FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - What Women Want

Rant Number 424 12 January 2011

If Charles Martel had not defeated the Moors at the battle of Poitiers in 732, perhaps ‘the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad’. So mused Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Pace Gibbon, in AD 2011 students may choose to study Qur’anic exegesis at Oxford. Plus, in Britain ‘record numbers embrace Muslim faith’, an Independent newspaper headline ran last week. It seems converts to the revelation of Muhammad have doubled in 10 years. A study by Faith Matters, an interfaith think-tank, suggests 5000 become Muslims each year, making maybe 100.000 altogether - though that is only a ‘guesstimate’. (Oh, getting the snip – circumcision, al Qitaan in Arabic – is not obligatory for male converts, only recommended – that must encourage recruits.) What The Independent kept mum about, however, is something even more stunning: two-thirds of the known Muslim converts are women. Wallahi! Maybe our establishment sky pilots, Church of England vicars, should take notice. What if their old ladies – a sizeable part of the flock – ‘turned Turk’, as one used to say? Who would be left to serve tea and biscuits after the service? A real logistic nightmare.

Women turning to Islam. ‘A case of turkeys voting for Christmas’, a wit commented online. But what will do as a joke won’t be good enough as an argument. After all, have you heard of many Germans embracing Judaism under the Third Reich? So masochism or self-hatred won’t do as answers. Despite a media tendency to equate Islam with terror and violence and the cacophonies of puffed-up, hysterical scribblers like Chris Hitchens who preach about the horrors of ‘Islamo-fascism’ (a contradiction in terms, surely) the religion draws. Especially, wonder of all wonders, women. The very sex allegedly discriminated against, worse, victimised by Islam, flocks to the Crescent. Presumably to be beaten by their husbands, enslaved like dogs, imprisoned in the home, chained to the kitchen sink, shut into burka, treated as non-persons, robbed of education, all that. What a slap in the face of all liberal, right-thinking folks! Of the ‘sisters’, above all. News like this must make them eat their hearts out. It militates against everything the egalitarian, ‘emancipated’ brigade hold dear. A challenge to their reason. It is impossible. It cannot be. And yet...it is.

Could it just be, on the other hand, mad though it may seem to a certain type of progressive Western mindset, that those women converts like to feel looked after by men? Protected? Cared for? That they may even freely choose to dress and behave modestly? (Huh! Modesty! It used to be a Christian virtue, was it not? When did you last hear the general Synod of the C of E commend it?) That many women may actually prefer, horribile dictu, being mothers, looking after the home and the children? That they may find more happiness and contentment not in the workforce but...in the home!?! I wonder.

My son Linus, a bit of a feminist, sounds off. ‘Dad, it’s rot! I know Muslim girls in my college who can’t stand the mullahs or the religion. You can’t pass from ‘some’ to all’. Logical mistake. Just because some women convert, it doesn’t mean all do. Look, in my church we have quite a few Muslims who have become Christians. Mostly Kurds. Some are women. There must be more around. They don’t advertise it because they don’t want to be killed but they are there. So stop being a Muslim apologist, dad, will you?’

Muslim apologist? Moi? A priest! How unfair can my lad be? However, forget about the matter of Islam. Too emotive, visceral a subject, I suppose. (I wonder what bad Dr Freud would say...) I will turn instead to sociologist Geoff Dench’s revealing short book, What Women Want. ‘Evidence from British Social Attitudes’. A real gem. Please, do get it. (Hera Trust, Gardner Books.) Geoff’s work is not doctrinaire, a priori, theoretical stuff. Rather, it is based on empirical research. It seems that our politicians – surely the most despised and despicable race under the sun – have determined not to listen to what many women really do want. Governments – Labour and Tory alike – have bent over backwards to ‘create a workforce in which men and women occupy identical positions’. But research by the Centre for Policy Studies, relying on the findings by the leading national survey, point in a different direction.

Many women, it seems, are happier in ‘the private realm’, i.e. in domestic life, the family and the community, than in paid work. And there are class differences in happiness, too. Middle class females are the chief advocates of paid work. The media devote an inordinate amount of attention to the career problems of middle class women. They have little sympathy for the lives of those women who put their efforts into, and derive their fulfilment from, family life. Working class ladies feel more contented in domestic life, it seems. And that is even true of lone mums. The latter may even be the victims of state policies which prioritise getting women into work.

Where do we go from here? Geoff has his own recommendations, and you’ll have to read the book to find out. Marriage certainly ranks high in his scale of solutions. I agree. You see, when in parish work I was privileged to prepare couples for marriage and then marry them. One thing always struck me: love. The love I could see shining through the eyes of the men and women whom I married. But note: marriage is above all a sacrament. Not just a contract. It is a holy bond, in God’s name, binding two beings for ever in His sight. Unless marriage really is that...well, we are back to Tolstoi’s terrible tale, The Kreutzer Sonata. Just check that out, too.

‘Dad, you are a man! What damned right have you got to tell women...’ explodes Linus. Well, my boy, I have the same right as Adam had with Eve.