Dutch lawyer and practicing Muslim Mohammed Enait refused to stand up and remove his taqiyah for a Dutch court because according to his religion all people are equal. He was reprimanded by the bar disciplinary board consequently. Last week, the Disciplinary Appeals Tribunal threw out the ruling in Enait’s favor on the grounds that the Netherlands is a society in constant flux, that this country is now a multicultural society and that based on that the court and the institution of law must change accordingly.
Enait also refuses to shake hands with women because of these same religious beliefs, another incident that got him national media coverage. So, when the Appeals Tribunal decided in his favor regarding his refusal to rise, another media hype was born. In the influential Dutch talk-show Pauw & Witteman Enait was, let’s say, ‘interviewed’ regarding his beliefs. What ensued was neither an interview nor a civil dialogical exchange. It was however an interesting deconstruction of the media’s involvement and responsibility in Dutch politics.
Enait was asked as to why he wears the taqiyah and why he refuses to remove it in front of a judge. Pauw repeatedly referred to Enait’s ‘religious headware’ as a ‘muts’ (cap) and in one instance as a headscarf - even after Enait on numerous occasions in the interview corrected him politely. In Dutch the term ‘muts’ , as Pauw used it in a derogatory way, which judging from the audience’s and other guests’ laughter is apparently quite funny, is not something anyone and in particular a journalist would or should use to refer to the Muslim taqiday. Pauw also ironically feigned ignorance regarding the Muslim and thus Enait’s custom to speak a salawat when using the name of their profet Muhammed (i.e. ‘Praise be upon Him’).
All in all, it was clear that Pauw’s single purpose was to harass his guest, a strategy that was not lost on Enait, a law graduate from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Enait retorted by deconstructing the interview in situ. He finds it rather curious as to why Pauw is asking these questions about his religious custom to wear the taqiyah. ‘It is the same as when women wear a headscarf’, he says and adds that he doesn’t understand the purpose of these questions. Now it gets interesting. Enait turns the interview by questioning Pauw’s own motives for conducting the interview as he does. He remarks that his position is obvious as was clarified to the editorial team of Pauw & Witteman before the show as well as stipulated in no uncertain terms in the judge’s ruling which was, as he recalls, based on the idea that the Netherlands is a multicultural society and as such should respect the customs of non-Judeo-Christian traditions.
‘There is no black box here’, he says to Pauw. Instead he reasons there is something else going entirely in this ‘debate’, something which he calls out as elite racism. He recounts Pauw’s remarks to him prior to the shoot in which Pauw said that he does not believe in the multicultural society. When confronted Pauw does not deny this but tries to make his personal beliefs irrelevant to the issue at hand. But of course, that’s not possible and Enait rightly brings this out. Pauw loses his journalistic perspective when Enait pushes on and accuses Pauw of a monocultural approach. A last attempt by Pauw to re-gain his ground is by constantly interrupting Enait with more derogatory remarks and finally calling him a ‘provocateur’, someone who’s out to simply provoke hyperbolic response. That was a mistake.
Enait points out that he is no such thing. Rather, he is someone who asserted his fundamental rights as a religious person and who did so entirely with in the ‘iron cage of the judicial system’, as he calls it, and prevailed. This was not an act of religio-fundamentalism or orthodox muslim terror. This was justice. At least as defined by Western standards.
It is a shame Pauw’s own ego got the better of him. He could have asked important questions such as why Enait equates monoculturalism with racism and whether Enait thinks multiculturalism is compatible with his orthodox beliefs. And how can Enait justify his multiculturalism with his persistence to adhere to his own values with little regard for values not his own?
On all of these questions my hunch is that Enait would be severely lacking an appropriate response because he is not a multiculturalist at all. Enait would like us to believe, rather opportunistically, that he is a multiculturalist, as per the Tribunal’s ruling. We could classify his multiculturalism as that what legal theorist Stanley Fish calls a ‘strong multiculturalism’; that is to say that Enait takes universal cultural difference so seriously he cannot think through any particular difference, for if he did so, he would paradoxically undermine the general politics of difference he wants us to believe he so strongly believes in. In fact Enait displays the text book example of the only way - according to Fish - that a strong multiculturalist can maintain his position: by privileging a particular difference which necessarily represses any other differences. The particularity of the Muslim to cover his head can now be seen as fetishization. As a commodification of one’s religious beliefs, it becomes the body of difference through which Enait’s ‘multiculturalism’ is mediated. Fish concludes that there is no such thing as multiculturalism, rather there is what we can call a multicultural fallacy: multiculturalism is logically impossible. Instead there is only uni- or monoculturalism and differing shades of tolerance for cultural habits other than one’s own. Exactly the kind of culturalism Enait finds at fault in Pauw’s thinking.
What Enait’s usage of the term elite racism however does bring out is the dismal state of the left elite in the Netherlands and perhaps elsewhere. The term itself is not new. It is the object of research by Teun van Dijk at the University of Amsterdam (Discourse Studies). As Van Dijk writes ‘elite racism is seldom overt and blatant’ and - because it is practiced by a group of people (with easy access to mass media for instance) who are generally regarded as tolerant - their racism is ‘typically denied and hard to oppose’. To me, this is the upshot of Enait’s ‘performance’ on Pauw and Witteman. According to Van Dijk the general assumption is that "popular" racism and populist politics are the major reproductive forces behind racism. Instead, what Van Dijk shows is that there is a far more cunning and dangerous kind of racism found within the ranks of the elite which shape our minds through mass media on a daily and constant basis.
It has been a long suspicion of mine that both left as well as right politics fail to engage the so-called ‘muslim threat’, what is sometimes called the ‘Islamization’ of Western society, because both left as well as right fail to come to terms with their own primordial, xenophobic reflex, their xenophobic unreason. ‘It’s about the way you act’, Enait answers to Pauw’s question as to whether Enait believes he is furthering his cause when referring to the media elite in Hilversum as racist. Enait need not answer this pseudo-question. Enait, who at least for now, comes across as a misguided multiculturalist or at least someone who has succesfully laid claim to multiculturalist values has exposed the left’s failure to think their own primordial premisses which are quite simply: racist.
