Who Decides What's Normal?

Who gets to decide that's normal?
Who gets to decide what faith means?
Who gets to decide who we are?

In recent months debate has raged in the
French political class about the small
number of Muslim women who wear the niqab
or the burkha. The lower house of the French
parliament has voted for a ban on the burkha.
Is this Islamophobia or extreme secularism,
or a bit of both? The debate, which is also
seen in the UK tabloid media, actually relates
to around about 2-3,000 French Muslim women. In
the UK vurtually no Muslim women wear the niqab
or the burkha. So what's this really about?

Over 30 years ago the postcolonial critic
Edward Said wrote a book called 'Orientalism'
in which he suggested that so called western
and oriental ways of thinking and being have
been pitted agaisnt one-another as irreconcilible
opposites...a legacy of the not-so glorious
colonial era. When we think in blocks, in camps
we forget that real people are a whole mix of
different ideas and cultures....Life in urban
Europe is more complicated than French
politicians, tabloid journalists in the UK or
some Salafi Muslims would have us believe....

We are not one thing or another but a whole heap
of things at the same time...Let's say 'No' to
fixed notions of identity that assume one image
is OK but another is inherently a 'threat'. No
to binary imaging of fluid identities.

Faith in urban Europe is critically important
but it cannot reasonably be reduced to tabloid
headlines or notions of believing that have not
shifted for a century....

Who am I? What is a European? How does my faith
relate to that of my neighbours? And most important
of all...How might people of faith and no-faith
build a movement aimed at fashioning social justice?

The Burkha is a side issue, so is the crucifix which
the French courts [and British Airways] tried to ban
too....What matters is the place of faith in societies
where those with power simply don't seem to get the
fluid realities on the ground...Faith in the public
square can either foster social justice and equality
or social exclusion and intolerance...I know which I
prefer.