Andy Ngo, a talented up-and-coming young writer from the “anti-PC liberal” camp, has found himself in hot water over a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A Visit to Islamic England.” The article has been called“ridiculous,” “silly,” “cowardly” and racist,” and the reaction on Twitter has been what you’d expect. The backlash to the article has been nasty and extreme, accusing Ngo of racism and bulldozing over some points that are worth considering. However, there is no question that the article was seriously flawed — and is an object lesson in the pitfalls of writing about Islam and Muslims in Western societies.
Before I continue, I should say that I know, like, and respect Andy Ngo. Andy, a Vietnamese-American graduate student at Portland State University, has done excellent work covering the culture wars. He is also an editor at Quillette, a fine (and often unfairly attacked) online magazine to which I am proud to be a contributor. Andy is not a racist. He has a strong interest in the problems posed by radical Islamism and conservative Islam, and he’s not a stranger to controversy on those issues; a little over a year ago, The Vanguard, the PSU student-run newspaper, fired him as social media editor for sharing a clip in which a Muslim speaker on an interfaith panel said that if a country chooses to follow Islamic law, apostates who leave Islam must be either killed or banished. (The Vanguard editor made the dubious claim that the clip was out of context.) But he has also written with sympathy and sensitivity about Muslim reformers and about the struggles of gay Muslims and their families; I know this very well because we first made contact when he asked me for advice on placing one such article.
That said, I think the “Islamic England” article was regrettably below his usual standards.
Radicalism, lack of integration, and rejection of modernity in Muslim communities in Europe, including the United Kingdom, pose real problems. Two years ago, reports on the situation in Paris suburbs where women were not welcome in cafés sparked protests in France. Around the same time, a pollof British Muslims found that slightly over half believe homosexual relations should be illegal, nearly half of the men and a third of the women think a wife should always obey her husband, and over a third (compared to less than 10 percent of all Britons) think Jews have too much power.
Some of these data are disputed; for instance, the British study polled only Muslims living in areas that are at least 20 percent Muslim, which leaves out about half of the UK’s Muslim population (and may skew the results if those living in neighborhoods with a lower concentration of Muslims are more assimilated and socially liberal). And some of these issues are not unique to Muslims; witness, for instance, the tensions between secularism and the Orthodox community in Israel. But that hardly invalidates the concerns in Europe, particularly since militant Islamic fundamentalism in our time is associated with far more extreme beliefs and actions than even the hardcore fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Judaism. (One in five Americans — mostly, no doubt, conservative Christians — still believe same-sex relations between consenting adults should be illegal, but it’s unlikely that many of them support the death penalty for transgressors.)
So yes, the problems are very real. But so is the “Muslim peril” rhetoric that often has the effect of treating Muslims living in Europe as menacing “dark hordes.”
For one thing, such analysis often inflates both the Muslim presence and the associated problems. The debate about the alleged “Muslim rape epidemic in Sweden” is a case in point: The facts are nearly impossible to sort out, since a likely real rise in sex crimes by migrants gets conflated with a spike in rape reports due to a feminist-driven expansion in the definition of rape.
To take another example: Douglas Murray’s controversial 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which makes some thought-provoking points about the effects of large-scale immigration combined with Europe’s loss of confidence in its values, opens with a startling but misleading factual claim. In 2011, writes Murray, “only 44.9 percent of London residents…identified themselves as ‘white British.’” He doesn’t mention that Irish and white European residents combined made up another 14.8 percent, and that only 12.3 percent of Londoners in the 2011 Censusidentified as Muslim. (After English, the most common language in London is Polish, spoken by nearly 2 percent of the city’s population.) Yet given the book’s themes, one might assume that British Londoners are being displaced by the Muslim invasion.
Andy Ngo’s embrace of the alarmist “Islamicization” narrative led him, unfortunately, to make a number of embarrassing errors and sweeping assumptions. Thus, he assumed that an “Alcohol restricted zone” sign on a pole in Tower Hamlets, a London neighborhood with a 38 percent Muslim population, was a concession to the Islamic prohibition on alcohol; in fact, it appears that such zones are simply areas where consumption of alcohol is forbidden for entirely secular reasons of curbing public intoxication and misbehavior. (Laws and ordinances that forbid public drinking are common in the United States.) Three days after publication, the article was updated with a correction on this point.
Ngo’s comment about the lack of eye contact between Muslims going to the mosque for a Friday prayer and non-Muslim residents going the other way also drew a lot of ridicule.
There has been harsh criticism of the article’s depiction of areas with a high density of Muslims as virtual Islamist enclaves, with segregated fitness centers, halal eateries, all-male cafés, and boutiques with “modest” clothing; critics say there are plentiful and diverse non-Muslim establishments in the same areas. And in fact, some of Ngo’s claims seem to be based on superficial observations that are not borne out by facts. Thus, describing his visit to the small town of Luton, he mentions visiting a bustling mosque and then passing by three other mosques, “vibrant and filled with young men coming and going,” as well as “a church, which was closed and decrepit, with a window that had been vandalized with eggs.” The implication is clear: dying churches, thriving mosques. But when I did a Google search for “mosque in Luton” and “church in Luton,” it turned up 28 mosques and 129 churches. (Wikipedia lists 117 active churches in the town.) It is also worth noting that, as Ngo acknowledges, he observed an unusually high level of Muslim religious activity because his visit was just before the Eid holiday.
So yes, much of the criticism is warranted. But many of the attacks are also symptomatic of the pseudo-progressive approach that glosses over real problems in conservative Islam.
For instance, many of Andy’s critics found particular hilarity in this passage:
When I was visiting the U.K. as a teenager in 2006, I got lost in an East London market. There I saw a group of women wearing head-to-toe black cloaks. I froze, confused and intimidated by the faceless figures. It was my first encounter with the niqab, which covers everything but a woman’s eyes.
Splinter News’ Libby Watson sneers:
What… The fuck? FROZEN with fear? He was at least 13, and he was scared of someone wearing a niqab? This is presented as a normal reaction, not worthy of any introspection: of course this impressionable young lad would be afraid of an unfamiliar item of clothing.
Watson thus normalizes the niqab as just another “unfamiliar item of clothing” (no different, for instance, than the sari or the dashiki). But first of all, it’s ridiculous to pretend that a figure dressed entirely in black with the face covered except for the eyes would not look shocking and creepy to many teens — or, frankly, even adults who are not used to the sight. Facial covering violates one of the fundamental norms of human interaction in most cultures; it also has all sorts of negative associations, from spectral figures in horror films to robbers and terrorists in black ski masks.
Secondly, female face veiling has inescapable misogynistic connotations. (This is not to argue that all Islam is misogynistic; the vast majority of Muslim scholars do not believe Islamic norms require the niqab or the burqa, a head-to-toe body and face covering.) Progressives love to talk about “erasure,” but the niqab quite literally erases female individuality. It is worn by a small minority of Muslim women, at least among those who have a choice in the matter. Many observant Muslim women reject all veiling, not only the niqab but the hijab, which covers only the hair; some support banning the niqab in public places.
It should be noted that there is no information on what percentage of British Muslim women wear the hijab or the niqab. (In France, as of 2009, around 1 percent of Muslim women wore the niqab or the burqa; there are no data on hair-covering.) But many acknowledge that the hijab, at least, is becoming more common.
A few years ago, British writer Yasmin Alihai-Brown, a left-wing feminist who is also a practicing Muslim, published a book called Refusing the Veil. In the book and in her articles, Alihai-Brown has expressed alarm about the spread of veiling among British Muslim women, often as a cultural and political statement of identity, often as a coercive social and religious norm. She sees veiling (even the hijab) as “an affront to female dignity, autonomy, and potential” and a retreat from progress, as well as self-imposed isolation. “A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked, walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort,” Alihai-Brown wrote in a 2015 Guardianarticle. She also stresses that in many countries, veiling is imposed by force and by threat of draconian punishments.
According to Ngo, the first English-language booklet he picked up at a Luton mosque was a text by a fundamentalist preacher arguing that the Qur’an prescribes the hijab for women. I think Alihai-Brown, for one, would agree that this is a cause for concern and not mere alarmism.
And Ngo’s article makes other points that deserve serious attention. If all-male cafés and sex-segregated gyms become something of a social norm in some British neighborhoods, how will it affect the larger culture? Does the mandate to Muslims to“re-establish the Shari’ah” (Islamic law), which Ngo finds in another pamphlet from another mosque, really refer, as Watson argues, simply to living according to religious norms on a personal level, or is it a call for social action?
The “Islamicization of Europe” narrative can lead to fear-mongering, unwarranted stereotyping, and sloppy reporting (and yes, it can fan hostility toward Muslims). But the standard progressive view in which “Islamophobia” is the only real problem has its own pitfalls: a see-no-evil approach that is just as likely to disregard facts and that ignores the real threats posed by militant or ultraconservative Islam, particularly to the groups that are normally at the center of progressive concerns such as women and gays.
Andy Ngo will, I hope, learn from his mistakes. But his detractors need to do some hard thinking, too.
Update: The article has been updated to acknowledge that The Wall Street Journal acknowledged the error with regard to the “alcohol restricted zone.”
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