There’s a kerfuffle going on at RMIT over the question of Muslim prayer-space. The Muslim students want a space of their very own.
There are already eight Muslim prayer rooms across the university’s three campuses, Dr Maddy McMaster, Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Students) said.
So what’s the problem?
“The university’s policy is that prayer rooms in its spiritual centre are multi-faith, open to bookings by members of all faiths,” she said.
There’s the hitch: the Muslim students aren’t about to use a room contaminated by Christians and Jews and who knows? by Zoroastrians. So they pray in corridors, and other drafty places.
They order these things better in France.
What engaged my attention was a twist. The Socialist Left on campus got all fired up in support of the Muslims. The socialist left. The socialist left. I still can’t adjust to this particular shift in the party line.
I was consoled by remembering a wicked little piece by Joan Didion called ‘The Women’s Movement’. In this 1972 essay (reprinted in The White Album) she writes as if the movement were already over. She notes that the essentials of the women’s movement, for its theorists, were Marxist. The discontents of women were an opportunity for people whose goal was The Revolution.
Marxism in America had never really taken on, she explains, and the root of the problem was the absence of a proletariat.
‘The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having.’ The minorities actually cared about issues like integrated luncheonettes and a seat at the front of the bus, and failed to see such issues as ‘ploys, counters in a larger game.’
They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’.
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement and the invention of women as a ‘class’. ? The notion that ? a revolutionary class might simply be invented, ‘made-up’, named and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away ?
It did indeed, and it still does. I wonder how many of the Muslim students are aware that they now constitute a revolutionary class, and how many just want to, you know, get out of the draft?