A vegetarian gives me a useful lesson

It’s always salutary to be taught a lesson about your own character.

When the process comes in combination with an excellent meal, the experience becomes invaluable in so many ways. He wins every point, some ancient once said, who mixes the useful with the agreeable. And that was certainly the case here.

It’s not easy to be a vegetarian in Spain. When one of my sons, then still a vegetarian, first moved to the country his announcement that he wanted a vegetarian meal would be greeted by waiters with the statement, “Yes, sir. How would you like your potatoes?” But ten years on, things have changed. Today, in Valencia, which we’re visiting with a vegetarian friend, there is quite a choice not only of vegetarian but even of vegan restaurants.

We booked for one to celebrate my wife’s birthday. When we turned up, however, the manager could find no trace of the booking. At first she denied it had been made but then, as she carried on talking to our daughter-out-law who’d made the reservation, a terrible awareness grew on her.

“It was me, wasn’t it?” she asked, “I spoke to you on the phone.”

In the end she apologised profusely and with great unhappiness. “Come back tomorrow,” she implored us, “the meal will be on me.”

But I was in no mood to be forgiving. I was tired – it had taken us the best part of half an hour to walk to the place – and hungry – the Spanish like to eat late by my standards – and I was in no mood to tolerate poor service.

“Come on,” people kept saying to me, “everyone makes mistakes. After all, you can’t claim never to make any, can you?”

These are people who’ve known me far too long for me to get away with any such claim. Besides, I pride myself on recognising my mistakes and trying to learn from them. So I limited myself to grumbling about bad TripAdvisor reviews.

The next day, I kept demanding that we phone to confirm the reservation before we walked back to the restaurant. But no one did. There was general if unspoken consensus that we ought to trust the manager and that, however much I might want to bear my grudge, as a group we weren’t going to.

And I must admit they and not I were wholly right. We turned up and were shown straight to our table, not even by the manager but by another waitress. She smiled, sat us down and told us the menu they’d planned for us. It was excellent.

The Restaurant Manager
Warmhearted, kind, friendly.
Not at all a suitable object for my resentment

When the manager appeared, I attempted to explain to her that we’d pay for the meal, and when she refused, that we would at least pay for the wine. She refused that too and when she went so far as to place a kiss on my cheek, I really couldn’t maintain any further resentment against her.

Why, she even served my wife a slice of a cake with a candle on it as a belated birthday greeting.

In the end we did the opposite of a runner: we fled the restaurant having left enough money on the table to cover at least the wine and the service.

My TripAdvisor review is, of course, outstanding. After all, I’ve had a great meal. And an invaluable lesson in what tolerance really means, when you live it instead of just paying lip service to it.

Banning the Muslim veil to protect Western values

On 29 November, the lower house of the Dutch Parliament voted for a partial ban on the burka, the full-face covering veil worn by a minority of Muslim women. If the vote is confirmed by the upper house, the veil will be banned on public transport, in government buildings and in schools.

On 6 December, Angela Merkel, preparing her run for a fourth term as German Chancellor, told the conference of her party, the Christian Democrats, that she too favoured a partial ban.

“The full veil must be banned,” she declared, “wherever legally possible. Showing your face is part of our way of life. Our laws take precedence over honour codes, tribal customs and sharia.”

Angela Merkel at the CDU Conference

Holland used to enjoy a reputation as one of the most liberal countries on earth and, despite the irruption on the scene of a number of hard right-wing parties and individuals – none more so than Geert Wilders, now leading in opinion polls – it retains much of the structure of a highly liberal nation. Merkel has also emerged in the last few years as one of Europe’s most liberal leaders, most notably with her decision to allow a million refugees to enter the country – a decision, incidentally, which she now says will never be repeated.

France and Belgium have already banned the burka and even the niqab, the form of veil which leaves the eyes exposed. Such veils are, it seems, deeply disturbing to Western societies. We are used to seeing faces (part of our way of life, as Merkel says). A covered face is hostile or even sinister, marking the criminal covering his features to avoid identification and capture. During the Northern Ireland troubles, an icon on both sides was the man in the balaclava, the clothing of choice of killers in either camp. 

Faces hidden from sight make us uncomfortable. Discomfort is never easy to bear. It seems that even liberalism finds it difficult to withstand. The developments in Holland and Germany suggest it has a fatal tendency to give way when made uncomfortable. 

That, however, leads to the heart of the Muslim veil conundrum. If liberalism backs down as soon as it’s faced with a perturbing difficulty, what is liberalism worth? Or, putting it another way, it’s easy to tolerate things we’re comfortable with; it’s when we deal with things that make us uncomfortable that our tolerance is truly tested and we have to prove whether it’s genuine or not.

These matters all became personal to me a few weeks ago at a badminton club where we play most weeks. A new, beginner joined. And she came in a niquab.

She’s covered head to foot. Her sleeves are held in place by loops over her thumbs. Her leggings reach down to her shoes. Her only exposed flesh is on her hands and a strip around her eyes. 

Playing badminton with someone dressed that way was certainly a new experience. I suppose it initially felt odd. But it quickly became commonplace. We were all struck by her speed around the court, by her accuracy, by the strength in her wrists. She plays a great deal better than most people who’ve played as little as she has.

When we shake hands at the end of a game, as is the convention, she won’t shake mine or that of any other male player. So what? She smiles (a smile with the eyes is far more telling than one just with the lips). She repeats the usual compliments we all give each other – “good game”, “well played” (the latter always with the subtext, “not quite well enough for us”).

She is, in fact, one of us. If we feel uncomfortable about her dress, what gives us the right to inflict our feelings on her? Her dress codes does us no harm, and it doesn’t hold back her game. What on earth business is it of ours?

I’d go a step further. If we imposed a Muslim veil ban in Britain, she would no longer feel she could come out and join us. She’d be forced to stay at home and give up on a form of exercise which must do her good and which she evidently enjoys. While she’s with us, incidentally, her husband’s looking after the children. That’s a form of equality between the sexes that we, in the West, generally criticise Islam for not displaying enough.

In fact, banning the veil far from integrating our friend more closely into Western society and into an adoption of its values, would hold back her assimilation. In other words, it would produce precisely the opposite effect of what we claim to seek. I fully understand the need, for security reasons, to be able to demand that burka-clad people show their faces to suitably empowered authorities such as the police; I see no reason why Muslims should be forced to abandon the veil generally in public.

One right no constitution in any country guarantees, is the right not to be made uncomfortable. If learning to overcome some slight discomfort in ourselves protects important rights in others, and helps to assimilate different communities better into our society, why shouldn’t we make that effort?

It’s my feeling, and I have personal experience to back it up, that a Muslim veil ban would be a completely unnecessary, illiberal and intolerant measure that would undermine, rather than upholding, Western values.

Islamophobia and the unintended power of prayer

It’s always good to replace doubt by certainty.

I’m not sure whether anyone still believes that the basis of Islamophobia isn’t racism, rather than merely religious bigotry. Some perhaps cling on to that illusion. So an incident at Luton airport the other day is at least helpful in dispelling any such uncertainty.

Laolu Opebiyi is a British citizen living in North London. He’s also a committed Christian. I repeat: Christian, not Muslim. He belongs to a group called ISI Men. I repeat: ISI, not ISIS. ISI stands for Iron sharpens iron and is a reference to the Bible: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Proverbs 27:17).

Unfortunately, sitting on a plane at Luton he used his phone to text members of his group to suggest a conference call prayer, and received a most unwelcome lesson of the effectiveness of prayer, in a wholly unintended way.

The passenger in the seat next to him was reading the text over his shoulder.

“What do you mean by prayer?” he asked.

The neighbour was soon asking to be let off the plane as he felt unwell. And a little later, Opebiyi was taken off it himself by armed police, who questioned him about his beliefs and demanded the password to his phone so they could check just what he’d been texting. They asked him to confirm that he was not only Christian, but had never considered converting to another religion.

The police quickly cleared Opebiyi of the damaging charge of religious belief with intent to be a Muslim, and said he could travel on. Then the pilot intervened, refusing to carry him. So he had to catch the next flight. Seven other passengers who’d left the earlier flight to avoid him realised that he was going to be on the one they were taking instead, and there was another bit of a scene.

Eventually, he got to his destination. But when he returned, his passport was refused by the e-passport reader and border staff questioned him again. As he told the Guardian:

Someone felt I was a terrorist because they saw the word ‘prayer’ on my phone and now I stand in uncertainty about my freedom of movement in and out of the United Kingdom.

I have nothing but sympathy for his view that:

Even if I was a Muslim, it was pretty unfair the way I was treated. I don’t think anyone irrespective of their religion should be treated in such a way. If we keep on giving in to this kind of bigotry and irrational fear I dare say that the terrorists will have achieved their aim.

An excellent point. The triumph of terrorism doesn’t lie in a bullet or a bomb. It happens in our minds and hearts.

Finally, here are some test questions for you.

What colour do you think Mr Opebiyi’s skin is?

Laolu Opebiyi: victim of Islamophobia.
Without even being Muslim

Do you still think that Islamophobia is all about the finer points of conflicting religious doctrines?

Aren’t we good in the West at illustrating our unshakeable commitment to the principles of democracy and human rights?

A Muslim nation that offers an object lesson in tolerance

Warmth. That’s what I remember most from the week we spent in Tunisia the week before last.

Not just the physical kind, though there was that too: in the mid-twenties Celsius. It’s the perfect level, comfortably warm without being unbearably hot.

But the main thing was the human warmth. An awareness that others too had rights. A willingness to treat them as you’d want to be treated yourself.

The Tunis Souk.
Lively, bustling, diverse. Fun

There was an expectation that we would bargain over any price, so starting offers were always high. Once an agreement had been reached, however, that was the price. Neither side would change it. And what was to be delivered, would be delivered. Cars we ordered turned up on time (actually, ahead of time we generally found), and the price on a bill presented for payment was the price agreed.

But even that reassuring honesty wasn’t what mattered.

No, what really mattered was the tolerance, the willingness to live and let live. Tunisia is undoubtedly a Muslim country, and most restaurants and cafes we visited served no alcohol. However, it isn’t an Islamic nation, so there were plenty that did sell alcohol, and they served it to Tunisians as well as tourists.

What I found interesting is that those places had their conventions. I’ve cut down recently on the amount I drink (not just doctor’s orders, though I’ve had those too – well, actually, nurse’s orders: I’ve never yet managed to see a doctor at the Practice where I’m registered, instead always being palmed off on a nurse but, hey, they’ve been great so why should I complain?)

One evening I decided to stick to water with the dinner. After the meal, the restaurant offered us a liqueur on the house – but the waiter brought four to the five of us. Clearly the restaurant was used to mixed groups of guests, some of whom were drinking and others not, and tactfully offered no drink to those who weren’t.

I was impressed by the delicacy of the gesture.

Later on, the manager did still better, having one of the staff drive us back to our hotel through a torrential downpour. I’ve never known a restaurant anywhere else offer that kind of service.

As it happens, it was a bit like the courtesy drinks. There was only space for four, so I walked. I’m not sure whether that was related to not drinking alcohol – the one who was drinking only water might as well be the one who got wet, perhaps? 

My overall impression of the country was one of charm, generosity and above all a willingness to admit that there are many ways to live a life, and no-one needs to tell others what’s wrong with theirs.

Sadly, there are elections later this year, and many fear that the Islamists will make gains. I know the difference between Muslims and Islamists, and I’d much rather see the former continuing to live as they do than the latter taking their place. Insha’Allah, the present happy arrangement may continue.

If it does, well, Tunisia will have a lesson or two to teach other countries, not least the democracies of the West. A lesson in basic liberalism. And its most important component: tolerance.