ID card conundrums

How will the looming ID card system cope with people who have more than one legitimate identity?
IT Week
Mar. 14, 2006

Yesterday I met a man born in 1360. Surprisingly, he was still fit and well.

No, the gentleman in question was not deluded, but neither is he 646 years old. He was, of course, counting using a different calendar. He was born in Iraq in 1360 according to the Islamic calendar, or 1941 to you and me.

While Western dates are counted from the birth of Christ, the Islamic calendar naturally proceeds from a different year zero - the Hijra, the passage of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina in 622AD.

There’s a further complication in that Islamic years are based on lunar cycles, and are therefore out of step with the annual progress of the Earth around the sun. An Islamic year is 354 days long (355 for a leap year) and as a consequence, your Islamic birthday will gradually migrate through the seasons. A Muslim born at the height of summer will celebrate their 16th birthday in the depths of winter.

Or they might, if they made much of a fuss about birthdays. For most Muslims, birthday celebrations are a habit only recently borrowed from Westerners.

This lack of care for birthdays means that not all countries are as keen to record birth dates as Westerners might suppose. Prior to the 1960s, for example, officials in Iraq recorded only the year of birth.

These things can make life interesting for Muslims operating in the Western world, where accurate birth dates are taken for granted.

When our Iraqi friend first arrived in the UK, in 1960, officials were unimpressed when he couldn’t give a birth date more precise than 1941. In the end the records showed 10/09/41 – 10 September being the start of term at his college in Stockton-on-Tees.

To make matters yet more opaque, the Iraqi authorities eventually began to record full birth dates, and decreed that all citizens already alive were born on the first day of the seventh month. (Ill-informed Western officials tend to wonder what must happen in October to cause such huge clusters of July newborns).

All this leaves our friend with four birth dates. His British passport says 10/09/41. Official Iraqi documents say 01/07/41. Neither date is his actual birth date, 28/02/1941, which he computed only recently from the Islamic date recorded by his mother: 01/02/1360. He has never had a birth certificate.

All of which creates an interesting situation for the UK government, and its efforts to force identity cards onto us all.

One of the major supposed reasons for ID cards is the ability to track immigrants, particularly immigrants that the state supposes might be up to no good.

But when a perfectly innocent, upstanding Iraqi is able to produce documents likely to secure two different ID cards, it surely throws the whole notion into doubt.

The government is attempting to apply a veneer of order onto a situation where there is none, and in doing so it is likely to create yet more loopholes for genuine wrongdoers to jump through. After all, an ID card will be proof positive of identity, even if someone manages to obtain two contradictory cards.

However, if the real motivation for ID cards is to better control the activities of ordinary, law-abiding citizens, then the awkward lack of records in other countries is of no concern.

Fortunately, our government doesn’t intend to play Big Brother. It simply wants to have ID cards to track ne’er-do-wells. So we can all sleep easy in our beds, no matter old we happen to be. Can’t we?