The Vacant Mind of Margaret Wente

Someone had to do it. Not surprisingly, it was Margaret Wente who threw down the challenge to the women who wear the veil---the full shroud with only a slit left for the eyes.

Wente sees a growing number of Muslim women in this attire, and whenever she sees them she gets “a chill.”

“The trouble with the veil is not simply that it makes conversation difficult,” she writes. “It is that it stands for a set of behaviors and beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy. Take off your veils ladies. I beg you,” exhorts Wente.

In true Orwellian fashion, it is the vacant-minded views of Margaret Wente that are, in fact, fundamentally incompatible with those of a liberal democracy.

What makes Wente’s column a classic is that it has been written countless times in Canada over the last one hundred and fifty years.

Wente writes that while in “tolerant, conflict-averse Canada, it’s almost taboo” to ask whether the veil-wearers or the rest of us should adapt, in Europe today “there is a growing sentiment that immigrants should be more like ‘us’---if not in dress, then certainly in values---and a spreading unease that some Muslims and the mainstream may not be able to co-exist.”

What Wente has done is to depict Muslims as “the other,” as a mass or collectivity that is robbed of individuality. I’ve grown more sensitive to this because I’ve been on the road on a book tour with Haroon Siddiqui, the distinguished Toronto Star columnist who has written a book titled Being Muslim. Siddiqui makes that point that in our society today, Muslims are subjected to a psychic internment. When a Christian does something---smokes dope, exposes midriff, massacres students at an exurban high school---he or she is judged as an individual. By contrast, when a Muslim does something, a Muslim anywhere in the world---all Muslims are asked to pronounce on it, as though they are all somehow implicated, say in a suicide bombing or some other act of terrorism.

Out of this reduction of Muslims to the status of “the other” arises Wente’s query. Are these people going to fit in as immigrants? Can we assimilate them?

It’s a very old story. In Ontario, in the 1850s, following a wave of Irish Catholic immigrants in the wake of the Irish famine, people questioned whether the Irish would be unruly, un-British, a mass that could never adopt our ways. Would they join with the Fenian terrorists who were plotting to attack Canada (and actually did attack) in a campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule?

In the early 20^th century, people wondered whether Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish migrants to Winnipeg would assimilate or would they try to plot a Bolshevik revolution, as some thought they had in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In recent decades, Chinese immigrants have been similarly subjected to suspicion and doubt. Were the Chinese residents of Richmond B.C., who shopped at malls where the signs were almost all in Chinese, going to become real Canadians? Or had we encountered the mass that would never be like us?

During my years teaching at York University, I’ve learned not to judge people by their appearance, or their dress. The Orthodox Jewish student with the big black hat---who looked like my rabbi grandfather in Montreal in the 1930s---insisted on spelling the name of the deity, G_d. But his essay was no less worthy in its analysis of Canadian society that that of the kid with the pierced tongue and eyebrows, who was always reading James Joyce.

The same has been true of the hundreds of Muslim students I have taught, with the veil, without the veil, with the shroud, without the shroud. They participated in class and in the papers they wrote, as individuals.

Bigots used to brag that they could always pick out the Jews from a series of photographs. When put to the test, it turned out that they couldn’t. I defy anyone to read the essays of my students---with the names removed---and to figure out their religion, ethnicity or gender.

It’s easy these days to pick at the Muslims in our midst and to increase their feeling of psychic internment. Margaret Wente has a perfect right to peddle her brand of breezy, seemingly frank and guileless horse-crap. Why the Globe and Mail chooses to sacrifice so many hectares of forest to that end is another question.