Category Archives: “Islamophobia”

Is a liberal Islam possible? The drivers of faith that make faith dangerous

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I did not really intend to carry on with my posts about Islam, but something by Yasmin Ablihai-Brown in the Independent yesterday seemed (to me, anyway) to express her customary poorly concealed contempt for British society in a way that seemed to demand some kind of response. She asks, in her title, “Why do Muslims keep having to explain themselves?”; and then goes on, in the rest of her article, to suggest that the violent jihadists are really in some sense irrelevant to what is happening in Islam today. They should, she says, be examined by psychologists, because they are simply hyper-masculine freaks who have nothing to do with Islam. She doesn’t mince her words:

I have written extensively about the Rochdale and Oxford gangs and their sick values, but it’s clearly never enough. And how dare these letter-writers link me to the Woolwich savagery? What’s it got to do with me or the millions of other blameless British Muslims? We hate Islamicist brutes more than any outsiders ever could. They ruin our futures and hopes. And at moments of high tension, the most liberal and democratic of us fantasise about transporting them all to a remote, cold island, their own dismal caliphate where they could preach to each other and die.

Then she goes on to point out that many British Muslims think alike on this, and deprecate the fundamentalist Islamists like the Woolwich murderers and the Oxford criminals who were pimping young white women, speaking of them disparagingly as “white meat.” Indeed, she points out that were she to write as she does in many Muslim countries she would be silenced, and perhaps silenced forever, for there democratic freedoms are not understood, much less sought. But, sadly, her words are contradicted by the polling figures about the attitudes of British Muslims, and the fact that she would be silenced in most Muslim countries is indicative, surely, of something fundamental about Islam itself, and she should not suggest that, of course, Islam in Britain is completely unrelated to what is going on in Islam elsewhere.

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An Unpopular Position: Ban the Burqa

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista: thanks, as always, to Malgorzata,

I believe, contrary to what seems to be the customary liberal consensus, that such things as the veiling of women should be forbidden, not only because it expunges women from public space, but because it is inevitably coercive for some (if not most) women – and it is, I think, meant to be coercive. Even those women who don the burqa as an expression of religious piety, I suspect, mean it to be coercive to other women in the same community. We have been having a rather long – yet, for all that, civil – discussion about this on the last post – entitled “The New Atheism and the Problem of Islam” – and while we are, perhaps, no further ahead than when we began, I think the different territories have been mapped out with some clarity.

I won’t repeat that discussion here, because in this post I want to use as an example something that happened recently at the University of Leicester. A sold-out talk by Hamza Tzortzis* on the existence of god was strictly segregated: brothers (male) and sisters (female) directed to one side or the other:

segregation signs on door

According to an article in the Guardian:

A message on the group’s [the university's Islamic Society] website says: “In all our events, [the society] operate a strict policy of segregated seating between males and females.”

Nothing could be clearer than that.

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The New Atheism and the Problem of Islam

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A lot of people are simply not paying attention. It is, of course, true that the so-called “new atheists” are opposed to religion, and what makes their opposition in some sense “new” is the frank openness of their opposition. Some opponents call it strident and shrill. Academic criticism of religion is one thing, and the new atheism is something completely different, even though, to a large extent, it is anchored in proponents who are either academics or are at least not strangers to academic discussion and the intellectual rigours of academic debate. Yet lately they are accused of leaving that rigour behind, and, in the words of one of the latest commentators:

The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.

The words are those of Nathan Lean, one of the latest to join the ranks of those criticising what they perceive as the extremism of the new atheism. I take the words from another new critic of the new atheism, Jerome Taylor, whose article, “Atheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris face Islamophobia backlash,” appeared yesterday in the Independent. And Taylor seems to be fully in accord with other critics, ending his article with another quote from Lean, who claims that the new atheism “sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims.”

One of the problems with the “new criticism” is that their criticism seems to be as incendiary and ill-founded as, according to them, the new atheist critique of Islam. Indeed, none of them seem to be above misrepresenting the objects of their criticism. For instance, in this latest sally forth from their fastnesses in Britain’s premier newspapers and magazines, Jerome Taylor says, without any qualification, that Sam Harris,

Wearing a palpable disdain for Islam on his sleeve he has also written in favour of torture, pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the profiling not just of Muslims but “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be a Muslim.”

While I think that Harris would have been better off had he left his remarks on torture or pre-emptive nuclear strikes unsaid, it is only fair to point out that those who make this kind of blanket statement are seriously misrepresenting what he does say under these headings. Indeed, while the criticism of Islam in fairly general terms seems to me to be justified, given the written evidence of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, there is no excuse for someone like Jerome Taylor to ignore the contexts and the qualifications in terms of which Harris has spoken of torture or pre-emptive nuclear attack. Nor is it obvious that Harris is “using [his] particularly anti-Islamic brand of rational non-belief to justify American foreign policies over the last decade,” as Nathan Lean suggests in his Salon article, “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia,” which Taylor quotes with approbation.

One of the problems here, I believe, is that the new atheists have devoted themselves largely to the criticism of Christianity, and their remarks on Islam have tended to be prompted mainly by events, rather than by systematic study and critique of Islam itself. They have done so, for the most part, because they do not feel qualified to criticise Islam in depth. Indeed, as Richard Dawkins recently revealed, some of them have not even read the Qur’an. Of course, that would not settle matters, for the Qur’an itself is not given an historical context. As an apparently timeless revelation, understanding of the Qur’an is impossible without the interpretive gloss provided by extra-Qur’anic sources, such as the Sira (or biography of Muhammad) and the Sunnah, which comprises the whole complex of Qur’an, Sira and Hadith (the remembered sayings of the prophet of Islam). And even then, the Islamic doctrine of abrogation, in which earlier revelations are suppressed in favour of new revelations, is nowhere clearly explained. So, reading the Qur’an is not, in itself, sufficient to ground a comprehensive criticism of Islam. Yet Islam itself, since it makes such large and implacable claims, is in serious need of criticism. Indeed, since its eruption onto the Western stage and into the Western consciousness, on 11 September 2001, and the continued threat of violence from Muslims in response to any perceived insult to its prophet, or criticism of the finality of the revelation supposedly vouchsafed to him, such criticism is an immediate and urgent necessity.

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On the Difficulty of Criticising the Public Face of a Religion

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My last post spoke of Islam as “a bossy domineering sexually warped abusive misogynist sack of shit,” with thanks to Ophelia Benson for this comprehensive put-down of a religion. I am then accused by one commenter (using the name Rahman) of conflating peaceful Muslims with the more extreme variety, thus, it is claimed, aiming my criticism at the wrong people entirely. Most Muslims, I am told, are peaceful, and do not intend to subvert governments or to overturn existing cultures in which Muslims have come to dwell. I am guilty of conflating extremist Muslims and perfectly harmless Muslims who simply want to get on with their lives and practice their religion in peace. It was always thus, of course, and it is a perfect excuse to do nothing at all about the problem of radical Islam.

However, here is the criticism, so that you know what I am addressing here:

 [I]n your article you subtly conflate the views of ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ and extremest muslims with muslims as a whole. I sometimes think all billion muslims are viewed by westerners as pretty much the same, all live in the desert, depraved, primitive, chopping of peoples hands and stopping their women driving. In a way I think this view has been promoted by western powers who profit from wars against muslim countries.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this, and the rest of the comment to which it belongs carries these mistakes further and further than this opening gambit seems to suggest, going, almost at once, to list a number of completely irrelevant supposed facts. I find this kind of thing tiresome, so I thought perhaps I should make another stab at this. It is almost impossible to escape the accusation of “Islamophobia,” and doubtless the following will be no exception to this, but the Islamophilia that is proposed in response to any of my attempts to criticise Islam is, if anything, less discriminating than the Islamophobia that Western critics of Islam are, almost by a reflex, accused of.

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Islam is a bossy domineering sexually warped abusive misogynist sack of shit

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The title comes from Butterflies and Wheels, where Ophelia is decrying the Islamist drive to get some Bangladeshi atheist bloggers imprisoned for “defaming a religion.”  The penalty for this “crime” stands at up to 10 years imprisonment. It is not unreasonable to make, regarding this, the point that it Islam is not unique in this respect. David Hume, for example, when he wrote about religion, was very conscious that he was living within a social order which, within living memory, had executed a young Scotsman for blasphemy. Thomas Aikenhead, 20-years-old, a student at Edinburgh University, was prosecuted, and then, on 8th of January 1697, charged with blasphemy. The indictment read, in part:

That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ. [see the Wikipedia entry under Thomas Aikenhead]

Interesting in this indictment is the charge that he preferred Muhammad to Christ. Hume, born in 1711, was extremely cautious regarding causing offence to the religious, and delayed publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after his death. When we criticise contemporary Islam we should bear in mind the record of Christianity in persecuting dissenters.

That does not, however, mean that we should not recognise the danger that Islam poses for Western democracy, as well as to the freedom of those who live in Muslim majority countries. We should remember that it was over three hundred years ago that Thomas Aikenhead as hanged for the offence of blasphemy. We know better now, and we must not permit Muslim backwardness in this respect to govern the future, either in the West, or in areas where Islam is in the ascendant. Women in Egypt are now beginning to recognise that, not only did their efforts, during the misnamed “Arab Spring,”  in overthrowing the Mubarak autocracy, not achieve the freedom that they sought, their position in Egyptian society is now under greater threat than it was at any time under the more secular tyranny of Mubarak. This was, of course, predictable. That it was not predicted in the breathless excitement that accompanied the revolutionary movement that ousted Mubarak is due, in no small measure, to the Western belief that democracy will always be preferred to autocracy or to religious hegemony. It will not. The priorities of the Republican Party in the United States present clear evidence that this is a myth. Zealous religionists will always prefer rule by the redeemed to rule by popular vote. In his 1984 book, The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning (downloadable here) Stephen Mumford puts the point bluntly:

The Roman Catholic Church will stop at nothing within its power, quite literally I’m convinced, to impose its pro-natalist agenda on the American people and their government.

If the destruction of U.S. Constitutional and representative democracy is found by the Vatican to be necessary to achieve its goals, the Church will not hesitate to attempt this. [4]

We can be assured that Muslims also will not hesitate to undermine democratic polities if it is in the interests of their religious commitments to do so. To suppose for one moment that religions are happy with democratic political arrangements would be very foolish. Religions consistently give preference to legislation which upholds religious moral prejudices to legislation which favours individual choice. This is quite clear in relation to legislation regarding abortion and assisted dying, two areas where religions are determined to win, regardless of the consequences for individual freedoms.

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The Debate that was lost before it began

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Lawrence Kraus took part in a debate at University College London that he won hands down. He won it before he had said a word. The proposition to be debated was: “Islam or Atheism: Which makes more sense?” The debate, organised by the Islamic Education and Research Academy, despite assurances that the audience would not be sex segregated, was indeed sex segregated nevertheless, and by being so made clear that Islam makes no sense, and is an ideology that self-respecting women, as well as men, should avoid. Kraus himself threatened to walk out, and last minute adjustments were made, but the issue was not really resolved, and (in my view) it would have been better had he not appeared at all. That would have been a much more powerful message than any he could have delivered in words, and he could with some justice have claimed that he had won by default, the behaviour of the Muslim organisers having made his point as eloquently as it could be made in any case.

The problem, apparently, goes much deeper, for this is not the only sex segregated event that has been hosted at University College London. As Richard Dawkins made clear in a Tweet, it is an offence that University College London, the first university in England that did not have religious tests for admission, and the first university to accept women students, should allow its facilities to be used in such a way as to flout its most sacred traditions of freedom of thought and the principle of the equality of women and men. This should not have happened, and it certainly should not happen again.

To my mind, however, this poses deeper questions. Not only does it show clearly that Islam makes no sense — but no sense at all — for it simply cannot encompass the idea that humanity is composed of women and men in roughly equal numbers, and thinks it appropriate to segregate men from women in response to a supposed revelation from a god; but it shows that Islam is a danger to democratic polities and a subversive element within democracy. When the best educated Muslims consider it their duty, in the name of Islam, to contradict a fundamental premise of European culture, that men and women are equal participants in society, in governance, work, opinion setting, education, teaching, leadership, and consider it their duty to introduce sex segregation into one of the leading secular institutions of higher learning in Britain is not only an offence, it is a clear indication of the danger that Islam is to the values upon which British freedoms are based. And this applies pari passu to democracy and freedom throughout the West, as well as in nascent democracies that could be stifled at birth, if the reign of Islamic theocracy is given room to spread its illiberal ideas unhindered by the severest criticism — something that, because of terrorist threats, is already in doubt.

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What’s this got to do with free speech?

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This Post is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks once again to Malgorzata.

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In an op-ed in the National Post this morning George Jonas seems to be desperately confused as well as confusing. People have a right to say stupid things, he tells us the in title of the piece, and then he spends 889 words telling us why Douglas Murray is wrong, and does not really stand in the tradition of his Enlightenment ancestors — the Scottish one’s, of course. Jonas is responding to Murray’s article in the Spectator in which Murray takes the press to task for not supporting one of its own, and he ends with this:

However, Murray reports “a rare piece of good news in Europe. Lars Hedegaard is … going to sue the Swedish media for libel. I hope — along with all decent people who believe the media should be more than the warm-up and PR wing of the jihad — that he takes them to the cleaners.”

Trouble is, the quoted words are not to be found in Murray’s Spectator article, which is the one Jonas highlights. So, Jonas’ parting shot –

There’s no doubt that lawsuits aren’t in a class with assassination attempts, and libel-chill is preferable to murder. Still, liberty’s ideal is a free press. That’s what constitutions guarantee, with a fair press just a hopeful consequence. I’m afraid people turn to libel suits when they lose hope in freedom.

– seems not to be about anything at all. But the words do come in an article that Douglas Murray wrote for the Gatestone Institute, entitled “Blaming the Victim” (which Jonas fails to link — perhaps the Gatestone Institute is beyond the pale). But the Spectator article is all about blaming the victim too, though in the Spectator Murray doesn’t pass on the “good news” of Lars Hedegaard’s decision to sue the Swedish press. That, Jonas says with some acerbity, is what people do when they lose hope in freedom.

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And the Real Turkey Is?!

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Christine Odone, whom I once called the most rebarbative journalist published in English newspapers today, has crossed the line in an article that flew under my radar a few days before Christmas, not only expressing her views in her familiar, constipated prose, but this time tipping over into outright abuse. It all stems from an interview given by Richard Dawkins to the Muslim Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera. Hasan had an op-ed in the Guardian (as long ago as last July), which makes a nice companion piece to Odone’s childish tantrum regarding some incidental remarks made by Dawkins in that interview. The key issue being discussed seems to be the old chestnut of whether religion does more good than evil in the world. That’s really a roundabout way of getting at the real point at issue; namely, whether religion can be reasonably criticised. For the strange thing is this. Criticism of religion is taken as a blanket denial of any value in religion whatsoever, and defenders of religion are very quick to pick up on anything, any little word or expression which can be taken to be a chink in their opponent’s armour, and by then putting the Schwerpunkt of their argument at that point, they give the impression of having overturned their opponent altogether.

One thing that nonbelievers have to remember is that religious believers have been at this business of apologetic defence of their religious beliefs for much longer than nonbelievers. They have been hardened and inured to criticism, because the religions themselves have been constantly at each other’s throats for millennia. If you listen to the Mehdi Hasan interview straight through, you will notice how unfazed he is by Dawkins’ expression of amazement that Hasan should actually believe that Muhammad rode to heaven on a winged horse. It is in the Qu’ran, so he believes it. He asks Dawkins if he is abusing his children by telling them the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven, and Dawkins says no, of course not. Here is the story, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Muhammad travels on the steed Buraq to “the farthest mosque” where he leads other prophets in prayer. He then ascends to heaven where he speaks to God, who gives Muhammad instructions to take back to the faithful regarding the details of prayer.

I happen to disagree with Dawkins. I think it is abusive to teach such stories to children, if they are led to believe that they are true. It encourages them to believe in fantasy as truth, which must have an effect on how they regard truth itself. Hasan was actually successful in getting Dawkins to give way on this point, clearly because Dawkins did not want to appear insensitive and strident. If Hasan tells these stories to his children as part of the mythology of Islam, then perhaps no harm is done, but if he tells these stories as confirming the immediacy and reliability of Muhammad’s revelation, that is certainly a form of child abuse. Fairy tales are one thing, since children know that fairy tales are not true; but telling children tall tales in contexts that are heavy with religious significance and seriousness is another matter altogether. This kind of story telling is only a very short distance away from the sources of religious violence, and this is a practice that needs to be acknowledged and opposed.

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The incompatibility of democracy and religion

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I have just finished reading a short HuffPo piece by Victor Stenger on the incompatibility of science and religion, but it’s hard to miss the fact that democracy and religion are really incompatible too. This is not often mentioned, because obviously politics is simply drenched in religion practically everywhere you look. What would American politics look like without religion? What would the Malaysian government do without Jews to hate? What would the Tory party in Britain do without its religious nut-cases like Jeremy Hunt, who has the audacity to set back, by decades, the rights of women, and then to say that it has nothing to do with his Christianity, which, he adds, simperingly, he does not broadcast? But just as you can be a scientist and go on believing in sky fairies without apparent conflict, even though religion and science really are incompatible, you can also be a politician and proclaim your religion from the housetops, even though religion and politics, at least politics that regards human rights with any respect, are really incompatible.

The point is this. Governance, just like science, should be based on reason and evidence, and not just on one’s personal prejudices, because one’s personal prejudices have no place in the making of laws, which should be blind to religious belief. If they’re not, this means that laws are being made that are supported only be those who have the current religious beliefs, and that’s not politics, that’s tyranny. Why is it becoming increasingly acceptable for people to voice their religious opinions in the public square, and seek to base laws upon those opinions, when it can be known, simply by a survey, that either a majority, or a significant minority, of constituents do not hold the religious opinions upon which so many members of legislatures are quite prepared to base their lawmaking? How is this different from simply flipping a coin, and deciding for laws based on a simple rule of “heads” for the passing of laws, and “tails” for their defeat?

Just consider, once again (I promise, I’ll let him go soon), Jeremy Hunt’s proposal that the limits for abortion on the United Kingdom should be lowered to 12 weeks gestation (the first trimester, as they say). There is absolutely no scientific basis for this change, as the experts have been quick to point out, wondering where on earth the Health secretary, who has just taken over the role, gets his information. Not only is there no evidence in favour of such a move, there is plenty of evidence that it would be nothing short of a catastrophe for many women. But Hunt doesn’t care a fig about women or women’s rights. This should be amply clear by now. He doesn’t care about women. He doesn’t care about their lives. He has no interest in them at all. All he’s thinking of, even though he claims not to be doing so, is his religious revulsion at the thought of abortion itself, and that’s all he needs to make an arbitrary declaration that the cut off for legal abortions should be the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. See — just like flipping a coin! And then, of  course — you can see it coming, can’t you? — others will say 20 weeks, and people will think they’re making a compromise, even though there is no more reason for drawing this line either, but at least popes and archbishops will approve.

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The limits of free speech and the vague distinction between the religious and the political

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Buddhist Temple in Bangladesh Destroyed

Lately, a trend has developed of urging people to refer to certain events as political rather than religious. To take an example where this might easily be done, take the recent outbreak of anti-Buddhist violence in Bangladesh, apparently over a Facebook image thought to be insulting to the Muslim prophet. It’s irrelevant what caused the violence, it might be said, because in nearby Myanmar (Burma), Muslims have suffered grievously at the hands of Buddhists, who went on a rampage over the alleged rape and murder of a Buddhist girl. So, it might be thought, the violence in Bangladesh, and the destruction of Buddhist temples and homes, may be just a tit-for-tat response to the violence visited upon the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. So, is the violence not more political than religious in origin and nature, and the claimed insult an excuse rather than a reason?

This distinction is often made with the implication that, if it is political, it is not religious, and vice versa, as though religion can be let off the hook simply by bringing up the political dimension of the violence. On the other hand, as is claimed in the Wikipedia article on religious violence,

[t]he invention of the concept of “religious violence” helps the West reinforce superiority of Western social orders to “nonsecular” social orders, namely Muslims at the time of publication.

It is hard to see how this is true, especially since so much of the violence in the arc of countries running from Egypt to Pakistan, though often represented as secular, has been given a deeply religious hue by American fundamentalists, most particularly by President Bush, who claimed God’s commandment as his motivation for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. A contemporary report states:

President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold of Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a state for the Palestinians.

So a strong religious colouring clearly marks both sides in the ongoing conflict in the region. While not so public as Bush in claiming a religious rationale for going to war, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, believed that God wanted him to go to war to fight evil. It is hard to find much purchase here for the moral superiority of the West, based on the West’s secularity as opposed to the supposed blinkered religionism of the East. So, it is not simply a matter of (innocent) secular states against blinkered (guilty) religion.

The problem is that, whenever a nonbeliever speaks in a critical way about offended Muslims rioting, or Christians in Britain making exaggerated claims about persecution, or Muslims denouncing Islamophobia whenever someone criticises any aspect of their religion, the response is so often that religion is not at the centre of these events; instead, we are to understand, the issues are political, or racial, or cultural, or something other than religious. Islamophobia, for instance, is often thought of as racist, even though Muslims are not identifiable by race, except, of course, insofar as many people, even Muslims, tend to identify Islam with the Arab world, when, of course, it is not that simple, for there are Russian Muslims, Chinese Muslims, Indonesian Muslims, Indian Muslims, and white European (American, Canadian, Australian, etc.) Muslims. So a criticism of Islam is the criticism of a religion, not of a race, or even of a particular ethnic grouping — though of course, in local circumstances, it may be directed at a specific ethnic enclave, and may then be identified more precisely as racial, ethnic or cultural in tone and effect.

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