Category Archives: Qur’an and Sacred Text

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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Jesus and Mo and the Koran

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2013-03-20

Since I have been having a little discussion on the side with a Muslim, Rahman, in relation to an older post (see this note, et seq), this seemed apropos. Join in, if you like, but let’s bring the discussion over here. You can see more of these great cartoons over at Jesus and Mo dot net. The problem that Jesus has with the Qu’ran is precisely the one that always strikes me when I read it — “berating the infidel and fantasising about their punishments.” It doesn’t only border on the sick, it is seriously twisted.

Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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Congratulations, Jerry Coyne!

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This post is now available in Polish translation here. Thanks, as always, to Malgorzata at Racjonalista.

Jerry Coyne has just finished reading through the Bible (the Christian Bible, or at least one version of it — the Ethiopian canon, for example, contains 9 extra books, not included in the Western canon, and the Western canon includes 11 books (depending on how they are counted) not included in most Protestant Bibles), and he has some comments about the experience over at Why Evolution is True. I have done it myself about four times. The last time I tried, some fifteen years ago, I gave up after finishing the Torah, or the five books of Moses, because it became so oppressive and unintelligible, so Jerry deserves our congratulations for persevering to the end, though, to be frank, the only reason for doing something like this is to be able to say that you had actually done it.

It’s a bit like climbing mountains. Edmund Hilary, the first white man to climb Mount Everest (he was accompanied in the feat with his Sherpa guide, Tenzin Norgay), once said that the reason for climbing mountains is “because they’re there,” and the same, I suppose, could be said for reading the Bible, or any other supposedly holy book. Because they’re there. And scaling the mountains of words — or (perhaps a more appropriate image) descending the cliffs into trenches or rift valleys towards the nadir of human thought – is almost as treacherous as climbing real mountains, because anyone who has read through the Bible, and, perhaps, even more so for someone who has scaled the treacherous depths of the Qur’an, with its unremitting hatefulness, is bound to be a poorer person for the effort. If reading changes you, reading these texts can only change you for the worse, for to confront human evil sanctified by centuries of blind adulation is a risky business, to say the least.

At least now, though, when the issue of the value of such ancient texts is more frequently raised by critical voices, the danger is much less than it once was, for now it is possible to forget the patina of holiness and read them as the irreducibly human works that they are, with all their blotches and wrinkles. One of the things that should be clear to anyone who has read the Bible or the Qur’an straight through is how uneven these texts are. Perhaps I should qualify that, because the Qur’an is not as uneven as the Christian or the Jewish Bible. There are at least high points of literary achievement in the Bible, and this cannot be said for the Qur’an. I’m told that in Arabic the resonance of the language can reduce a person to tears. It is hard to believe that the thoughts themselves can do so, the Qur’an containing, amongst holy books, the most stultifyingly constipated thought ever to enter the minds of men, and being so unremittingly boring and repetitious that it is hard to stay awake, let alone retain what little intellectual content is to be found in it. How anyone can think the thoughts and call them holy is simply beyond reason and the most fertile imagination.

The Bible, though, has some genuine treasures, amongst them the Song of Songs, a lively erotic work of some subtlety, and the book of Job, perhaps the most unrelentingly searching study of the problem of evil ever written. The book ends, of course, on an entirely false note, as though lives can substitute for lives, or wealth for suffering, but the poetic heart of the book is an ageless and so far unanswered challenge to the justice of any imaginable god. Another text of some value is Ecclesiastes, the author of which was almost certainly not a true believer, who provides as convincing a case for atheism as any of the new atheists. It’s fundamental message is that “shit happens.” The world goes on in its accustomed way without any sign of design or purpose, and so one should live stoically, drifting with the tide of change, accepting the goodness that may come one’s way, and enduring the suffering without complaint.

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Did Muslim thought on evolution take a step forward?

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According to Salman Hameed, in an op-ed in the Guardian entitled “Muslim thought on evolution takes a step forward,” which adds, in the subtitle, the claim that the debate on Islam and evolution sponsored by the Deen Institute, was “[a] high-quality debate of a sensitive topic [which] did not disappoint, as all panellists  bar one accepted the scientific consensus,” and so moved Muslim thought forward. This claim is, at best, misleading. Yasmin Khan, also writing in the Guardian, ends her article “Muslims engage in quest to understand evolution,” with these remarks:

As the event closed I was left restless and sensed that others felt similarly conflicted. I tried to envisage how to establish a consensus of Muslim opinion on this topic. Where was the call to action? Who would bring the necessary scholars and scientists together to form a legitimate committee?

The debate has lifted the lid on this Pandora’s Box, but the next steps are uncertain. Without more structured engagement with Muslims, the concept of human evolution will continue to be both an intellectual and spiritual minefield.

If it continues “to be both an intellectual and spiritual minefield,” then there was less apparent agreement than Salman Hameed suggests. Indeed, as Jerry Coyne, reviewing the event, suggests:

Given nearly unanimous Muslim opinion on the impossibility of human evolution (something I’ve learned from studying how Muslims reconcile science and faith), and opposition to evolution itself in many quarters, there is no way to establish a Muslim consensus on evolution (which should be that everything evolved according to natural processes) without getting rid of Islam.

If this is the takeaway message from the conference, then no wonder Yasmin Khan was so conflicted!

But, it seems, after all, that this was the takeaway message. For example, take the summary of the debate offered by Farrukh Younus in a post on his blog entitled ”Evolution and Islam 2013“. While Sameed claims that all except one accepted the scientific consensus on evolution, this is far from being the case. It is even important, I think, to take into account the emphases that Younus places on the different panellists participating in the debate or discussion or series of talks (it’s not altogether clear how the conference was organised). To take one example, Professor Ehab Abouheif, who teaches biology at McGill University in Montreal, apparently defined evolution, and then went on to suggest a common misunderstanding that may impede the acceptance of evolution by religious believers. According to Younus:

Crucially he addressed a common misunderstanding, that in evolution you do not transition from one species to another. That is to say the common belief that we originated from monkeys and apes, despite sharing extensive similarities, is an over simplification and inaccurate representation of evolution.

Of course, this is true. We share common ancestors with monkeys and apes; we did not descend from monkeys and apes themselves, which are species equally evolved with ourselves, just as every other living species has a evolutionary history that shares its origin with the origin of life on earth. But Younus says none of this, as though remarking on the misunderstanding, without explaining the significance of that misunderstanding, is sufficient.

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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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Called Home?!

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When tragedy strikes: that’s when people start talking nonsense about god (let’s keep that lowercase). In a HuffPo piece on the Newtown tragedy, Edward Blum suggests silence:

Perhaps in this moment “sigh” is better than childish theology; perhaps to remain attentively quiet is what God would ask of us — because that is what God seems to do too.

And who can doubt that silence in the face of the incomprehensible is better than lies or nonsense? But what is this “that is what god seems to do too” doing here? What sense does this make? After all, has Blum ever heard god speaking on other occasions? Why is god silent when things are going badly, but good fortune is taken as a good word from god? Yesterday, the religious idiots got in their silly words about god’s unwillingness to protect children, because we don’t pay him his due. According to them, god is not being silent at all. His message is loud and clear. Start praying in your schools or else!

Now, it’s interesting that everyone has their own take on what god’s message is in situations like this. Blum thinks god has gone silent. All he has is a sigh. Huckabee thinks that god is a figure of malice and violence, who kills children if we don’t worship him by setting aside a moment or two each morning to pray for the children’s welfare. Otherwise, the kids are in danger of god’s wrath.

The problem is that no one really hears god at all, in good or in ill fortune. They either make up these stories to make a political point, or to comfort people who cannot be comforted, or just to keep our attention focused on our own failures, so that we don’t notice that god is really just an empty vessel which we fill with our own hopes and hatreds. But god never acts at all. In the video of the Dawkins-Lennox debate which I mentioned yesterday (and from which I took Lennox’s convenient lie), Lennox expressed his unwillingness to believe that god didn’t intervene at some point in the evolutionary process so that we are toto caelo distinct from the other living things that populate this earth. It’s a bit like Pope Wojtyła’s ontological saltation. At some point in the evolutionary process, he suggested in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, god intervened and injected a soul into human beings. When Dawkins asked Lennox at what point god might have done this, whether at the time of archaic Homo sapiens or more recently, Lennox, of course, had no answer. But his belief in eternal life requires that it must have been done — what would be the point of granting eternal life to bugs and bacteria? – so it has to be posited. There must be an ontological difference, detectable or not.

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The Mindless Idiocy of Religious Morality

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Isn’t it just about time that we told religious moralists to shove it? Really, when you look at the world today, and consider the offences that religions commit against human dignity and justice, for religions to make claims to speak with authority on moral questions is not only laughable, it is plainly obscene. Religious thought is rightly thought to be “other worldly” — it certainly does not belong in this one. Roman Catholic ethicists, like the incredibly doctrinaire Robert P. George, who thinks that only Catholic morality can be justified by reason, and therefore should be made into law, cannot even imagine how it could be possible for anyone to disagree with them, and yet very few moral philosophers do agree with them. They carry on their moral projects in a private room, as though no one else was thinking about ethics at all. No wonder they are so dismayed when people turn them down.

Take Robert P. George’s arguments regarding the immorality of abortion, for example. He thinks that anyone who thinks that abortion, at any stage, is morally justifiable, is simply wrong, and he thinks that this is a position securely grounded in science itself. I will not go into detail, since I do not think the argument deserves this kind of close attention. Just consider this statement and its sequel:

What the zygote needs to function as a self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.

At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called “substantial change” (or a change of natures). It is human and will remain human. [71]

Now, let’s stack this claim up against the claim of the woman in whom this zygote has taken up residence.

In the Independent this morning the main headline is:

Woman dies after being refused an abortion in Irish hospital

Here’s part of the story:

Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.

The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in Galway University Hospital.

He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.

A “heartbeat was present”! The woman had suffered a miscarriage, for Christ’s sake! But a heartbeat was present, so, conformable to Robert P. George’s (and the Pope’s) dictum, a human being was present. So, instead of rescuing the woman, she was allowed to die, being told that an abortion was contraindicated because “Ireland is a Catholic country.” The idiocy of this is simply stunning, and yet this is what happened. A life of a woman was forfeited, regardless of her own choices, because there was a heartbeat! It’s enough to make one scream, and to call down execrations on the heads of those “in charge,” and it reminds one that “Mother Teresa” (now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta) declared in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (of all things!), that abortion was “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.” (We should all retire to Bedlam!) Neither the woman’s distress nor the husband’s request availed anything, and she was left to die because of the inviolable logic of Roman Catholic ethics. It makes me so angry that I want to wring some prelatical throats.

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Islam and respect, continued ….

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I want to begin with something that The Philosophical Primate said in a comment on yesterday’s post, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting all of it:

I honestly do not believe that Islam is intrinsically worse than any other faith-based religion. Rather, it is merely trapped — for the moment — at an earlier stage in religious development. Islam is currently as Christianity was in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages — oppressive, totalitarian, theocratic, and violent, not least to its own adherents, especially women. So too was Hinduism not so long ago (many remnants of which still remain), shoring up the caste system and demanding (or at least reinforcing) such quaint and charming traditions as suttee. So too was Mormonism until the Mormon patriarchs decided that the benefits of Utah’s statehood outweighed the benefits of their quaint traditions of murder and child-rape/slavery/marriage. So too are any and all religions based primarily on faith (and indeed, faith-based political ideologies like the various forms of Communism), because unsupportable claims are the ideal tool for rationalizing unconscionable actions.

No faith-based religion is worthy of ANY respect whatsoever, at any stage in its development. The fact that broader cultural forces of enlightenment and progress can force reform on backwards traditions does not alter their inherent backwardness, it just makes them more neighborly. That neighborliness is certainly important, but it is not worthy of respect: Rather, it warrants only wary tolerance. Tolerance, not respect — and always wary, because faith remains intrinsically perilous, easily exploited to rationalize any reprehensible nonsense believers invent.

While I largely agree with The Philosophical Primate here, I want to make some qualifications. It does not seem to me helpful to say that Islam is ”trapped at an earlier stage of development.” It is not clear to me that there is any measure of development for religions. However, it does seem to me that Islam has reached a particularly difficult stage in its trajectory at which it feels trapped by circumstance into becoming, along some of its axes, a particularly virulent form of itself, at a time when Christianity (in particular), under pressure from the Reformation and the wars of religion, has been forced to become more liberal and tolerant. I agree that no religion is deserving of our respect, and that about them all we should be warily tolerant. But I do think — and I do want to say this with tolerance and respect for those Muslims who have been able to make the transition to modernity without abandoning those things which they consider to be of spiritual value in their faith – that there are aspects of Islam which make it particularly dangerous, and largely inhospitable to significant revision, at least on a large scale. It is perhaps worth mentioning those features here.

First, there is no central authority in Islam, so Islam is how it is interpreted by any number of different “authorities”, and this tends to produce a kind of competition to the most literal reading of the religion. Where authority is dispersed in this way, the tendency is to try to outdo others in faithfulness to tradition, to the words of sacred texts, and to severity of interpretation. (The same tendency can be seen at work in evangelical Christianity.) And this dispersed authority is further intensified by using the street as a way of enforcing the conclusions of the “scholars”.

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Separate but Equal. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

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Over at the London Times ”Articles of Faith” section, there is an article by Sahar Khan about women in Islam. She goes on a bit about how Muhammad liberated women (tell me the old, old story!), and then this:

It is the Qur’an’s differing treatments of men and women in relation to inheritance, testimony and marriage that are viewed as inequalities; some of these teachings have been misinterpreted to justify Islam’s unjust treatment of women. It is myopic to assume that being treated differently is being treated unequally. Where the Qur’an does make a distinction; it does not mean that men are favoured over women. On the contrary, the Islamic law seeks to protect the interests of the woman. For example, the disparity in inheritance is consistent with variations in the financial responsibilities designated to a man and woman. A woman has no financial responsibilities even if she possesses wealth of her own; whereas a man is required to provide maintenance for the wife, children and close female relatives. Based on this, a man will receive twice the portion of a woman. This is not absolute in all cases though, in some situations men and women are allocated exactly the same shares.

In my opinion, women’s liberation should not be about competing with men and wanting to ape them, gender differences should [be] accepted; women should cherish their femininity as distinct and unique to them.

Think about the misogyny so clearly expressed in that, and then continue to the rest of the post. You probably see more wrong with it than I do, but I was horrified! And Sahar Khan thinks it’s Western stereotyping!

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