Sunday, May 14, 2006

Sunday morning yaaaaawn with political content

Trying to avoid my captivating book about London's East End this morning - because when I start I can't stop - I turned on the computer to read the news while having breakfast.
Jyllands-Posten (http://www.jp.dk/dkmuslim3/) claims this morning, under the headline 'Everybody's talking about them, but nobody's talking with them', to be the first Danish newspaper to ask Danish Muslims about their opinion, today on their positions on the many forms of headscarves and dress that Muslim women can wear. The paper has, ever since the infamous drawing-incident, taken it upon themselves to educate the Danish public about the Muslim minority, their cultural and religious practices and their attempts to integrate into society.
According to the Rambøll Management who has conducted the poll, 66,6 % of Danish Muslims do not believe that teenage girls should wear the hijab when outside the home. Furthermore, the poll has a detailed section on the characteristics of the interviewees such as age, gender, occupation and how many times a day the interviewee pray. Apparently, people that pray more often have the highest percentage of yes-sayers to the question - but still, it's only half of the persons asked.
My immediate thoughts when reading this was that Jyllands-Posten is courting the Danish Muslims by giving them a voice through this kind of initiative. That they are trying to make up for their big boo-boo with the drawings. But then I thought to myself that I'm no better than the paper anyway because I assume automatically that there's a 'hidden agenda' of a negative kind behind the initiative. I must either be very naïve or very stupid because I can't see how that would be the case here - the poll is disproving the ideological strategy, the paper has been employing for years, namely gross generalisations about certain groups in the Danish society (not just Muslims) and legitimising voices of antagonists of a plural society that is already a reality and not realistically up for discussion.
The only discoursive space I see occupied still by a biased view on Danish Muslims (and perhaps even Muslims in other places as well) in this specific context is the fact that they have become a 'subject of public research'; of course teaching the public about the life of Muslims in the country - but also singling them out and putting their 'different-ness' under a microscope. Even if the poll shows that the differences are not as big and discouraging as 'we' thought, it still draws the attention of the reader to the fact that humans of Denmark are diverse and this presents a potential problem.
Besides, it would be much more interesting to ask the non-Muslim Danish what they think Danish Muslims think. And honestly, why does Jyllands-Posten never print anything about people like me, people that don't think that all Danish Muslims suppress their teenage daughters and make them wear hijab?! I never understood how this became the center of attention for debates about integration and co-existence - since when did a liberal welfare state like the Danish have anything to say about what people wear?! There are much more serious problems to address; problems which do are not analyzed thouroughly by investigating the minds of Danish Muslims alone but solely from looking at the relation between them and the non-Muslim majority of the Danish population. As the paper itself says - 'we' are talking about 'them', not engaging in active exchange of viewpoints and ideas about solutions. This initiative does nothing to dismantle the prevalent idea of insurmountable differences, rather it cements it and at the same time legitimizes it.

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