It's time to ditch the pieties and ask if multiculturalism and women's rights can really co-exist

On Thursday evening in Surrey, B.C., there was a remarkable scene. A string of South Asian women stood up at a public meeting to speak out. Their stories weren't pretty. One woman, speaking in Punjabi and English, recounted 20 years of punches, slaps and taunts from the husband with whom she still lives. "If I can improve one girl's life, it is worth my husband's anger," she said.

After several high-profile cases of grisly domestic violence, people in British Columbia's Indo-Canadian community are finally saying the unsayable. There is a bias in South Asian culture that condones violence against women.

"The birth of sons are a celebratory event; when daughters are born, it's not a happy event," says B.C.'s attorney-general, Wally Oppal, himself an Indo-Canadian. He went on to blast the dowry system. "What can be more demeaning for a woman than to have to pay the family of the person you're going to marry?"

For years, it has been all but taboo to point out that the abuse and demeaning of women is a significant problem among certain immigrant groups. It has been absolutely forbidden to suggest that women in the South Asian immigrant communities of Surrey or Brampton are treated any worse by their fathers, their husbands and their mothers-in-law than are women who live in Westmount or Rosedale. And if they are, it has not been acceptable (until Mr. Oppal came along) to name the main reasons why. Official explanations typically lean heavily on narratives of Western racism, colonialism, economic failings, and class exploitation. "There is increased understanding that a person's vulnerability to abuse may be increased by factors such as dislocation, colonization, racism, sexism, homophobia, disability, poverty and isolation," goes one classic government report. You'd scarcely guess from these accounts that deep-seated anti-female religious and cultural attitudes imported from the old country had anything at all to do with it.

Down in Australia, they're wrestling with another example of misogyny on parade. Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, a prominent Muslim cleric, gave a sermon a couple of weeks ago in which he compared women who dress immodestly to uncovered meat. If a cat eats the meat, why blame the cat? So it goes with uncovered women. If they are sexually assaulted, why blame the man? (He also said that men who steal and deal drugs are pressured into crime by nagging wives who want new furniture, and that infidels will burn in hell forever.)

The sheik was immediately denounced by almost everyone, including many Muslims. Australia's Prime Minister called for his resignation. But the backlash wasn't long in coming. Yesterday, 5,000 Muslims, including hundreds of women, flocked to his Sydney mosque to demonstrate their support. Dozens of Muslim groups banded together to issue a statement calling the controversy overblown. "It is clear that certain sections of the media and political establishment have used this incident as an opportunity to vilify the Australian Muslim community," they said. Striking a now-familiar note, they warned that by unfairly criticizing Muslims, the media and the politicians were fanning the flames of terrorism.

It's not clear how widely the views of the misogynous imam are shared by Australia's growing Muslim population. Few would publicly use the extreme language he did. But the belief that women are responsible for inciting the ungovernable lust of men is embedded in Muslim culture. A few days later, another Australian imam echoed the sheik's view, saying that women are sexually attacked only because men are provoked.

Here in Canada, M. D. Khalid, a director of the Islamic Society of North America (Canada), told the Toronto Star this week that a woman should cover her face to avoid the unwanted attention of men. When pressed if he meant only beautiful women, he said, "Very attractive women. It's essentially trying to avoid any bad feelings from men."

Many observant Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and other immigrants from highly patriarchal societies have no problem living quite happily within a liberal democratic state. But many others do. Some moderate Muslims here in Canada say that Canadian imams generally share the views of the red-meat mufti. "The entire onus of responsibility for male behaviour is on the women," says Farzana Hassan, who is president of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "This is what young women are being taught all the time."

Western feminists have long denounced the evils of patriarchy. Yet they also excuse and even endorse patriarchal behaviour -- so long as it's imported from somewhere else. Feminists (along with folks like Mr. Khalid) were among the leading proponents of introducing sharia law in Ontario.

In theory, feminism and multiculturalism go hand in hand. They are the mark of a liberal enlightened society. The multicultural credo holds that everyone is equal, that all cultures are equally good, that multicultural values and mainstream values do not conflict, and that the greatest moral virtues are tolerance and respect.

What happens, then, when multicultural and mainstream values do conflict? What happens when certain subcultures tolerate the abuse of women? What happens is that those practices are either blamed on the defects of the West or wished away. No subculture must be judged or criticized. That explains why you don't hear very many Western feminists standing up to argue for the right of South Asian and Muslim women to not be slapped around by their husbands. "Where two pieties -- feminism and multiculturalism -- come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence," wrote British social critic Theodore Dalrymple.

Many multiculturalists and feminists also feel bound to stand in solidarity with critics of the West. These days, that means Muslims, especially those who have explicitly rejected identity with the West. That's how we've arrived at a most peculiar moment in the history of women's liberation -- a moment when Western feminists endorse the veil as an instrument of female empowerment.

Personally, I'm with the South Asian women who were courageous enough to speak out the other night. It's time to ditch the pieties and end the silence -- for the sake of this generation, and the next.