The hijab controversy brings liberalism and multiculturalism to the limits of coherent co-existence, argues John Waters
Hitherto they seemed natural bedfellows, bestowing tolerance and piety in all directions in the manner of a John and Yoko bed-in. But this one bursts the hot-water bottle, and no mistake.
For here is an issue on which the feminist and the fascist can be friends - the one because, you know, those Muslims are so oppressive of their womenfolk; the other because the darkies must be kept down. Liberalism suddenly finds itself abed with the previously anathematised - the racist, the bigot, the xenophobe and those branded with these labels for trying to draw attention to the inevitability of our ending up where we are. The usually monolithic liberal-left constituency is divided between those who say that diversity is the pre-eminent value of pluralist society, and those who have suddenly decided that equality is more so.
This might seem either an exceptionally complex issue or an aberration that defies the logic of tolerance we had so come to trust. It is neither. Although liberals strain to create a new equation to explain the inconsistencies in a polite liberal way, the truth is that we have hit philosophical bedrock. The hijab issue provides a convex-mirror image of the advanced inconsistency arising from liberalism's belief in the unlimited reach of a coreless diversity policed by rigid notions of equality. Such diversity is as unworkable as equality is impossible.
Any notion that the French decision to ban the hijab in state schools was motivated by concern for Islamic females, is humbug. Similarly, combining the ban with a prohibition on other religious symbols, thus presenting it as an attempt to achieve the separation of religion and state, is a figleaf. This is an attempt to curtail the devotional influence of Islam, which now threatens to swamp a Europe rendered faithless by materialism and hubris.
In the equal treatment of the iconography of indigenous and external belief systems can be found the seed of Europe's undoing. It is precisely the equation of Christianity with other religions that brought Europe to its present point of vulnerability. The idea that we can arrest the influence of Islam by limiting further the instruments of our own salvation is to propose treating the condition with the virus that caused it.
Liberal Europe is in philosophical disarray, because its logic has worked too well. The idea of Europe is based on frontierless European superiority: people from all over the world would come here - as needed, of course - to be tolerated and patronised, and would forever be so grateful to, and overawed by, European pluralism and liberalism that they would never seek any kind of autonomy, never mind dominance. To make our tolerance more manifest, we would suppress our own cultural and religious character, lest the visitors become offended.
But instead of sitting demurely in their immigrant corner, some visitors took European tolerance at its word. Eschewing integration with the wider community, they looked to themselves, and began building their own citadels of faith and identity on the foundations provided by modern Europe's parasitic indifference to its own culture and traditions. Then, gaining confidence, they began to agitate and self-promote, to shout their beliefs from the rooftops and, finally, to observe how wanting they found the host culture in matters of morality and belief.
They were, of course, correct. The host culture had, in the complacency of self-belief, all but deconstructed itself. It no longer believed in anything other than the right of people to believe whatever they pleased. Up to a point, which we have now reached.
The fatal flaw in multiculturalism is its denial of a need for particularity at the centre. To be easy with the beliefs of others, we must first be secure in our own. The problem we face is not the vibrancy of particularisms in Islam, but the weakness of them in our own culture.
Secularists always claim that the worst they feel towards intense belief is impatience with its alleged superstition; in fact, they are terrified by its seemingly irrational power. European liberalism shifted the weight of its culture from God to state, and now, finding itself invaded by Islam, is unable to match it in kind.
Those who argue Muslims have a right to dress their children as faith and tradition prescribe are absolutely right. The expression of spiritual belief is a fundamental right, encompassing, among others, the right to bear witness; the right to assert humility before a Superior Being; the right to nurture a collective religious culture.
Europe will soon find that the trite ragbag of orthodoxies - rights, equality, political correctness - with which it has supplanted its traditional values will prove an inadequate defence against the austere rage of those who will now see the blurring of its condescension into totalitarianism as further proof of Europe's intrinsic degeneracy.