Another grim reminder of Britain's colonial past

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 22:10

MORE than 60 years on from the beginning of the end of the British Empire, it's sometimes depressing to note just how far the life of the global village is still scarred by the memory of old colonial wrongs.

Watch the current BBC version of Andrea Levy's beautiful novel of postwar England, Small Island, and you'll receive the sharpest possible reminder of the shaming levels of racism experienced by black ex-servicemen who migrated to the "mother country" in the 1940s and 50s, and of the legacy of rage on our streets today.

Look at the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, and you'll see a planet divided and bickering along old colonial faultlines, even on the brink of a catastrophe which – governments say – could threaten the very future of human life on earth.

And look even closer to home, into the Old Bailey courtroom, where a jury this week convicted Mehmet Goren, a man originally from Turkish Kurdistan, of the murder ten years ago of his own 15-year-old daughter Tulay, who had fallen in love with a man from the "wrong branch" of Islam, and you'll see the traces of a British judicial and policing system left almost powerless to protect innocent human life by its own confusion over how to express respect for diverse cultures, while upholding basic law and order.

There is, of course, no question of what should have been done in Tulay Goren's case. Her father is a psychopathic bully whose violence extended far beyond his relationship with Tulay; Tulay should never have been left at his mercy. But the failure of the police to protect Tulay reminds us that the enduring scars of colonialism and race politics run through our own minds, as well as between our minds and those of others. Were the police as concerned about Tulay as they would have been about a similarly distressed "English" girl? Possibly not.

But were they also inhibited by their membership of an ex-imperial culture lately shocked into a neurotic unwillingness to impose ethical norms on anyone who claims cultural exemption from them? Quite possibly; even when those norms clearly have nothing to do with the specifics of western culture, and everything to do with such universal moral basics as the idea that "thou shalt not kill".

What should be crystal clear from the story of the Goren case, in other words, is that, in failing to protect women like Tulay, we in the West go far beyond a simple betrayal of our own best values. It is true that, over the past century, western society has made giant strides towards real gender equality, in which we can take some pride.

It's worth noting, though, that, well within living memory, entrenched patriarchal assumptions about everything from women's work to domestic violence – including strict social rules about covering the head in certain public places – were prevalent everywhere in British society; and feminism itself has lately become such a traduced and unfashionable cause that, in many areas of public life, the position of women is actually deteriorating once more.

And just as mainstream British society has less reason to be smug about gender equality than it sometimes imagines, so it is wrong to assume that minority cultures and faiths somehow sanction, permit or encourage the kind of pathological violence shown by Mehmet Goren to his family.

In the first place, this casual assumption that unfamiliar or "foreign" faiths permit horrific practices is racist in itself, based on the old idea that other cultures are "primitive", whereas ours is more civilised and well-developed. No faith with as long, complex and learned a history as Islam – to name only the most obvious example – should ever be viewed in such a simplistic and pejorative way.

Secondly, and much more directly, such assumptions betray those brave men and women within minority communities – particularly women such as the mother and sister of Tulay Goren, who finally spoke out about her terrible death – who are fighting every day, in the Britain of the 21st century, to free women from the kind of ignorant, patriarchal bullying that has reared its head at different times within every cultural tradition on the planet, and is particularly characteristic of the moment when a traditional rural culture is placed under stress by a traumatic encounter with modernity. Most families, in every tradition, manage to negotiate this dangerous corner without descending into the nightmare of domestic murder that engulfed the Gorens. But every student of the social history of Britain's own industrial revolution knows that, behind the closed doors of its miners' rows and tenement flats, fists often flew, as damaged men took their revenge on those whom they could control, in a world increasingly unfamiliar and threatening.

In that context, the idea of the bullying, control and occasional murder of women as a source of "honour" for men is nothing but an organised form of the same thuggery, a distorted reflection of village tradition sharpened by the stress of social change, and embraced by a minority who can find no other way to achieve a sense of power. No religion sanctions it, no faith requires it, no tradition excuses it.

In even using the words "honour killing" to describe it, we therefore accord it too much respect. It has nothing to do with honour, everything to do with the deliberate oppression of women purely on grounds of their sex, and with unchecked bullying leading to criminal violence. And the honour in this case lies entirely with two fine women, Tulay's heroic mother Hanim and her sister Nuray, who would not let the waters close over the head of their beloved daughter and sister, and with those, of all faiths and none, who helped them to their victory on Thursday, reaching out across every kind of divide between cultures to serve an ideal of justice and humanity that finally matters more than any of them, and is bigger than them all.