Rod Liddle on the case of Bushra Noah, the headscarf-wearing Muslim who has just won £4,000 from the Wedge hair salon
I used to dye my hair — Midnight Auburn, from Clairol. Yes, because I’m worth it. I did it myself, once every three or four months or so, always ruining several perfectly good towels in the process. I don’t dye it any more because my girlfriend says that if I do, she’ll bin me. This is because a man dyeing his hair is both undignified and vain, she says: however, I think her opposition stems from the fact that if I got rid of all the grey, I would be irresistible to all women. She would suddenly have intense competition. She would come home from whatever it is she does during the day, all that onerous waxing, and find a panting queue at the front door, headed by Angelina Jolie and Caroline Flint. But either way, my hair is now a sort of greyish-white with strawberry blonde highlights — she can’t do anything about me putting the highlights in because they’re not the consequence of Clairol, they’re the consequence of nicotine. Truth be told, I’ve written my hair off. It’s hideous. As time goes by, more and more parts of the body are left to destruction by hostile forces; the hair, the gut, the skin, the liver.
So I will probably not be applying for a job at the Wedge hair salon in King’s Cross, London — despite the fact that there is a current vacancy, apparently, occasioned by the failure of one Bushra Noah to get a job there. The owner of the salon, Sarah Desrosiers, told an industrial tribunal that the people working in her business needed to project a ‘funky, urban image’ and that the salon should ‘showcase alternative hairstyles’. Well, I suppose my hairstyle could be called ‘alternative’, in much the same way as someone suffering alopecia and a bleeding scalp might call their hairstyle ‘alternative’. But I don’t suppose I would pass the funky urban test. Anyway, as a result of not being allowed to work in Ms Desrosiers’s salon because of my unfortunate hair, my feelings have been hurt and I intend to take her to an industrial tribunal. It is my human right to be allowed to work in a funky urban hair salon, even if I look like a sack of s***. It’s discrimination, that’s what it is.
You might have guessed why Ms Desrosiers was appearing before an industrial tribunal — it’s down to that aforementioned Bushra Noah, of course. Bushra mistakenly believes that her Muslim faith requires her to wear a headscarf at all times and Ms Desrosiers refused to give her a job because a headscarf did not, from her point of view, constitute a funky and urban hairstyle. The tribunal ruled in favour of Ms Noah and ordered Ms Desrosiers to bung her 4,000 quid, on account of her feelings being hurt. The tribunal stated: ‘There was no evidence before us as to what would have, for sure, been the actual impact of the claimant working in her salon with her head covered.’ Well, there may have been no actual evidence, but couldn’t you have used common sense and taken a guess?
Ms Noah took her complaint to the tribunal on the grounds of religious discrimination, despite the fact that patently there was none. There are plenty of Muslim women who do not wear headscarves and there is no stipulation in the Koran for women to wear headscarves — merely that they should dress and disport themselves with modesty. Ms Desrosiers had not insisted that her employees wear a leather basque with nipple clamps — merely that their hair should be, uh, funky. There are probably one or two hardline Muslims in the country who would argue that working in a funky and urban hair salon is itself counter to the wishes of Allah, PBUH — but that, I suppose, is beside the point. There was not the remotest suggestion that Noah had been denied employment because of her religion — as indeed the tribunal agreed — so the claim should have been thrown out immediately. Noah’s feelings were hurt, and she got her money, because her hairstyle wasn’t up to scratch, so it should follow than anyone whose hair is a shocking mess and who is deprived of employment by Ms Desrosiers on those grounds might also be bunged 4,000 quid. But you know that won’t happen, don’t you? You know that if someone like me were to apply for a job at the Wedge hair salon and was refused employment on account of looking the way I do, the tribunal would laugh and kick it out of court, quite rightly. But even having agreed that there was no religious discrimination in this particular case, they nonetheless felt, in that terrible, almost Pavlovian, manner to which we have all become accustomed in the last few years, obliged to pay obeisance to Ms Noah’s feelings because of her religion — and force Ms Desrosiers to pay her lots of money. I wouldn’t wish to compromise my habitual neutrality in such matters, but I do hope that the entire tribunal panel become infested with hair lice and are thus turned away from every hairdressing establishment they approach.
This is one side of the coin, of course. The general thesis is that where Muslims are concerned, the rules will be bent and twisted, logic and common sense fly out of the window. On the one hand we pander, allowing Muslim-only swimming nights at local leisure centres when we know that Christian-only swimming nights would be quite unthinkable, and we insist that Muslim girls should be allowed to wear burqas in school. And then, on the other hand, we bang up Muslims for eight years for chanting incendiary slogans during a demonstration and increase to 42 days the length of time during which they can be held in prison while the Old Bill try to cobble together a few charges. In both cases, I think, we have got it wholly wrong; we should make no exceptions to the usual law of the land, either out of a wish to placate or a wish to punish. It is these double standards which more than anything else cause division and incite unrest.
