California (Muslim) Girls
- 03.26.2008 - 11:48 AMToday the New York Times has an article about the many Muslim Pakistani-Americans in Lodi, California who are schooling their daughters at home. At least in the case of 17-year-old Hajra Bibi, her parents had an excellent reason:
Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.
Substituting hard labor for teasing isn’t a parental approach you’re likely to find on Dr. Phil. However, there is something distinctly American about this phenomenon. In Pakistan there is very little room left to fantasize about the benefits of Koranic society. Failed government, non-existent security, and dilapidated infrastructure have made such preoccupations significantly less appealing. But in the exurbs of San Francisco, where goods and services abound, Pakistani-Americans are as free as other spacey Californians to go after their eccentric sociopolitical dreams .
But this is not as quaint as, say, a communally worked vineyard. The kind of isolationism these families are instituting is exactly what’s brought about the Islamist problem in England. When these communities cut off their children from larger American society, they raise a generation of domestic extremists at odds with their host country. Which, as far as I can tell, is fine with the parents interviewed by the New York Times. As the article points out, “[T]he intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.”
This cannot stand. America has had an advantage over places such as England, Denmark, and France in that our Muslim immigrants flow, for the most part, into the larger cultural mainstream, whereas theirs recreate their homelands in microcosm. If our liberal attitudes toward other cultures begin to facilitate the fostering of extremists within our own borders, we’re sunk.
The first thing Lodi’s local councils need to do is get some child-advocacy groups involved and investigate the lives of these American girls who cook, clean, and serve their male relatives in the name of Allah. After that, they might want to look into their kitchen table curriculum. After all, al-Qaeda’s own Adam Gadahn was home-schooled in the suburbs of the Golden state.
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March 26th, 2008 at 1:24 PM
This is a tough one. We DON’T want to see America in the same situation as Europe. But sending child welfare authorities to intervene in the assignment of chores in a home is something a huge number of Americans would find anathema to liberty and right-sized government.
How, after all, do we justify drawing the line between Muslim sex-role distinctions in the family, and those we may find in a Christian homeschooling household, where girls do laundry and make beds and boys mow lawns and shovel snow; or those we may find in a Hasidic Jewish household?
While it’s quite true that these latter peoples don’t produce felonies like honor killings and female “circumcision” behind closed doors, what they DO do is demonstrate that observing sex-role distinctions does not inevitably lead to such felonies, or even to dangerous unassimilation.
We Americans don’t REQUIRE people to do most things that identify themselves to the tracking of the state, or expose them to its influence. We have no national identity card. Getting a driver’s license is optional. Parents can educate their children outside the public schools. It’s perfectly legal to have no Social Security number; you just won’t be able to legally do anything normal without it, like get a steady job, have a bank account, borrow money, rent or buy real estate. There are still people who live off the Social Security radar, and we don’t hunt them down. Social Security doesn’t require bio-form identification (facial recognition, hair/eye color, height/weight) anyway.
I am not sure Americans are really prepared to be, all of us, tracked as intrusively as we would have to track Muslims to ensure that they are conforming to our social standards. I know for a fact that quite a few Americans of a more libertarian bent are NOT so prepared. As always, Muslims are a problem for everyone ELSE’s liberties, in a liberal state.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:31 PM
Before we get out the pitchforks and torches, let’s take a second to ponder another exurb bedroom community, this time on the East Coast near another of our great, liberal American cities: Monsey, New York. Home of many families of Satmar Hasidim who, just like these Pakistani-Americans wish to “isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.” I doubt that the daughters are treated as domestic servants, but the gender roles in traditional Jewish communities are as deeply held and anti-modern as they are in the Muslim communities.
Let’s ask the Monsey city council would send child-advocacy groups to liberate these American girls who slaving away in the kitchen on Friday baking challah and cooking chicken for their male relatives in the name of Hashem. They’re likely not home schooled, but that’s more a function of that fact that the Satmars number in the thousands by now and can afford to set up their own yeshivot and girl’s schools.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:52 PM
There is a serious problem with Greenwald’s proposal: The United States has extended exactly the liberty of non-assimilation to others (Jews, Amish, Mennonites, etc.). As long as the Paki Muslims of Lodi (which is nowhere near San Francisco, by the way) are also willing to leave others alone, it is almost surely impossible to compel them to abide by rules that we would not think if imposing on others.
I’d rather find out the answer to a different question: Are these people legally present in the United States? For the groups I’ve listed above, the answer is “yes.” Maybe there is a legal basis for making a distinction, but a different one than Greenwald proposes.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:58 PM
Richard Belzer,
My only proposal is that the authorities make sure these girls aren’t being abused and that they are being properly educated.
Abe
March 26th, 2008 at 2:17 PM
I concur with the commenters who are concerned about the liberty interest at stake if there is heightened scrutiny of these people. I also fear, however, that an influx of people inclined not to assimilate and having the potential for becoming jihadis is undesirable, for reasons now evident in England and France.
The solution, it seems to me, is a much more restrictive stance on immigration, both illegal and legal–a five or ten-year moratorium, with a narrow exception for science Ph.D’s and refugees who are fleeing because of association with the U.S. (Iraqi interpreters, for example). A return to national-origin quotas is a political non-starter at least until the next Al Qaeda attack.
As an aside, I assume the ad, boasting a hjiab-clad young woman, for the “International Muslim Matrimonial Site” on the side of the comboxes is generated by an algorithm, not by that site’s owners’ desire to support Commentary or the magazine’s wish to encourage Islamic matchmaking.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:30 PM
It’s perfectly legal to have no Social Security number; you just won’t be able to legally do anything normal without it, like get a steady job, have a bank account, borrow money, rent or buy real estate.
Which contributes to the radicalization of muslim youth in europe.
One of the differences between US and EU with respect to integration is that immigrants MIX with natives and other immigrants. The earlier in life, the better, and that’s school. There are also minimal educational standards required to function in western society. When you allow for unregulated home “schooling” by parents who are NOT integrated and do not have the knowledge of how to educate for such functionality, which also prevents the mixing, you are more or less guaranteeing a generation susceptible to sharia law.
like the various collapses in unregulated markets have shows every decade or so, complete freedom ends up destructing the system based on it. intelligent regulation is necessary to preserve liberty without collapsing the system, and that is true in social as well as economic life.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:58 PM
“This cannot stand”
Wrong. But don’t take my word for it. Go convince the Amish. And all the other groups of folks who educate their own children and who don’t want the state busting into their homes and their families.
Of all people who should understand the fundamental justice inherent in allowing people to have the freedom to educate their own children, it should be you folks.
What kind of comment does this make about you that you would abandon your most fundamental principles just because the folks living those principles happen to be Islamic.
“get some child-advocacy groups involved and investigate”? Wow. How quickly to jump to fascism.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:58 PM
paul,
nothing taken to extremes works.
education at home is fine. but i very much doubt that what girls learn at home by unintegrated muslims is education. in order to educate you gotta be educated first.
i dont particularly care for the amish, but they don’t think they ought to impose their setup on others and rule and oppress them. and in any case i would not call the amish integrated, would you?
March 26th, 2008 at 8:04 PM
Mr. Greenwald,
Your revision is misleading at best. You did not propose “that the authorities make sure these girls aren’t being abused and that they are being properly educated.” You said “Lodi’s local councils need to … “get some child-advocacy groups involved and investigate the lives of these American girls.” It is hard to imagine a group more inclined to define “abuse” as widely as possible.
Perhaps your revision better reflects what you meant by what you said. If so, your original post was inartfully worded, at best. And I’m not sure your revision is that helpful. As of last week, it became presumptively illegal in California to homeschool one’s child without approval from the government in the form of holding a teaching credential, an early sign of brain damage.
Beware what authorities you cavalierly confer on “the authorities.”
RBB
March 26th, 2008 at 9:45 PM
Richard Belzer,
You’d prefer a narrow definition of child abuse?
Abe Greenwald