goes out of its way to blur the issues involved: “The claim that to dress differently is to create division is so absurd that it is only given credence over the niqab because of already rampant islamophobia. The Hassidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north London, dress in clothing modelled on the 18th century. Both men and women dress very differently from non-Hassidim. Sikh men dress distinctively. Punks dress differently. Goths dress differently” (www.respectcoalition.org).

This is nonsense. The Hassidic Jews dress in this manner precisely in order to help reinforce barriers against assimilation into the wider society. It is a little like saying that the Armish people of central Pennsylvania, USA, who shun electricity, telephones and many of the conventions of wider society in order to isolate themselves from the world, just happen to dress like mid-19th farmers. Just like goths or punks, dressing this way sends a signal, is expressive of a particular cultural and social outlook shared by that group.

Clearly, the convention of the veil is rooted in the oppression of women and has been used historically to ensure that they cannot take a full part in society. Thus we should have no fear of saying that we would prefer women to discard it. But this must be an act of self-liberation: it must never be imposed from outside for chauvinist reasons.

Nor should we be neutral about religion. Marxists are atheists. We seek to overcome religious superstition and win people to a materialist outlook. We are also secularists and advocate the complete separation of state and church (or mosque, temple, or whatever) in order to achieve the full equality of believers and non-believers. As such we are opponents of political islam, a reactionary and repressive political movement.

Communist Students will argue for united campaigns with islamic societies on campuses in order to counter any surveillance or harassment of “Asian-looking” students, or in defence of any of our civil liberties and democratic rights – including organising ethnically (and sexually) integrated physical defence squads when necessary. But we are not in favour of strategic alliances with forces whose programme is opposed to that of working class socialism.

Carrot and stick

Why did Straw speak out against the niqab? His comments require a more subtle analysis than simply shouting “racist” at him.

Only a small minority of muslim women wear the niqab (well under 5%). They are a highly visible minority who are commonly perceived to be more ‘extreme’ or ‘fundamentalist’. The government has attempted to divide muslims as either ‘moderates’ or ‘extremists’- and holds out the ‘carrot’ of full acceptance into British multicultural society for the former. It will promote and reward those ‘good’ muslims that accept its version of ‘Britishness’ – deference to authority, abstract notions of fair play, the supposed democratic traditions of the British imperial state.

The ‘extremist’ minority are targeted as a lesson to ‘moderates’ of what the ‘stick’ looks like. The ‘moderates’ are encouraged to police the ‘extremists’ in the muslim population – it is not just university lecturers that the government wants to spy on young muslims, but their own parents.

We want the greatest unity of working people of all ethnicities; we do not celebrate divisions for their own sake. We are for assimilation – not forced from above, but voluntarily from below; and not on a national basis, but worldwide.