Wine, Islam and Twitter
On the weekend, Patrick Lagacé wrote a column about a reader’s anecdote about how she and her party had been asked to hide their wine in a restaurant because the owners also had a reservation for a larger party of observant Muslims who didn’t want to see anyone drinking. Lagacé refers to them in one passage as “moyenâgeux réfractaires au vin” but on the whole it’s a reasonably calm retelling of an incident at the border of two cultures. He also makes a point about how religious strictures – even someone else’s – can affect older Québécois who remember the hegemony of the Catholic church here.
What’s interesting is the twitter thread that followed. Richard Martineau jumped on Lagacé, saying had he written the same anecdote he would’ve been accused of more Islamophobia. Lagacé dissects the difference in a few terse tweets.
Kevin 16:15 on 2020-02-10 Permalink
Would Lagacé — would anyone — have written that piece if it was an AA meeting making the request?
Chris 16:39 on 2020-02-10 Permalink
Kevin, I sure hope they would!
Or another analogy: if some vegans booked 30 seats and the waiter told other patrons they couldn’t order meat today. You don’t think many people would be outraged?
This seems to me an example of: should we tolerate the intolerant? These particular Muslims (allegedly) are intolerant of societal norms and sought to impose theirs on others. Like it said at the end of the article, they should have just been told when reserving: we are BYOB, accept or decline, up to you.
If you hate meat so much, go to a vegetarian resto. If you hate booze so much, so to a dry resto. The resto chooses what they serve, if you don’t like it, don’t go.
Blork 18:24 on 2020-02-10 Permalink
As with everything, there are subtleties here that should be mentioned. First, the restaurant is BYOW, and the owners are muslim. You could argue that allowing people to bring wine is the owners’ accommodation for the non-muslim majority — an accommodation they can withdraw if they want to. After all, there is no absolute right to drink wine on someone else’s property. I can open a restaurant and declare that nobody can ever drink in that restaurant and that would be legit.
Another thing to consider: this is reportedly a very small restaurant, so the group of 30 muslims probably just about filled the place. When they made the reservation — a lunchtime reservation mind you — they undoubtedly asked the owner, who they knew to be muslim, if the restaurant could be alcohol-free when they were there, and the owner said it would be. That’s not unreasonable on the part of the customers; they simply made a request. It’s not all that unreasonable for the owners because it’s their restaurant and they probably didn’t think there’d be any lunchtime drinkers.
The complication comes with the mixup over the times. The owners though the wine-drinkers were coming in the evening, but they came for lunch — just before the group that had asked for the restaurant to be alcohol-free.
Let’s take a step back and think about the days when people were allowed to smoke in restaurants. Imagine you have a small restaurant and a group reserves almost the entire place on the condition that it be smoke-free while they are dining. But then a smaller group shows up just before them and they light up. It would not be unreasonable for you to ask the smaller group to not smoke — to tell them they can only eat there if they don’t smoke because you promised a smoke-free restaurant to a larger group. The smaller group can choose to either dine without smoking or go elsewhere. It’s natural that the larger group’s request takes precedence, especially if (as the restaurant owner claims) they were not expecting the smaller group at that time.
The main thing is that this is entirely on the restaurant owner, not the group of muslims. The muslim group simply made a request. The owners could easily have said no, but since the owners are muslims themselves there might be some community pressure or it could simply be that they are friends and acquaintances and the owners were happy to host them even with the condition that — for a muslim — did not seem very unreasonable.
Kate 08:55 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
As I understand it, the owners should probably not have allowed anyone to bring wine in. Having wine in the place suggests it is not halal, and that’s probably what the owner was worried would be concluded by the observant clients, whom they may have feared wouldn’t grasp the technicality that the wine hadn’t been sold by the restaurant.
JaneyB 09:33 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
@Blork, @Kate. Lovely subtle points. Real life and real people are often much more complicated than the debates.
Chris 10:54 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
Blork, some good points, I certainly agree this screw up is entirely on the restaurant owners. I don’t think your smoking analogy is so good though because: secondhand smoke is proven dangerous, whereas merely being around alcohol is not. It’s the difference between a rational fact-based worry, and an irrational one. I think my vegan analogy is better.
Kate, why should the owner worry that the Muslim clients would conclude that the place is non halal? The owner himself doesn’t claim it is be a halal resto.
Kate 10:55 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
Chris, just a surmise. Lagacé doesn’t mention halal either way. And the smoking comparison is neither here nor there. If one of the owners was assuming their observant clients would expect the resto to be run on halal principles, then wine wouldn’t be welcome there, even at another table. (I know people who run a halal operation. They don’t have a licence, but neither do they make it BYOB.)
Chris 12:01 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
Lagacé indeed doesn’t mention halal either way. Failing to point out this resto was halal would be an insane omission, no? Therefore, it’s not a halal resto. Anyway, how could a BYOB place be halal? Pretty much contradictory.
Again, these ‘observant clients’ surely googled the resto and saw that it wasn’t halal and was BYOB. i.e. they should have known and been prepared for other patrons not all sharing their worldview. They shouldn’t have been promised otherwise. What harm does it do to you if someone at another table is drinking wine? (An activity typical to the establishment you chose to visit.) How is that not something you can tolerate?
Blork 14:10 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
@Chris, I don’t think my smoking analogy is bad, because it hinges on what the customer asks for. WHY they ask for it is a separate issue.
Also, you might think their request, based on their belief, is irrational, but the reality is usually more complex. Ardent atheists like yourself tend to be very dismissive of religious beliefs, as if they are little more than grown ups believing in fairy tales. But for the religious faithful they can be much more than that. Things like the alcohol ban can be woven into the community, so it’s more than just a magical belief, it’s a sign of their moral values and their community identity.
Surely there are some behaviours that you object to. Would you want to have dinner next to people who are shooting heroin? Plenty of heroin users use it casually and don’t develop addictions, so why not? Maybe because it freaks you out a bit and you think of all those people who are destroyed by heroin. Well maybe a devout muslim family thinks about all the people and families that are destroyed by alcoholism and drunk driving, and all the crimes and misbehaviours conducted by people who are intoxicated. Sure, plenty of people drink and don’t have a problem with it, but remember my note about heroin, above.
So it’s not about being “afraid” of a bottle of wine. It’s about identifying as a group who shun alcohol and who perhaps think a lot about the damage done by alcohol. So when they reserved for a group lunch they likely chose a muslim-owned restaurant specifically because they felt asking for an alcohol-free space during that time was not unreasonable. Bearing in mind it was lunchtime and AFAIK that group of 30 likely dominated the space.
BTW, not all restos mention BYO on their websites (especially ones owned by muslims). I doubt they thought the place was halal.
Blork 14:16 on 2020-02-11 Permalink
Oh, and just to flog the dead horse a bit more, here’s another possible analogy.
Imagine you live in the US, in an “open carry” state where MAGA nuts walk around brandishing guns a lot. Imagine you’re not one of those people. So you and 29 of your non-MAGA friends know of a restaurant owned by a fellow non-MAGA who doesn’t like open carry but tolerates it because that’s the dominant culture.
So you phone them up and ask if the would put up a “no guns” sign for an hour while you and your friends took over most of the restaurant space for a big lunch. Does that sound unreasonable?
It would sound unreasonable to the MAGA nuts. They’d accuse you of all sorts of things including being “afraid of guns.” (Maybe your gun control stance isn’t based on fear of the object but an understanding that things are better when there are fewer of them.)
It’s kind of the same thing. It’s about deeply felt beliefs that aren’t necessarily “magical.”