Category: Articles

• Planet of the Hats

  I know you will not believe me, but I swear it’s true: I’m not of this earth. I fled here years ago because my home planet was driving me crazy. Let me explain.

  My home world is very much like this one. It’s populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing.

  The hats.

  My people are obsessed with hats. Almost everyone wears them, and a lot of their identity is wrapped up in their particular style. Some people always wear cowboy hats, for instance, and others wear bowlers, and each think the other is exceedingly funny-looking, and would never consider switching. They have elaborate ceremonies for their children in which they confer the hats, and kids often go to special schools once a week where they learn about the history and significance of their hats. Everyone has the importance of hats drilled into them from birth to death.

  The particular type of hat was critical. Individuals only rarely changed hat styles, and when they did, it was considered grounds for sorrow by those who wore the abandoned style, and cause for rejoicing by those wearing the newly adopted style. Sometimes people would invent new kinds of hats, which were typically regarded as bizarre when one person was wearing it, but once a sufficient number switched to the new style, they were respected automatically. It meant that streets of our more cosmopolitan cities were filled with strange and comical hats bobbing along, but no one laughed. Laughing at a hat was considered a heinous crime.

  It sounds very silly, I know. A minority on my planet also find it pointless, myself among them, and didn’t bother with wearing a hat. This is tolerated in the more civilized nations, although there are places where wearing no hat, or a strange hat, can get you killed. And honestly, many people in my country only bothered to wear their hat once a week, although the rest of the time they would keep them on ornate hatstands in their home, and attached much significance to their presence.

  Now why should mere excesses of fashion compel someone to flee many light years to escape? There was something more. There was a near-universal notion of remarkable absurdity: most people believed that an important portion of their minds actually resided in their hats. The locus of their ethical sense was not believed to be in their brains, but somehow intertwined in the fabric of their hats. This led to strange customs: witnesses in trials were required to wear their hats to give testimony; soldiers were thought to be cowards without their hats; politicians vied to see who could wear the most ostentatious versions of their hats; sex was considered a filthy practice because people would take off their hats to do it. There was no scientific evidence for any of this, and the evidence actually contradicted the belief, but since it was hallowed by tradition, it persisted.

  Hatters, milliners, and haberdashers were highly regarded professionals, and every town would have numerous hatshops. Their numbers proliferated, because obviously you could not have the person who crafted miters also making berets, or vice versa, but still they prospered because, not only were the majority sinking a significant proportion of their income into the purchase and care of their hats, but the occupation was considered too dignified to be taxed. Huge sums of money were poured into hatteries, and the people considered this to be a virtuous act that made them more noble and right. The president of my country listened very closely to his council of hatters, and no television punditry was complete without a haberdasher to use his vast hat-based wisdom to pontificate on domestic and foreign policy. They were all talking out of their hats, which was considered a very good thing.

  I couldn’t help noticing, though, that the very idea that ethical thought was localized to a hat was a ridiculous notion, and that hatless people could be just as good and kind and wise as those with the most ornate hat (and that hatless people could also be wretched and cruel, of course, as could the hatted.) Our president had a rhinestone-covered 20 gallon cowboy hat with an airhorn and flashing strobe, and he seemed far less virtuous than my neighbor, with her simple and unostentatious cap. Hats obviously had nothing to do with morality, except perhaps in an inverse way: those who spent the most effort polishing the geegaws and flash on their hats usually put the least effort into honing their minds.

  I could see the writing on the wall. Being hatless myself meant my chances for promotion were limited, but even more worrisome was that the height of one’s hat was becoming the sole measure of nobility of purpose, and the genuine leaders were being replaced with loud poseurs who knew how to stretch a crown and use a Be-Dazzler. When the People of the Easter Bonnet started encouraging war with the Chador Wearers, citing deep philosophical differences, I bundled my family into our rocketship and flew away.

  We stayed briefly at the Planet of Shoes, but found the same problems there, so now we’ve settled here on Earth where, clearly, the situation is completely different.

  This interlude first appeared on Pharyngula and is re-published here by permission.

  June 19, 2005

• Magic vs. Modernity

  In the European Enlightenment, the belief was that science and reason
  would soon sweep myth and magic into oblivion. For some, myth included
  religion while others operated in terms of some variant of Deism or even
  Theism, believing that there was an unknown power beyond what was known and
  knowable to humans. In fact, many scientists, then and now, could fully
  exercise their religious convictions and interpret them in such a way as
  not to allow them to interfere with scientific understanding. For those for
  whom there was no conflict between science and religion, it was because
  particular statements or religious beliefs about the way the things work
  always gave way to emerging facts and theories of scientific inquiry.
  Science and reason became the basis for advancing human understanding and
  enlightenment.

  By the time that I was an undergraduate, the enlightenment ideal was well
  established in my University. The opposition to evolution was thought to
  have been laid to rest in the 1920s; the religious groups that continued
  to oppose Darwin were small and marginal; their beliefs were expected to
  fade away as their children studied biology and other sciences in
  school. The various romantic reactions in literature and in such areas as
  the various arts and crafts movements, organic agriculture or homeopathy
  were likewise considered to be minor and relatively harmless. The
  literature professors who railed against science and materialism had
  ways of life not all that different from their colleagues in the sciences.

  More violent reactions to science and reason such as the Nazis were
  explained as reactions by those who had been harmed by the transition to
  modernity and signaled a dying gasp and not an indicator of anything to
  follow. In any case, this reaction had been permanently laid to rest in May
  1945. In the emerging post-colonial world, students were flocking to Europe and North
  America for education, and newly minted countries were establishing
  Universities with science, technology and engineering programs modeled
  on those of their former colonial masters. Contrary to post-modernist
  and other critics, few of us believed that Western Culture was a universal
  model for all to follow without question, but many of us believed
  that science and techno-engineering understandings transcended cultural
  boundaries and created a global discourse and mechanisms for advancing the
  human endeavor.

  Six decades after World War II, now into the 21st century, the area of
  basic human understanding of the world around us has greatly expanded and
  yet the enlightenment vision seems farther away than ever in my
  lifetime. The extent and horizons of modern knowledge are beyond the
  comprehension of earlier generations. And this knowledge and understanding
  is far more than merely being “theories” in the pejorative misuse of the
  term theory. Modern knowledge has pragmatically proved itself in helping us
  to live much longer, healthier lives and enjoy amenities undreamed of by
  our progenitors.

  It has to be one of the great paradoxes of our time that as our knowledge has expanded in
  recent decades, the opposition to it has become more assertive
  and politically potent. One of the crowning ironies of the anti-science
  brigades is that groups that are largely contemptuous of each other often
  frame their anti-science rhetoric in essentially the same terms. My
  colleagues in the Humanities cluck piously about those ignorant rednecks
  who oppose Darwin and promote ‘‘intelligent design,’’ yet they in their own way
  hold anti-science ideas no less absurd. One strains to find any difference, significant or minor,
  between the argument of intelligent design that there is in life an
  “irreducible complexity” and the post-modernist critique of modern science
  as being “reductionist” and not “holistic.” To both in their particular
  crusades, the species barrier is immutable, or at least should be.

  Clearly there must be considerable frustration among scientists as
  organized groups oppose various forms of science education or scientific
  research. One recent article included in its title “why scientists are
  angry” and spoke about the anger that grips scientists when demonstrably
  false statements are paraded as facts and influence public policy.
  As an economist with a layman’s knowledge of the natural sciences, I
  understand these frustrations. I am a member of various newsgroups involved
  in agricultural biotechnology, most of whose contributors are in the
  sciences. This piece was inspired by a recent extended discussion on the
  difficulty of combating absurd phobias about transgenic food crops that
  anti-biotechnology activists have so carefully disseminated.
  (Unfortunately, other writing commitments prevented me from being other
  than a passive participant at the time.) Each time one scare is seemingly
  laid to rest, another rises, as one scientist described it, like a hare
  from nowhere. Even those fears that are massively refuted never die, but
  seem to be in some Sargasso Sea of cyber space awaiting a new current to
  set them afloat again as part of the litany of
  horrors of genetic modification of plants.

  There were discussions about being proactive, but the question becomes how
  can one be proactive against opponents who may be ignorant of science but
  who lack nothing in imagination and talent for fear-mongering? On a
  typical day, a scientist awakens and is concerned with ongoing research . An activist wakes up thinking
  about what the next campaign should be or whom they should
  they contact in the local media and whose friendship they should cultivate. Some even have
  focus groups to help them select the scare terms
  that would be most effective. Like the multi-national corporations that
  they attack, some of the activist groups begin promoting one cause,
  then morph into all-purpose NGOs with a diverse
  agenda of causes with which to garner publicity and raise money.
  An anti-science agenda links the dangers of
  biotechnology to the evils of multi-national corporations along with destruction
  of the environment and cultural and biological diversity; all turn into
  lucrative sources for fund raising and membership recruitment.

  It is difficult to be proactive when you are dealing with carefully
  calculated rational irrationality.
  When one is confronting claims of transgenic bacteria that could destroy
  all life on earth or similar unscientific nonsense, one is responding to a
  kind of irrationality that is impossible to predict and therefore to be prepared to respond to in
  advance, let alone educate the public on the subject. However irrational various anti-science proclamations may be,
  their advocates are supremely rational in the sense of being very skilled
  at crafting their propaganda so as to win public support and influence
  policy. Some groups are so good at driving public opinion to support
  their anti-science agenda, some of us wonder whether their leaders may
  be dealing from the bottom of the deck to their own members as well as to
  the public.

  The media may often put an obvious pejorative like “Franken food” in quotation marks, but
  too often the media routinely accept the terminology of the activists,
  even though the habit introduces biases which violate professional journalistic
  standards. Pollen drift from transgenic plants is almost always referred to, tendentiously,
  as “contamination” even though there is no evidence of harm. Similarly,
  “organic” agriculture is described as “sustainable” and “earth-friendly”
  while their food crops are said to be better tasting, fresher and healthier,
  without a shred of evidence for any such claims. In Houston, the food
  writers for the main paper have become unwitting propagandists for
  “organic” agriculture, as has happened in many other large and small
  circulation newspapers.

  The 24 hour news cycle has led to a reverse feeding frenzy, with activist
  groups all too ready to conjure up a scandal, inflating a
  statistically insignificant variation in a clinical study to a threat to
  the human endeavor or even to the planet, and to label a defense as
  part of a corporate cover-up. Scientists attempt to respond to these scare
  stories on a case by case basis, trying to explain the nature of
  the scientific inquiry involved and the way it is used to interpret
  experimental results. That is how scientists work, and the only way to wear down the opposition to
  scientific reasoning.

  Countering falsehoods with facts is a necessary condition to promote better
  understanding of issues involving science, but unfortunately, it is not a
  sufficient condition. Scientists
  present their evidence with appropriate qualifications, and with recognition that
  there are no absolute truths. The anti-science ideologues have no problem
  with absolutes and certainties. The scientists’ answer to the often asked rhetorical question
  – can you guarantee that no harm will ever come from transgenic crops – is
  obviously no. The activist now moves in for the kill, making
  it difficult for a scientist to explain that one cannot give such a
  guarantee for any phenomenon. There is a blatant but unstated falsehood in
  the rhetorical question, in that it implies that there are alternative
  actions that carry a zero risk on into the indefinite future. That
  transgenic plant breeding may possibly be the most precise, predictable
  form of plant breeding yet devised by humans is simply lost in the rhetoric of fear.

  A further problem is that editors and other news professionals are rarely
  educated in science and have little understanding of the scientific method.
  My experience has been that newspapers hate to make substantive
  corrections to a major story. One case involved a major story of two
  columns with picture on the front page of the
  Sunday edition and over one full page inside. In this case (in which I was
  involved), a group of scientists wrote in and pointed out some of the
  many errors in the story. Even though the writer had traveled to Mexico
  to do a story on transgenic maize in the company of anti-biotechnology
  activists, the newspaper’s ombudsman defended the objectivity of her
  reporting. Not only were there errors in the story, but the institutions and
  individuals that were not interviewed, as well as those that were, made it
  clear that the activists were more than just good traveling companions. In
  an extended exchange with the ombudsman, it was admitted that the author
  did not even know of the existence of the world’s leading experts and the
  research and development institutions on maize and on the issues raised in
  the story that were available in Mexico and Texas
  to be interviewed. I have compared it to going to Rome to do story on a
  controversy in Roman Catholicism and not knowing about either the Pope or
  the Vatican.

  Had the writer traveled to Mexico in the company of employees of a
  biotechnology firm, we would never have heard the end of it and anything
  written would have been dismissed simply on this basis alone without the
  necessity of any factual refutation. A widely shared characteristic of
  anti-science groups across the political spectrum is a Manichaean view of
  the complete corruption of those they oppose, and the purity of their own cause.

  In many respects the problem is more complicated and therefore more
  difficult for scientists to address. It is becoming increasingly obvious
  that no matter how clear and meticulous in fact and scientific reason one
  may be in presenting a scientific theory or refuting pseudo-scientific
  falsehoods, a large portion of the public is simply not receptive.
  The question is why and what can be done about it? The why is easier to
  address than is what can be done about it.

  The very human curiosity that leads to scientific inquiry makes us
  creatures who wish to have answers and make use of these answers to
  navigate the world around us. I have often quoted, from John Dewey’s The
  Quest for Certainty (Dewey, 1929, p. 3):

  Man who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek for
  security. He has sought to attain it in two ways. One of them began with
  an attempt to propitiate the powers which environ him and determine his
  destiny. … The other course is to invent arts and by their means turn the
  powers of nature to account; man constructs a fortress out of the very
  conditions and forces which threaten him. … This is the method of
  changing the world through action, as the other is the method of changing
  the self in emotion and ideas.

  In many ways myth and science are two sides of the same coin as attempts to
  explain the world around us. It is thus understandable that some of us have
  believed that, as the realm of what could be understood is expanded, the
  realm of myth would give way and contract. What we failed to realize is
  that we essentially inherit the myths: we grow up with
  them as a part of our everyday culture, so it requires little effort in
  subscribing to them. Much basic science
  has become a part of this package, so people have no problem in believing in
  many cause and effect relationships. What takes effort is to learn
  of the larger dimensions of science that have been progressively displacing
  myth or simply superseding a lack of knowledge in a number of areas. It is
  far easier to cling to inherited ways of thought then it is to engage in a
  process of learning new things.

  Though many seek to cling to the old beliefs in a pure form, science and
  technology have transformed our world in ways that are too obvious to be
  totally ignored. There are a variety of pseudo-science beliefs that are an
  extension of traditional mythology and purport to be compatible with
  modern science, or better still, they purport to be science in a purer and less
  corrupted form. On this view intelligent design is better science than what is
  being offered by biologists, whose views are distorted by their secular
  ideologies. On the other side of the spectrum, beliefs in a natural harmony
  that is violated by biotechnology is superior science to that of scientists
  who have been bought off by large corporations (whether or not they have ever
  received any funding from them). Any argument that the conflict over the
  teaching of evolution or genetic modification is one of science vs.
  anti-science is vehemently rejected.

  The ease of mastering the rhetoric of contemporary pseudo-science is part of its appeal. “Training sessions” in which the
  pseudo-science vocabulary can be learned have become part of the activists’
  agenda. The appeal of these beliefs, in addition to their flowing
  seamlessly from what one has already learned, is that a few simple beliefs
  seemingly can explain everything – which to a scientist means that they
  in fact explain nothing.

  The world of contemporary knowledge is so vast that it is beyond the
  comprehension of any individual to master even the smallest part of it. It
  is far easier to accept an all encompassing pseudo-scientific formula. This
  worries those of us who wish to create a world where
  questions of fact are explored and resolved, at least provisionally, by
  science and reason. This does not preclude differing moral and ethical
  considerations, but it does mean that morals and ethics can not be based on
  factual claims that are demonstrably false. An anti-biotechnology
  referendum that was passed in a California county, defined DNA as a complex
  protein found in every cell of the body. This egregious error in basic
  biology seriously undermines the credibility of its proponents – except in the eyes
  of the believers.

  The fact is that we can navigate the world intelligently without the need
  for myths and pseudo-science. The immensity of knowledge may in some
  respects be a problem for each of us, but in more important respects, the way
  in which this knowledge was created provides us
  with a roadmap. Just because I am in a newsgroup in
  which scientists exchange ideas, explain issues and counter the errors of
  the anti-scientists, does not mean that I as an economist, have anything
  more than a superficial understanding of their explanations. What
  reinforces my acceptance of what is said is my trust in the scientific
  method, peer review, and the larger body of scientific practices. Part of my
  trust is simply that these methods are an integral part of my own work as
  an economist. It is what allows me to select between competing ideas and
  navigate my way through the world. And it is the success of this method in
  transforming our lives for the better that it gives it a moral and ethical
  dimension.

  In my judgment, the scientific method and the democratic ideal are integral
  to one another. Both scientific inquiry and democracy are self-correcting methods,
  one is correction by ongoing inquiry in which prior beliefs no longer stand
  the test of experimental inquiry and new more verifiable propositions
  supersede them. Democracies can correct this election’s errors in the next
  election or the one after that; both are a work-in-progress.

  Being self-correcting is an implicit recognition of possibly being wrong.
  Whatever the possibility of being wrong may be, the very self-correcting
  aspect of the process is one more factor that makes the outcomes of science
  or democracy more likely to be right today than any other way, and even
  more likely to be right tomorrow than any other form of inquiry. To
  paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government
  except for all others. Given the possibility of error, both science and the
  democratic ideal reject absolutism of all sorts, including those that
  entitle one to trample on the rights of others such as destroying a field
  of transgenic crops in the name of saving the planet. Tolerance is a key idea.

  In science, there is or should be a continued re-examination of the
  validity of the method as it is practiced. In recent days there have been articles in prestigious journals concerning the way in
  which biases are creeping into scientific research such as clinical tests
  for pharmaceuticals, and suggestions for ways of overcoming them. The
  activists will point to these studies, not as a strength of scientific
  inquiry, but as evidence of its corruption. However, when is the last time
  that any of the groups pushing a pseudo-science agenda stopped to question
  the validity of their beliefs or whether their actions were helping or
  harming humankind? A thriving democracy should always be involved in
  internal debate concerning its ideals and practices. Both science and
  democracy require freedom of thought and freedom of exchange of ideas for
  their effective functioning. Participating actively and intelligently in a
  democracy provides the same barriers as being knowledgeable about science;
  it takes concerted effort and is far more complicated than simply following
  the dictates of a peerless leader or a totalizing ideology. The widespread
  acceptance of the basic principles of democracy means that like science,
  many more claim to be adhering to it than is the case in practice.

  Evidence-based knowledge derived from experimental scientific inquiry
  allows policy formation on every level from the personal to the public, to
  be dynamic and respond to changing circumstances. Ideologically driven
  policy is almost by definition binding and static, capable of
  obstruction but not progress. John Dewey spoke about a “warranted
  assertion.” However ignorant each of us may be about other areas of
  science, technology, and engineering, we can each accept their findings as
  being both provisional as all knowledge is, and at the same time to be
  warranted assertions as a basis for action until better ideas come along.
  In other words, instead of the blind faith of believers, we can
  simultaneously have trust and still retain a measure of reservation and
  skepticism. This requires that all inquiry be kept open and that vigorous
  dissent be encouraged.

  It has often been noted that the critics of genetically modified food crops,
  who frame their opposition both as pseudo-science and as opposition to
  corporate dominance of agriculture, have had a perverse impact on the
  industry exactly opposite to what they claim to be their intent. By
  attacking the science of transgenic modification, they make it difficult to
  get the kind of public research funding for it that would give farmers public and private sources for the kinds of crop improvement that biotechnology makes possible. Not only do the protests reduce public research funding for agricultural biotechnology, but the
  cumbersome, expensive regulations that frightened politicians are
  imposing make it virtually impossible for small firms to afford them, which
  then leads to the kind of industry concentration that the critics claim to
  be fighting.

  The “precautionary principle” and other alleged safety concerns that have
  been driving up the cost of getting new crops marketed, have also had other
  perverse impacts. As I argued above, our trust in the scientific inquiry
  that provides us with the evidence for the most warranted actions,
  including considerations of safety, is predicated upon an open process,
  including dissenting views. In a kind of Gresham’s law of public attention
  span, bad criticism drives out good. Scientists are rightfully hesitant to
  voice criticism when it might identify them with anti-science activists.
  Further, there have been too many instances where research that
  raises a legitimate safety or environmental concern is seized and grossly
  distorted or publicized before a final analysis can be made. Scientists who
  seek to withold their findings until the research is completed, or who
  offer a more benign interpretation of their results than those of
  sensationalized media coverage, will have their integrity questioned and be
  charged with a cover-up.

  Technology Review had a recent set of postings where Stewart Brand suggested that critics not oppose nuclear power but embrace it and be involved as critics who want to see it done right rather than simply opposing it. Needless to say, his wise suggestion was less than
  enthusiastically accepted by those ideologically opposed to nuclear power.
  The major criticism against activist groups is that they are obstructing
  the introduction of new technology and new improved ways of doing things
  for human betterment and opposing the science that can continue this
  process. In my judgment, equally as deleterious, is their stifling of the
  critical component of the dynamics of scientific inquiry that appropriately
  restrains technophiles such as this author and makes the use of it safer,
  fairer and more intelligent and beneficial to the human endeavor.

  What has been happening is that scientists have been winning the battles
  but still managing to lose the war. The message here is that
  scientists have to operate at two levels, continually countering the
  pseudo-science of false fears and ideological driven beliefs, but at the
  same time working to bring about a fundamental
  transformation in the public’s understanding of the nature of scientific
  inquiry, and allowing scientists
  to operate within it.

  Scientists have to recognize that when they are countering a demonstrably
  false idea, they may well be entering a conflict with the total
  worldview of those who hold them. To the family in Kansas that rejects
  evolution, the biology teacher at the local school is doing far more than
  merely teaching science. The science teacher is in effect entering their
  home and family and undercutting beliefs upon which their family and sense
  of community is based. Is it any wonder that they feel like
  victims? To many activists, the plant bio-technologist is contaminating and
  polluting the planet as part of a corporate plot to dominate the global
  economy. Is it any wonder that they also feel like victims?
  To the absolutist mindset, breeching a principle is the same as abandoning
  it, and therefore any concession to differing views amounts to total
  surrender. This helps to explain why many disillusioned ex-communists became radical conservatives, why activists’ opposition
  to transgenic food crops is total, and why the scientific
  research use of embryonic stem cells is defined as taking a human life.

  As the new millennium was approaching, there were many candidates for the greatest achievement of the past 1,000 years; one
  such candidate was the development of the scientific
  method. That candidate has my vote. If we work
  at it, one of the greatest achievements of this new millennium
  could be the continued refinement of the scientific method, its
  integration into the beliefs and practices of everyday life for the greater
  part of humankind, and the continuous improvement in the quality of life of
  earth’s inhabitants that could be realized as a result.

  REFERENCE

  Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of
  Knowledge and Action. 1980 reprint, New York: Capricorn Books, G.P. Putnam
  & Sons.

  June 18, 2005

• “Theory’s Empire”

  This spring, Columbia University Press published an anthology of literary and cultural theory, a 700-page tome entitled Theory’s Empire and edited by Daphne Patai and Will Corral. The collection includes essays dating back 30 years, but most of them are of recent vintage (I’m one of the contributors).

  Why another door-stopper volume on a subject already well-covered by anthologies and reference books from Norton, Johns Hopkins, Penguin, University of Florida Press, etc.? Because in the last 30 years, theory has undergone a paradoxical decline, and the existing anthologies have failed to register the change. Glance at the roster of names and texts in the table of contents and you’ll find a predictable roll call of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, neopragmatism, postcolonial studies, and gender theory. Examine the approach to those subjects and you’ll find it an expository one, as if the job of the volumes were to lay out ideas and methods without criticism (except when one school of thought in the grouping reproves another). The effect is declarative, not “Here are some ideas and interpretations to consider” but “Here is what theorists say and do.”

  If the theories represented were fresh and new, not yet assimilated into scholarship and teaching, then an introductory volume that merely expounded them would make sense. The same could be said if the theories amounted to a methodological competence that students must attain in order to participate in the discipline, or if the theories had reached a point of historical importance such that one studied them as one would, say, the utopian social theories surrounding communist reform, no matter how wrongheaded they were. But Theory lost its novelty some two decades ago, and many years have passed since anybody except the theorists themselves took the latest versions seriously. And as for disciplinary competence, the humanities are so splintered and compartmentalized that one can pursue a happy career without ever reading a word of Bhabha or Butler. Finally, while the historical import of Theory remains to be seen, indications of oblivion are gathering. Not only are the theorists largely unread outside of graduate classrooms, but even among younger scholars within the humanities fields the reading of them usually doesn’t extend beyond the anthologies and a few landmarks such as Discipline and Punish.

  One wouldn’t realize the diminishing value of Theory by perusing the anthologies, though. In fact, one gets the opposite impression—and rightly so. For, while Theory has become a humdrum intellectual matter within the humanities and a nonexistent or frivolous one without, it has indeed acquired a professional prestige that is as strong as ever. This is the paradox of its success, and failure. Intellectually speaking, twenty-five years ago Theory was an adventure of thought with real stakes. Reading “Diffèrance” and working backward into Heidegger’s and Hegel’s ontology, or “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and sensing the tragic truth at the heart of Romantic irony, one apprehended something fundamental enough to affect not just one’s literary method but one’s entire belief system. No doubt the same was true for an earlier generation and its interpretation of Wordsworth or T. S. Eliot. But this time it was Derrida and Baudrillard, and the institution was starting to catch up to it with “Theory specialist” entries in the MLA Job List, Introduction to Theory and Interpretation courses for first-year graduate students, and press editors searching for theory books to fill out their next year’s catalogue. In an inverse way, the public seemed to agree when William Bennett initiated the academic Culture Wars with To Reclaim a Legacy, an NEH report that decried Theory for destroying the traditional study of literature with politicized agendas and anti-humanist dogma. He was right, and a public outcry followed, but that only confirmed to junior theorists the power and insight of their practice.

  Ten years later, however, the experience had changed. As theorists became endowed chairs, department heads, series editors, and MLA presidents, as they were profiled in the New York Times Magazine and invited to lecture around the world, the institutional effects of Theory displaced its intellectual nature. It didn’t have to happen, but that’s the way the new crop of graduate students experienced it. Not only were too many Theory articles and books published and too many Theory papers delivered, but too many high-profile incursions of the humanities into public discourse had a Theory provenance. The academic gossip in Lingua Franca highlighted Theory much more than traditional scholarship, David Lodge’s popular novels portrayed the spread of theory as a human comedy, and People Magazine hired a prominent academic feminist as its TV critic. One theorist became known for finding her “inner life,” another for a skirt made of men’s neckties, another for unionizing TAs. It was fun and heady, especially when conservatives struck back with profiles of Theorists in action such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, sallies which enraged many academics and soundly defeated them in public settings, but pleased the more canny ones who understood that being denounced was better than not being talked about at all (especially if you had tenure).

  The cumulative result was that the social scene of Theory overwhelmed the intellectual thrust. Years earlier, the social dynamic could be seen in the cult that formed around deconstruction, and a comparison of “Diffèrance” with the section in The Post Card in which Derrida ruminates over a late-night call from “Martini Heidegger” shows the toll celebrity can take on a brilliant mind. By the mid-Nineties, the social tendencies had spread all across the humanities, and its intellectual consequences surfaced in the desperation and boredom with which Theorists pondered the arrival of The Next Big Thing. When a colleague of mine returned from an MLA convention in Toronto around that time, he told a story that nicely illustrated the trend. One afternoon he hopped on a shuttle bus and sat down next to a young scholar who told him she’d just returned from a panel. He replied that he’d just returned from France, where he’d been studying for a semester.

  “What are they talking about?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Is there any new theory?”

  “Yeah, in a way,” he answered. “It’s called ‘erudition.’”

  “What’s that?” she wondered.

  “Well, you read and read, and you get your languages, and you go into politics, religion, law, contemporary events, and just about everything else.” (He’s a 16th-century French literature scholar who comes alive in archives.)

  She was puzzled. “But what’s the theory?”

  “To be honest, there isn’t any theory,” he said.

  “That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”

  “There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

  A trivial exchange, yes, but it signals the professional meaning and moral barrenness Theory accrued in the Nineties. The more popular Theory became, the less it inspired deep commitments among searching minds. The more Theory became enshrined in anthologies ordered semester after semester, the more it became a token of professional wisdom. The only energy Theory sustained during those years issued from a non-philosophical source: the race/gender/sexuality/anti-imperialism/anti-bourgeois resentments tapped by various critics giving different objects of oppression theoretical standing.

  This raises another discrepancy between Theory’s intellectual content and its institutional standing. Theory in its political versions claimed to be subversive, egalitarian, anti-hegemonic, and ruthlessly self-critical, but in their actual working conditions theorists presided over one of the most hierarchical, prestige-ridden, and complacent professional spaces in our society. Theory promised to bring a fruitful pluralism to the field, yet the proliferation of outlooks created the opposite, a subdivision into sects that didn’t talk to one another. Theory purported to supply intellectual tools to dismantle the contents of humanities education and undo the power structures of institutions, but while the syllabus and curriculum changed, the networking, factionalism, and cronyism only intensified. No doubt the infusion of corporate approaches into the university, along with the growing isolation of humanities professors from American society, played a role in the process, but while Theorists critiqued moneyed interests and bourgeois conventions, they enjoyed the perks of tenured celebrity as much as anyone. One can’t blame them for that, but one can blame them for enlisting Theory in the service of social justice while insulating themselves from genuine social problems.

  The personality rituals, the routine discoveries of radical approaches, the abhorrence of dissent, the discordance of word and deed—they enervated Theory and the intellectual stakes evaporated. The outcome shouldn’t surprise anybody. It isn’t the first time a philosophy rose to prominence in an institution at the same rate that it lost its power to inspire. But only recently, and far too late, have theorists begun to admit it, for example, at the April 2003 Critical Inquiry symposium in Chicago. Even their hesitant admissions, though, differ from previous reactions to criticism, for while others have made these points for years, Theorists and their votaries managed to make their charges look random and eccentric, outside the principal scholarly dialogue. Theory may appear at first to be a diverse collection of psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and the like, but while the different schools were allowed to spar with one another (feminists criticizing psychoanalysis, political critics chastising deconstruction, and such), whenever a non-theorist tackled a Theory (Fred Crews on psychoanalysis, John Searle on deconstruction), his or her arguments were denounced as anti-intellectual bile. Theory quickly seized the vanguard terrain and cast its detractors as merely anti-Theory—retrograde, bitter, superseded.

  What the latter group lacked, among other things, was a potent and lively volume such as Josué Harari’s best-selling early collection of programmatic and illustrative essays, Textual Strategies, or a bulky anthology suitable for a survey of all the reigning approaches such as The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Individual critiques such as Eugene Goodheart’s Skeptic Disposition might punch holes in one theoretical premise and another, but the institutional might of Theory remained firm. Only when an anti-or counter-Theory expression found a medium with sufficient institutional heft would the lock of Theory upon the humanities begin to loosen.

  This is, of course, a heavy burden to place upon Theory’s Empire. The purpose of the anthology, however, is not to replace existing collections but to complement and contrast with them. Despite its apparent pluralism, Theory has become a set of Establishment factions, and while in ordinary circumstances factions maintain their vitality by rivaling one another for influence, the protections of the academy permitted academic sects to coexist and turn inward. The loss of real intellectual challenge followed the time-tested laws of human nature; as John Stuart Mill put it: “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.”

  In the past, yes, Theory thrived on enemies, the “anti-Theorists,” but they were conveniently interpreted as outsiders. Theory needs new antagonists whose intelligence is unquestioned—not the conservative and (classic) liberals in the public sphere who unite in despising academic Theorists for their posturing and abstractedness, and not the isolated traditionalist professors who lament the hijacking of their profession with cartoon jibes on their office doors. Essays by a broad array of critics, philosophers, social scientists, and public intellectuals who question Theory’s logical and empirical contents and diagnose its institutional status, gathered into a single, course-friendly volume, will restore some respect and vigor to the field. The second thoughts of preeminent theorists of the past are inadequate, and we require more to make metacriticism interesting once again.

  Theory’s Empire is a start. It is weighty enough to preempt the anti-intellectual tag and count as more than idiosyncratic musings on the subject. The contributors are diverse enough in their interests, training, and politics to escape the standard labels applied to critics. The contributions are informed and broad enough to bring a wider perspective to fundamental problems. Some of Theory’s premises will be expelled, some names discredited, but others will be strengthened. That is the natural and healthy evolution of a discipline, and Theory has been able to resist it for too long. In a few weeks, the anthology will be the subject of a weblog discussion at The Valve, where several distinguished voices and lots of commentators shall initiate a process long overdue.

  June 15, 2005

• On Being a Mitigated Sceptic

  To be a sceptic is a difficult and dangerous business. To be what the philosopher, David Hume, called a “mitigated”, or moderate, sceptic is, in addition, deeply frustrating. In the first case, sceptics are seen as enemies of ”religion”; in the second, the moderate sceptic is constantly misunderstood, because one is dealing with carefully-modulated degrees of questioning and doubt that do not conform easily to the modern world of sound bites, shallow interviews, and pressure-group action. The media inevitably favour the religious fanatic who can encapsulate into a single sound bite simple articles of unquestioned faith that mesh readily with the prevailing public mood, which they themselves so often – too often – share.

  In the UK, ”global warming” is now a faith. We must not underestimate this fact. To be a “speculative atheist” – again employing Hume – is to place oneself on the outside of liberal society. You will be interviewed as a curiosity, if at all. You will also be attacked ad hominem. The aim will be to make you a leper, an untouchable. Some polite American scientists, when they are interviewed on, say, BBC Radio 4, are shocked by the vitriol they encounter if they dare to raise complexities and queries about the science, or even about appropriate action in relation to the perceived threat of ”global warming”. They have forgotten that, in the UK, the ”science” is legitimised by the popular myth, not the other way round. This is something that even our august Royal Society has failed to grasp. Too many of us believe that we are making an independent scientific assessment, when, in reality, we have subsumed vital Humean scepticism to the demands of the faith.

  But to be a “mitigated” sceptic – like me – is even more problematic. The “mitigated” sceptic has first to distinguish ”global warming” from ”climate change”. Secondly, ”climate change” itself has to be broken down into three component and separate questions: “Is climate changing and in what direction?” “Are humans influencing climate change and to what degree?” And: “Are humans able to manage climate change predictably by adjusting one or two variables, or factors, out of the thousands involved?” Imagine trying to unravel these threads in the shoddy warp and weft of a three minute radio interview, or a five minute television debate between three people. There is no air space for the “just reasoner”. Yet, as Hume was at pains to stress, when we are shown the “infirmities” of human understanding, we should naturally acknowledge “… a degree of doubt and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny, ought ever to accompany a just reasoner.”

  What is more deeply depressing, however, is the failure of the media, not the failure of the politicians, nor of the scientists. A critical media is vital for a functioning democracy. The media, nevertheless, can become dangerous when it ”crusades” uncritically, siding too readily with the establishment and government of the day. In such circumstances, the debate never achieves the depths of “just reasoning”, but becomes ensnared by the slogans of ”the faithful”, or worse, of the spin doctor and activist.

  The fundamental question in relation to ”global warming” is: “Can humans manipulate climate predictably?” Putting this more scientifically: “Will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate?”

  The “mitigated” sceptic has to answer “No”. In so complex a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system as climate, not doing something at the margins is as unpredictable as doing something. Surely, this is what the Royal Society should be admitting? This is the cautious science; the rest is dogma. And what precisely is a “better” climate? “Doing something” might inadvertently lead to “worse”.

  We are thus crying out for a media that will have the bravery to seek “just reason”. On climate change, the British public deserves a richer and more nuanced debate.

  I must thus remain the “mitigated” sceptic, despite the tenor of the times. My scepticism is not extreme. It is not the scepticism of pure relativism. Rather, it confronts instead what can be done about climate change that will work. At present, this fundamental question is lost in the clamour “to do something at all costs” and to damn those who doubt we can.

  Philip Stott is Professor Emeritus of biogeography at the University of London. This article was first published on his website Envirospin and is republished here by permission.

  June 9, 2005

• Gravity, or Paranoia II

  Here it is, another day. Well, I must admit, we were all quite surprised. None of us expected it. For quite a while now all the old certainties have been collapsing – as you well know. After all, none of us is ever likely to forget that day when it was realised that gravity was merely a part of that Social Construct of the Western Male Patriarchy called ‘Science’.

  Now, things no longer fall to Earth as they used to in the bad old unreformed days and everything floats as freely as possible. We are no longer bound to the Earth by the patriarchal dictates of the White Male Industrial-Military-Scientific Hegemony and all float free in perfect equality, whatever our gender, race, creed or political beliefs. True equality is ours at last.

  However, I have heard malicious rumours that there are still some aeroplanes up in the sky, caught out on that day. Their crews and passengers – of course – all long dead as they circle the endless skies. Of course, they claim, no-one dares go up there to get them down, in case they too suffer the same fate. But, I think we can quite easily dismiss such talk as counter-revolutionary, and – equally – dismiss such notions of so-called ‘proof’ that ‘they are clearly visible up there’ as an unfortunate hang-over from pre-enlightened days. After all, what is ‘proof’, but yet another manifestation of the pervasive way that the old ‘scientific’ hegemony corrupted our natural – and therefore – pure and good right to see things the way we want to see them? Just yet another manifestation of that whole corrupting notion of alleged evidence, which is – as we all now know – little more than so-called science’s ideologically corrupt propaganda.

  It – of course – also has become a fair bit colder since the Earth began to wander off its orbit, and – as I said – days these days do tend to be a bit of a hit and miss affair. But there is no way any of us would go back – want, or need, to go back – to those bad old unenlightened days of The Dominant White Male Hieratically Imposed Semi-Fascist Ideology Of Science that so corrupted us all back in now what seems like another Dark Ages.

  Now – at last – we are truly free, as free as the Earth is to wander the solar system and beyond, free to make up our own equally valid personal realities, and to never again suffer the indignity of occasionally falling over that once so distorted our self-esteem and growth potential as full, free and equal human beings.

  This article was first published at Stuff and Nonsense and is published here by permission.

  May 30, 2005

• Wallification, or Paranoia I

  Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ playing Pyramus says, more shrewdly than he or Shakespeare had any idea of, ‘O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss,/ Curs’d be thy stones for thus deceiving me!’ Shakespeare surprisingly often anticipated the insights of postmodernism in this way; it is quite poignant and heart-rending to realize he wasn’t in a position to know he was doing so. We are more fortunate.

  We are in a position to understand the insidious sublimated power of the wall in all its forms and manifestations, we can problematize its taken for granted status in our culture, we can interrogate the way it does its work, and thus come to an understanding of the regimes of separation, blockage, interference, interposition, interruption, and frustration in Western hegemonic structures.

  Walls are everywhere. A wall is a barrier, and barriers are everywhere we look. In fact, it is difficult not to conclude that Eurocentric Western hegemonists are so terrified of nature and the real world (if there is a ‘real world,’ but that is a question for another essay) that they can’t bear to confront any part of it without a barrier. Poor frightened paranoid rational bureaucratic neoliberals, cowering away from trees and flies and snow, constructing an artificial antiseptic world to live in and never smelling the flowers or the decaying corpses.

  Many of the walls and barriers are obvious enough: they’re the ones we already call walls and barriers: the walls of houses and prisons and asylums; fences and border crossings, and the like. Also roofs and floors. But there are other barriers, or walls – other solid objects that come between the Self and some piece or aspect of the outside world. Between Self and Other. These walls define the other as Other – that is the cultural work they do. There are more walls of that kind than a theorist can enumerate. Shoes. Hats. Socks. Clothes. Plates. Tablecloths. Chairs. Cushions. Beds, mattresses, sheets.

  All furniture is a barrier. Chairs and tables are barriers between us and the floor, which is a barrier between us and the ground. Plates and glasses are barriers between food and the table or floor or ground – and so on. Barrier upon barrier everywhere you look.

  All of our lives are infiltrated and saturated with barriers. Everything is blocked, interrupted, partitioned, channelled, frustrated. Our energies are clogged, our desires and impulses and hemmed in and corralled, our inspirations are siphoned and piped, our creativity is boxed up and fenced in. We are allowed free interaction and intercourse with nothing. (It is no accident that prostitutes can charge more for ‘bareback.’) Mosquitoes, flies, worms, bacteria, leopards, vultures, polar bears – we are forcibly separated from all of them.

  Band-aids. Umbrellas. Boats. Cars. Park benches. Bridges. All, manufactured artificial objects interposed between our breathing natural bodies and the earth. It is as if ‘civilization’ has done nothing but teach us a kind of hypertrophied paranoia in which we can’t stand to confront anything skin to skin. O wicked wall indeed.

  May 29, 2005

• We expect that Ontario should do the same

  TORONTO, Canada – “We are very pleased, and to be honest it’s a cause for celebration when we heard that Quebec has upheld human rights for all its citizens… we expect that Ontario should do the same”, said Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.

  “Quebec has taken a brave, bold and necessary step, a step that assures all Quebecers will now enjoy not only fair and equal treatment under the law, but also the right to be governed by the same laws as other Canadians.” said Ms. Arjomand.

  This decision was a positive move towards elimination of interference of religion in the justice system.

  We thank all progressive organizations and individuals that supported us and made this victory possible.

  “It is still concerning when we hear Premier McGuinty say ‘We will not be unduly influenced by …our provincial counterparts…We’ll be making a decision here that’s in keeping with the values and aspirations of the people of Ontario.’ Is Premeir McGuinty suggesting that the values and human rights in Quebec are different from the values and human rights in Ontario? If that is truly the case, how is it so different? We believe the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the standard to guide all our decisions on these legal matters.

  We also disagree with the findings of the Boyd report and in particular with her recommendation number 2, found on page 133:

  “The Arbitration Act should continue to allow disputes to be arbitrated using religious law, if the safeguards currently prescribed and recommended by this Review are observed.”

  Allowing religious laws to settle family legal matters, only serves to exclude some people from the privileges and benefits of the Canadian legal system. We believe one law should apply to all.”

  Once again Ms. Arjomand calls upon the Liberal government to abandon its support of private religious courts/ faith based arbitrations.

  Homa Arjomand is the co-ordinator of No Sharia. She can be reached at
  homawpi@rogers.com

  May 28, 2005

• Separation of god & science

  In January 2005 David Bell, a School Inspector, delivered a speech which was published in The Guardian about the rise in the number of religious schools in the UK. His comments have raised opposition by the Institute of Islamic Organisations in the UK. This interview aired on TV International. Bahram Soroush hosted the programme whilst Maryam Namazie was away.

  Bahram Soroush: You may have heard statements by David Bell and also the response by the Institute of Islamic Organisations in the UK. They have said he is picking on Islamic schools. Do you think this is discrimination?

  Azar Majedi: No I don’t. Actually my position is to ban all religious schools. I think education must be separate from religion and the church. It is a positive move to investigate faith schools, from a children’s rights point of view. It is of no surprise to me that they have found shortcomings in Islamic schools. I think it will probably be more or less the same with other religious schools. But perhaps other religious schools try to follow the national curriculum and standards more. Islamic schools are more into religious teachings than the regular curriculum.

  Bahram Soroush: So you feel that religious schools altogether across the board should be banned?

  Azar Majedi: Yes. They must be banned and education must be separated from religion and the church. Universal laws and standards are the basis of a civil society that respects human rights and the equality of all the citizens. Separation of religion from the state and education is the basis of a secular society, where free thinking is respected and encouraged. Religion, in my opinion, is permeated with superstition and contradicts the scientific achievements of humanity. For all these reasons religious schools must be banned.

  Furthermore, all religions are patriarchal and sexist. As it regards Islam, it is well-known for its sexist codes and rules. This is so because Islam has not historically been challenged or reformed, as it is the case with Christianity. The development of capitalism in the west resulted in significant social upheavals, of which the French revolution is the most influential. These upheavals challenged Christianity in different aspects and reduced its grip on the society and polished its most crude prejudices. When it comes to gender issues and sexual equality, religion has a negative effect.

  Religious schools, not only do not promote sexual equality, they reinforce sexism and encourage a sexual division of labour and differential gender roles. Islamic schools are segregated and promote totally different roles for girls in society and restrict girls from many activities. Finally, these schools are more a place for indoctrination than scientific teachings. By allowing religious schools to function, we are discriminating against a section of society, and we are setting double standards.

  Bahram Soroush: In that case what do say to this argument that we should look after children’s and pupils’ religious needs and that is why we have faith schools?

  Azar Majedi: I don’t believe children have any religious needs. When it is talked about children’s religious needs, it actually means their parents’ need to indoctrinate their children. “Children have no religion”; they happen to be born in a family with a particular religion. I believe there should be no official religious teachings to children. Once they become of age, then they can decide whether they like to pursue a particular faith or not. I strongly believe that religious teaching to children is indoctrination, like exposing them to any particular ideology. Therefore, it must be banned. It is fine to teach them the history of ideas, the history of religion but teaching religion as such should be prohibited.

  Bahram Soroush: Somebody made a comment in the recent controversy that if you have children who are in a religious family and when they go to school, they go to a religious school, and they come back to a religious family. So 24 hours a day they are confronted by religion.

  Azar Majedi: I think this is a very good and valid point. This refers to a sad reality of a life of indoctrination which is imposed on some children. I believe this must be stopped. This is wrong both from the child’s point of view and society’s point of view. To deprive a child of a normal happy life and normal education has become integrated in the society as a way of life. It is wrong to do that. They should be integrated with other children in the society as citizens, with children of all backgrounds. I understand that there are families with different religions and cultures.

  However, these religions and cultures must not be imposed on the children. In societies today, children are exposed to all kinds of religions and cultures. They should be given the right of choice. Once they reach adulthood, they can choose. And in any circumstance, education must be secular and based on the latest scientific achievements. Children should be free from religious brain washing and teachings and preaching.

  The effect of non-secular, religious and segregated education is very destructive on the society as a whole, and on our children’s happy, normal life, and upbringing.

  As we can see even a school inspector has come to recognise this fact. Of course this criticism is not radical enough (probably they have stronger criticisms themselves). It is carefully worded as not to “offend” any religious groups. But with a bit of insight one can recognise the severity of the problem. I am more concerned about the lot of these children. They are being deprived. Their basic rights are being violated. We cannot sit and watch. We should take action to defend the rights of these children to a happy, normal life, to safeguard their equal access to the world’s scientific achievements, to free-thinking, and safeguard their integration into the society, with all other children.

  Bahram Soroush: In a sense these children are being sent to the religious schools by their parents and are being denied the same rights as the children who attend the mainstream schools. What is your view on that?

  Azar Majedi: Yes that is true. Mansoor Hekmat has a very interesting and provoking statement regarding this issue and I have quoted it in many of my speeches and articles: “The child has no religion, tradition, and prejudices. She has not joined any religious sect. She is a new human being who, by accident and irrespective of her will has been born into a family with specific religion, tradition, and prejudices. It is indeed the task of society to neutralise the negative effects of this blind lottery.

  Society is duty-bound to provide fair and equal living conditions for children, their growth and development, and their active participation in social life. Anybody who should try to block the normal social life of a child, exactly like those, who would want to physically violate a child according to their own culture, religion, or personal or collective complexes, should be confronted with the firm barrier of the law and the serious reaction of society.”

  I believe the position is very clear. We should have the interest of the child before us. Providing a happy, normal life for any child, and the creation of a harmonic society on the basis of secularism i.e. separation of religion from the state, are the right principle and the basis of a right and just position. Respect for multi-culturalism and cultural relativism leads to discrimination against some sections of the society, violations of human rights for some sections, double standards, and the creation of a disintegrated and segregated society, where people are put into different pigeon boxes and identified by their cultural or religious backgrounds, instead of as equal citizens.

  Diversity is fine but creating boxes and stamping people’s foreheads with their religion or their family’s or community’s religion is wrong. Furthermore, children are not given proper scientific education in these faith schools. They are given a one-sided education which is more based on superstition than science. Thus a normal life is denied from them.

  We then come to the question of gender and sexual equality. Faith schools in general, and Islamic and Jewish schools in particular are based on sexist values and beliefs. In all religious schools there is a very definite defined gender role. Girls are considered as a whole different kind of human being than boys. There you have gender apartheid and segregation which is very discriminatory against girls and women. We have a long history of fighting for women’s rights in Europe. Especially the gender roles have been challenged significantly in the past 30 years in Western Europe. The religious schools deny that and contradict society’s achievements. They turn the clock backward. We should not let this happen. Bringing up children in religious schools is wrong and has to be banned.

  Bahram Soroush: Some might say fair enough, you want secular education, that children should be left alone until they reach the age of maturity, until they are 16, and then they can decide what religion to have or what not to have. But they also say, what about the rights of the parents? Don’t they have any rights and responsibilities towards raising their children? Aren’t you excluding them of their rights?

  Azar Majedi: No, I am not excluding any one of their rights. Parents definitely have a responsibility towards their children. They also have some rights. These rights and responsibilities must be defined by the society as a set of universal laws. Parents are responsible to provide their children, in the framework of their means, with a happy, normal and safe life. They must provide their children with love, security and safety. But this does not mean that if a child is born in a poor or disadvantaged family, the society will leave the child to have only what the parents are capable of providing. Society has a duty toward the well being of the child. That is why there are internationally recognised charters and declarations to safeguard and protect children. Modern society has recognised the need for such laws.

  That is why every civilised society has laws regarding obligatory education, prohibition of child labour, criminalising physical and sexual abuse of a child and so on. By passing such laws, the society has taken the matters in its own hand out of the parents’ realm of rights. We are not living in a feudal system where the parents – actually the father – decide over the whole family’s existence. For example, according to Islamic laws, a father or a grandfather can kill his children without being prosecuted. This is a law in some countries. Modern, civil society has abolished this right.

  I want to say rights are not absolute and ahistorical. Each society must define these laws according to the well being of children and in light of children’s interests. In my opinion, indoctrination of children is one of those so-called rights that must be taken away from parents. Education must be standardised and universal for every child in a given society.

  What I am trying to say is that there is a responsibility by the society towards children as much as there is parents’ responsibility towards children. That happy, normal and secure life that I was talking about is partly society’s responsibility in all aspects: economically and education wise. The society will not leave it to the parents just because the children are born in a particular family to teach them whatever they want and brain wash them with superstition. There is actually a law and a limited safeguard that the society offers to children if the parents are abusive. Society would intervene and take the child’s side.

  I think abuse is understood as merely sexual or physical and verbal violence whereas indoctrination and brain washing of children with superstition and prejudgments must also be recognised as abuse. Inflicting or imposing religious or cultural customs upon children that hinder healthy physical and mental development must be considered as abuse. I consider child veiling as a serious violation of children rights. In the same token, sending children to religious schools is a serious violation of their rights.

  Bahram Soroush: It particularly affects the girls. Doesn’t it?

  Azar Majedi: It does. Religion by its nature and as an ideology is very much sexist and male chauvinist. Christianity has been challenged in the 18 and 19th century, from the French revolution to the transformation of the European society from a feudal society to a capitalist system. It has been pushed back in the society and is more or less behaving itself. Islam however, has not gone through the same process. Islam has never been dealt with like this in the societies that it was born in. Islam has never been challenged in this way, has never been pushed back from the society.

  Moreover, for the past 3 decades a political movement has been born and developed, which takes its ideology and policy from Islam and is very reactionary, i.e. political Islam. This movement is not only religious but also political. We can see what political Islam is doing, gaining more and more inroads in western society as well. We know Islam’s record, what Islam says; it is written black on white and we know how male chauvinistic and sexist it is. Gender apartheid is the basis of Islam. The veiling of children and many other abuses should be stopped. If you expose a girl or even a boy to that culture and education, you are actually depriving these children of a humane life, especially the girls. Islamic schools must be stopped because this gender discrimination is embedded in Islam.

  Azar Majedi is the head of the Organisation of Women’s Liberation.

  May 26, 2005

• Mayor of London, Political Islam, and Us

  Maryam Namazie: Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, has published a dossier called ‘Why the Mayor of London Will Maintain Dialogues with All of London’s Faiths and Communities’. Basically, this report is in response to a criticism of his love affair with Qaradawi – a so-called Islamic scholar – by a coalition of several individuals and organisations, including the three of us. We have spoken a lot about this issue, so we won’t go into details here. But I do want to briefly, as an introduction for people who haven’t heard our other discussions about Qaradawi, ask both our guests why they are critical of Livingston’s relationship with Qaradawi? What’s wrong with having a dialogue with him in the first place?

  Bahram Soroush: It’s not just a dialogue. What Ken Livingston did was welcome Qaradawi and justify his ideas and what he has said. In fact the report that has been produced by the Mayor of London in response to a dossier by a large coalition of people who criticised his actions, goes even further than that. It paints a rosy picture of Qaradawi, which probably makes even Qaradawi wonder why he should be criticised at all by anyone. Maybe that was part of the Mayor of London’s strategy of gaining votes, finding another constituency within London and so building a cosy relationship with the Islamists. Qaradawi is one of the representatives of the Islamists, who, for example, on the question of homosexuals, women, and many other issues has uttered and holds fiercely reactionary and inhumane ideas.

  Fariborz Pooya: Effectively, the Mayor of London is appeasing a movement which is quite vicious. We have seen the activities of this movement in the Middle East, as well as in Europe. This is a fascist movement. It reminds me of Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, who in the late 1930s went to Germany and brought with him a piece of paper, waving it to the crowds, saying here, I have the word of Mr Hitler that he is not going to go to war – who says he’s aggressive? The following year Hitler rolled his tanks into Poland. So effectively we are facing a movement which is quite vicious, and the Mayor of London is inviting one of the representatives of this movement and presenting him as the ‘voice of reason’ for the people of the Middle East. That’s what’s wrong. I think there’s a strong recognition of this fact in Europe, as a lot of people objected to Livingston’s appeasing of the Islamic movement.

  Maryam Namazie: It’s interesting that you say that, because if you look at this dossier, the characterisations that are used for Qaradawi – from being a moderate, a progressive, a voice of reason, an advocate of democracy, pluralism, equality of women, and so on, it’s amazing. It actually brings a tear to one’s eyes when you read the things that he has been labelled as. He has been labelled as someone who is so wonderful, he is against terrorism and he even wanted to save the Buddhist statues from destruction by the Taliban…

  Fariborz Pooya: I think we should elect him for Mayor of London, then!

  Maryam Namazie: Well, their views are quite similar, aren’t they?! But what’s interesting is that the gay rights group Outrage! and Peter Tatchell, whom I have a great deal of respect for, because he has been a very outspoken critic of political Islam despite the barrage of racism that he has been labelled with, have written a very good report that, point by point, shows the realities of who Qaradawi really is. And what I’d like to know is how it is possible for such a positive image to come out of Qaradawi in this report? Why has that happened? What’s going on?

  Bahram Soroush: That’s an attempt to counteract the criticism that was levelled at Livingston. The issue is not just a one-off issue with Ken Livingston. I think what Fariborz was raising was that we are facing an attempt, including lobbying, backed up by money, media coverage and contacts throughout the world and Europe in order to launch and push forward the agenda of political Islam in these societies. And it’s not just in Europe, but in Canada as well, where we have seen the attempt to set up courts based on Sharia, i.e. Islamic law. All this fits into an ideology which justifies all these attempts – as if society is based not on citizens, but on groups of people belonging to various religions and tribes. So women who have escaped from Islamist societies should be treated according to the laws in place in those societies; and apparently they can never get out of that label. What people like the Mayor of London are doing is working within that context. What they are revamping is a movement which is fascistic, ultra right-wing, inhumane and undemocratic in every sense.

  Fariborz Pooya: Ken Livingston’s report represents a bowing to the Islamic movement. I think its essence is a retreat from civilized standards and universal rights. In the philosophy of Ken Livingston, which is shared by Bush, Paul Bremer, the Labour government and the United Nations, society is or should be a mosaic of tribes, ethnic groups and religions. Citizenship, universal rights and civil society do not exist any more. In this philosophy people are labelled and branded according to religion, ethnicity, and community; it’s a fragmented society which needs to be brought together, and power, the state and resources need to be shared based on that. This is what we see in Iraq; a government being installed based on tribes and religions, a post-Cold War type of government. What Bush and the like represent is a Western version of that. It’s a shame for humanity at the beginning of the 21st century to be retreating to the Middle Ages, where standards of the state and society were based on recognition of tribes, religions and fragmented identities.

  Maryam Namazie: One of the things that really outraged me when I read this report was that Qaradawi, this so-called Islamic scholar, is this wonderful progressive and the three of us who have been fighting for people’s rights, universal rights, equality, secularism, and so on are deemed to be extremists. It is our statements that are of concern! From the fact that we support the banning of child veiling (a children’s rights issue mind you), to the fact that we think all strands of political Islam are reactionary. So I would like to get your views on this. What’s going on? It seems the world’ gone topsy-turvy. You have been mentioning this. What’s your take on this?

  Bahram Soroush: I think that’s what happens when standards fall in a society. We are seeing a retrogression to the Dark Ages. Beliefs that were taken for granted, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s, even until very recently; things like opposing discrimination, fighting repressive, reactionary ideologies, putting the human being first, putting the citizen at the centre of your politics, ideology and actions, those seem to have been eroded. So people who are defending those things seem to be saying something radical. Talking about equal rights for women, fighting discrimination against gays and lesbians, standing for separation of religion from the state and education, believing that children should be left alone and not be veiled – these have been normal, standard and generally accepted beliefs of a secular and progressive society, and we now see the ruling classes going back on these, not just in the Third World, but also in the heart of Europe. Ken Livingston is part of that wave of regression.

  Fariborz Pooya: One of the characteristics of this regressive move to the Middle Ages is the language that is being used. You see the ideals of humanity not only being pushed aside, but also being emptied. They talk about freedom of religion, but there’s no secularism, no freedom of individuals, no freedom of human beings as human beings. The standards are being re-defined. Ken Livingston and people like him, the whole bourgeois class, the whole state, are regressing into this. The ossification of the state and the regression are all contributing to this. They think they can stop the Islamic movement by appeasing it, by re-defining the values and norms of civilised society, by defining freedom of women as forcing the veil on them, freedom of children as the right of parents to impose religion and bigotry on them, freedom of expression as justifying the most reactionary views, while anybody who defends human values and rights of people is labelled as extremist.

  TV International interview dated May 2, 2005. Bahram Soroush is a UK-based Civil Rights activist; Fariborz Pooya is co-editor of the WPI Briefing.

  May 14, 2005

• Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion and Belief

  The very notion of apostasy has vanished from the West where one would talk of being a lapsed Catholic or non-practising Christian rather than an apostate. There are certainly no penal sanctions for converting from Christianity to any other religion. In Islamic countries, on the other hand, the issue is far from dead.

  The Arabic word for apostate is murtadd, the one who turns back from Islam, and apostasy is denoted by irtidad and ridda. Ridda seems to have been used for apostasy from Islam into unbelief ( in Arabic, kufr ), and irtidad from Islam to some other religion.(1) A person born of Muslim parents who later rejects Islam is called a Murtadd Fitri – fitri meaning natural, it can also mean instinctive, native, inborn, innate. One who converts to Islam and subsequently leaves it is a Murtadd Milli, from milla meaning religious community .The Murtadd Fitri can be seen as someone unnatural, subverting the natural course of things whose apostasy is a wilful and obstinate act of treason against God and the one and only true creed, and a betrayal and desertion of the community. The Murtadd Milli is a traitor to the Muslim community, and equally disruptive.

  Any verbal denial of any principle of Muslim belief is considered apostasy. If one declares, for example, that the universe has always existed from eternity or that God has a material substance, then one is an apostate. If one denies the unity of God or confesses to a belief in reincarnation, one is guilty of apostasy. Certain acts are also deemed acts of apostasy, for example treating a copy of the Koran disrespectfully, by burning it or even soiling it in some way. Some doctors of Islamic law claim that a Muslim becomes an apostate if he or she enters a church, worships an idol, or learns and practises magic. A Muslim becomes an apostate if he defames the Prophet’s character, morals or virtues, and denies Muhammad’s prophethood and that he was the seal of the prophets.

  KORAN

  It is quite clear that under Islamic Law an apostate must be put to death. There is no dispute on this ruling among classical Muslim or modern scholars, and we shall return to the textual evidence for it. Some modern scholars have argued that in the Koran the apostate is threatened with punishment only in the next world, as for example at XVI.106, “Whoso disbelieveth in Allah after his belief –save him who is forced thereto and whose heart is still content with the Faith but whoso findeth ease in disbelief: On them is wrath from Allah. Theirs will be an awful doom.” Similarly in III.90-91, “Lo! those who disbelieve after their (profession of) belief, and afterward grow violent in disbelief, their repentance will not be accepted. And such are those who are astray. Lo! those who disbelieve, and die in disbelief, the (whole) earth full of gold would not be accepted from such an one if it were offered as a ransom (for his soul).Theirs will be a painful doom and they will have no helpers.”

  However, Sura II.217 is interpreted by no less an authority than al-Shafi’I (died 820 C.E.), the founder of one of the four orthodox schools of law of Sunni Islam, to mean that the death penalty should be prescribed for apostates. Sura II.217 reads: “… But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever , his works shall come to nothing in this world and the next, and they are the companions of the fire for ever.” Al-Thalabi and al -Khazan concur. Al-Razi in his commentary on II:217 says the apostate should be killed .(2)

  Similarly, IV. 89: “They would have you disbelieve as they themselves have disbelieved, so that you may be all like alike. Do not befriend them until they have fled their homes for the cause of God. If they desert you seize them and put them to death wherever you find them. Look for neither friends nor helpers among them…” Baydawi (died c. 1315-16), in his celebrated commentary on the Koran, interprets this passage to mean: “Whosover turns back from his belief (irtada ), openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether .Do not accept intercession in his regard”.(3) Ibn Kathir in his commentary on this passage quoting Al Suddi (died 745) says that since the unbelievers had manifested their unbelief they should be killed.(4)

  Abul Ala Mawdudi [1903-1979], the founder of the Jamat-i Islami, is perhaps the most influential Muslim thinker of the 20th century, being responsible for the Islamic resurgence in modern times. He called for a return to the Koran and a purified sunna as a way to revive and revitalise Islam. In his book on apostasy in Islam, Mawdudi argued that even the Koran prescribes the death penalty for all apostates. He points to sura IX for evidence:
  “But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then are they your brethren in religion. We detail our revelations for a people who have knowledge. And if they break their pledges after their treaty (hath been made with you) and assail your religion, then fight the heads of disbelief Lo! they have no binding oaths in order that they may desist.”(IX: 11,12)(5)

  Hadith

  Here we find many traditions demanding the death penalty for apostasy. According to Ibn Abbas the Prophet said, “Kill him who changes his religion,” or “behead him.”(6) The only argument was as to the nature of the death penalty. Bukhari recounts this gruesome tradition:
  “Narrated Anas:Some people from the tribe of Ukl came to the Prophet and embraced Islam .The climate of Medina did not suit them, so the Prophet ordered them to go to the (herd of milch ) camels of charity to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine).They did so, and after they had recovered from their ailment they turned renegades (reverted from Islam, irtada ) and killed the shepherd of the camels and took the camels away .The Prophet sent (some people) in their pursuit and so they were caught and brought, and the Prophet ordered that their hands and legs should be cut off and that their eyes should be branded with heated pieces of iron , and that their cut hands and legs should not be cauterised, till they die.”(7)

  Abu Dawud has collected the following saying of the Prophet:
  “ ‘Ikrimah said: Ali burned some people who retreated from Islam. When Ibn Abbas was informed of it he said, ‘If it had been I, I would not have them burned, for the apostle of Allah said: ‘Do not inflict Allah’s punishment on anyone.’ But would have killed them on account of the statement of the Apostle of Allah, ‘Kill those who change their religion.’ ”(8)

  In other words, kill the apostates (with the sword) but certainly not by burning them, that is Allah’s way of punishing transgressors in the next world. According to a tradition of Aisha’s, apostates are to be slain, crucified or banished.(9) Should the apostate be given a chance to repent? Traditions differ enormously. In one tradition, Muadh Jabal refused to sit down until an apostate brought before him had been killed “in accordance with the decision of God and of His Apostle.”(10)

  Under Muslim law, the male apostate must be put to death, as long as he is an adult, and in full possession of his faculties. If a pubescent boy apostatises, he is imprisoned until he comes of age, when if he persists in rejecting Islam he must be put to death. Drunkards and the mentally disturbed are not held responsible for their apostasy. If a person has acted under compulsion he is not considered an apostate, his wife is not divorced and his lands are not forfeited. According to Hanafis and Shia, a woman is imprisoned until she repents and adopts Islam once more, but according to the influential Ibn Hanbal, and the Malikis and Shafiites , she is also put to death. In general, execution must be by the sword, though there are examples of apostates tortured to death, or strangled, burnt, drowned, impaled or flayed. The caliph Umar used to tie them to a post and had lances thrust into their hearts, and the Sultan Baybars II (1308-09) made torture legal.

  Should attempts be made at conversion? Some jurists accept the distinction between Murtadd fitri and Murtadd milli, and argue that the former be put to death immediately. Others, leaning on sura IV.137,“Lo! those who believe, then disbelieve and then (again) believe, then disbelieve, and then increase in disbelief, Allah will never pardon them, nor will he guide them unto a way,” insist on three attempts at conversion, or have the apostate imprisoned for three days to begin with. Others argue that one should wait for the cycle of the five times of prayer and ask the apostate to perform the prayers at each. Only if he refuses at each prayer time is the death penalty to be applied. If he repents and embraces Islam once more, he is released.(11)

  The murtadd of course would be denied a Muslim burial, but he suffers other civil disabilities. His property is taken over by the believers, if he returns penitent he is given back what remains. Others argue that the apostate’s rights of ownership are merely suspended, only if he dies outside the territory under Islam does he forfeit his property to the Muslim community. If either the husband or wife apostasizes, a divorce takes place ipso facto; the wife is entitled to her whole dower but no pronouncement of divorce is necessary. According to some jurists, if husband and wife apostasize together their marriage is still valid. However if either the wife or husband were singly to return to Islam then their marriage would be dissolved.(12) According to Abu Hanifa, legal activities such as manumission, endowment, testament and sale are suspended. But not all jurists agree. Some Shi’i jurists would ask the Islamic Law towards apostates to be applied even outside the Dar al -Islam, in non-Muslim countries.

  Finally, according to the Shafites it is not only apostasy from Islam that is to be punished with death, but also apostasy from other religions when this is not accompanied by conversion to Islam. For example, a Jew who becomes a Christian will thus have to be put to death since the Prophet has ordered in general that everyone “who adopts any other religion” shall be put to death.(13)

  Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR,1948] states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance”.(14)

  The clause guaranteeing the freedom to change one’s religion was added at the request of the delegate from Lebanon, Charles Malik, who was a Christian.(15) Lebanon had accepted many people fleeing persecution for their beliefs, in particular for having changed their religion. Lebanon especially objected to the Islamic law concerning apostasy. Many Muslim countries, however, objected strongly to the clause regarding the right to change one’s religion. The delegate from Egypt, for instance, said that “very often a man changes religion or his convictions under external influences with goals which are not recommendable such as divorce.” He added that he feared in proclaiming the liberty to change one’s religion or convictions the Universal Declaration would encourage without wishing it “the machinations of certain missions well- known in the East, which relentlessly pursue their efforts with a view to converting to their faith the populations of the East”.(16) Significantly, Lebanon was supported by a delegate from Pakistan who belonged to the Ahmadi community which, ironically, was to be thrown out of the Islamic community in the 1970s for being non-Muslim. In the end all Muslim countries except Saudi Arabia adhered to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  During discussions of Article 18 in 1966, Saudi Arabia and Egypt wanted to suppress the clause guaranteeing the freedom to change one’s religion. Finally a compromise amendment proposed by Brazil and the Philippines was adopted to placate the Islamic countries. Thus, “the freedom to change his religion or belief” was replaced by “the freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief of his choice.”(17) Similarly in 1981, during discussions on the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, Iran, under the new regime reminded everyone that Islam punished apostasy by death. The delegate from Iraq, backed up by Syria, speaking on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference expressed his reserve for any clauses or terms that would contradict the Islamic Sharia, while the delegate from Egypt felt that they had to guard against such a clause being exploited for political ends to interfere in the internal affairs of states.(18)

  The various Islamic human rights schemes or declarations – such as the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (1981) are understandably vague or evasive on the issue of the freedom to change one’s religion, since Islam itself clearly forbids apostasy and punishes it with death. As Elisabeth Mayer says, “The lack of support for the principle of freedom of religion in the Islamic human rights schemes is one of the factors that most sharply distinguishes them from the International Bill of Human Rights, which treats freedom of religion as an unqualified right. The [Muslim] authors’ unwillingness to repudiate the rule that a person should be executed over a question of religious belief reveals the enormous gap that exists between their mentalities and the modern philosophy of human rights.”(19) Islamic Human Rights Schemes are clearly not universal since they introduce a specifically Islamic religious criterion into the political sphere, whereas the UDHR of 1948 places human rights in an entirely secular and universalist framework. The Islamic human rights schemes severely restrict and qualify the rights of individuals, particularly women, non-Muslims and those, such as apostates, who do not accept Islamic religious orthodoxy.

  As for the constitutions of various Muslim countries, while many do guarantee freedom of belief (Egypt,1971; Syria, 1973; Jordan, 1952) some talk of freedom of conscience (Algeria:1989), and some of freedom of thought and opinion (Mauritania: 1991). Islamic countries with two exceptions do not address the issue of apostasy in their penal codes; the two exceptions are the Sudan, and Mauritania. In the Sudanese Penal Code of 1991, article 126. 2, we read: “Whoever is guilty of apostasy is invited to repent over a period to be determined by the tribunal. If he persists in his apostasy and was not recently converted to Islam, he will be put to death.” The Penal Code of Mauritania of 1984, article 306 reads: “…All Muslims guilty of apostasy, either spoken or by overt action will be asked to repent during a period of three days. If he does not repent during this period, he is condemned to death as an apostate, and his belongings confiscated by the State Treasury.” This applies equally to women. The Moroccan Penal Code seems only to mention those guilty of trying to subvert the belief of a Muslim, or those who try to convert a Muslim to another religion. The punishment varies between a fine and imprisonment for anything up to three years.(20)

  The absence of any mention of apostasy in some penal codes of Islamic countries of course in no way implies that a Muslim in the country concerned is free to leave his religion. In reality, the lacunae in the penal codes are filled by Islamic Law. Mahmud Muhammad Taha was hanged for apostasy in 1985, even though at the time the Sudanese Penal Code of 1983 did not mention such a crime.(21)

  In some countries, the term apostate is applied to some who were born non-Muslim but whose ancestors had the good sense to convert from Islam. The Baha’is in Iran in recent years have been persecuted for just such a reason. Similarly, in Pakistan the Ahmadiya community were classed as non-Muslims, and are subjected to all sorts of persecution.

  There is some evidence that many Muslim women in Islamic countries would convert from Islam to escape their lowly position in Muslim societies, or to avoid the application of an unfavourable law, especially Sharia law governing divorce.(22) Muslim theologians are well aware of the temptation of Muslim women to evade the Sharia laws by converting from Islam, and take appropriate measures. For example, in Kuwait in an explanatory memorandum to the text of a law reform says: “Complaints have shown that the Devil makes the route of apostasy attractive to the Muslim woman so that she can break a conjugal tie that does not please her. For this reason, it was decided that apostasy would not lead to the dissolution of the marriage in order to close this dangerous door.”(23)
  Just to give you one recent example among many others that are discussed in my book, Leaving Islam Apostates Speak Out (Prometheus Books, 2003):

  A Somali living in Yemen since 1994, Mohammed Omer Haji, converted to Christianity two years ago and adopted the name “George.” He was imprisoned in January, 2000 and reportedly beaten and threatened for two months by Yemeni security police, who tried to persuade him to renounce his conversion to Christianity. After he was re-arrested in May, he was formally put on trial in June for apostasy, under article 259 of Yemen’s criminal law. Haji’s release came seven weeks after he was given a court ultimatum to renounce Christianity and return to Islam, or face execution as an apostate. Apostasy is a capital offence under the Muslim laws of “sharia” enforced in Yemen.

  After news of the case broke in the international press, Yemeni authorities halted the trial proceedings against Haji. He was transferred on July 17 to Aden’s Immigration Jail until resettlement could be finalized by the UNHCR, under which Haji had formal refugee status. One of the politicians who tabled a motion in July 2000 in the British House of Commons was David Atkinson. “Early Day Motion on Mohammed Omer Haji. That this House deplores the death penalty which has been issued from the Aden Tawahi Court in Yemen for the apostasy of the Somali national Mohammed Omer Haji unless he recants his Christian faith and states that he is a Muslim before the judge three times on Wednesday 12th July; deplores that Mr Haji was held in custody for the sole reason that he held to the Christian faith and was severely beaten in custody to the point of not being able to walk; considers it a disgrace that UNHCR officials in Khormaksar stated they were only able to help him if he was a Muslim; and calls on the British Government and international colleagues to make representations immediately at the highest level in Yemen to ensure Mr Haji’s swift release and long-term safety and for the repeal of Yemen’s barbaric apostate laws.

  Amnesty International adopted Haji as a prisoner of conscience in an “urgent action” release on July 11,2000 concluding that he was “detained solely on account of his religious beliefs”. The government of New Zealand accepted Haji and his family for emergency resettlement in late July after negotiations with the Geneva headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).(24)

  However charges of apostasy, unbelief , blasphemy and heresy whether upheld or not clearly go against several articles in UDHR of 1948 , and the legally binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] of 1966 to which 147 states are signatories.

  General comment No 22, adopted by the UN Human Rights Commission at its 48th session (1993) ( HRI/GEN/1/Rev.6 of 22 May 2003 , pp.155-56 ) declares (quote):“Article 18 protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief. The term “belief” and “religion” are to be broadly construed”.

  As with my statement to the U.N.Human Rights Commission delivered by the President of the IHEU, We urge the U.N. Human Rights Commission to call on all governments to comply with applicable international human rights instruments like the ICCPR and to bring their national legislation into accordance with the instruments to which they were a party , and forbid fatwas and sermons preaching violence in the name of god against those holding unorthodox opinions or those who have left a religion.

  Ibn Warraq is the author of Why I am not a Muslim (1996), and the editor of The Origins of the Koran (1999); The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), What the Koran Really Says (2002), Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (2003).

  This speech was given at a conference entitled “Victims of Jihad”, held parallel to the UN’s 61st commission of Human Rights on 18th April 2005, in Geneva, Switzerland.

  Notes

  (1) Al-Raghib al-Isfahani (died 1108 C.E.), al-Mufradat fi Gharib al-Quran ( Cairo ,1308 A.H. )

  (2) S. Zwemer ,The Law of Apostasy in Islam (New York ,1924 ), pp.34-35. See also al-Razi, al-Tafsir al-Kabir (Cairo ,1308 A.H.), Vol.2,lines 17-20.

  (3)Zwemer ,op. cit. pp.33-34.

  (4) Ibn Kathir, L’Interpretation du Coran, trans.Fawzi Chaaban (Beirut, 1998),Vol.2 , p.128.

  (5)Abul Ala Mawdudi , The Punishment of the Apostate according to Islamic Law, trans. Syed Silas Husain and Ernest Hahn (1994), available at Answering Islam

  (6) Ibn Maja , Hudud , bab 2; al-Nisai , Tahrim al-Dam, bab 14 ; al-Tayalisi , no.2689 ; Malik, Aqdiya tr.15; al-Bukhari , Institabat al-murtadin , bab 2; al-Tirmidhi , Hudud , bab 25; Abu Dawud , Hudud ,Bab 1; Ibn Hanbal i. 217, 282, 322.

  (7) Al-Bukhari , Sahih, Trans.Ahmad Hasan (Delhi ,1987 ),Vol.8, pp.519-520.

  (8) Abu Dawud , Sunan, Trans.Ahmad Hasan , Vol.3 , Kitab al-Hudud, chap.1605, Punishment of an Apostate, Hadith No. 4337 (Delhi 1990), p.1212.

  (9) al-Nisai , Tahrim al-Dam , bab 11; Qasama , Bab 13; Abu Dawud , Hudud , bab 1.

  (10) Al-Bukhari, Maghazi bab 60 ; Istitabat al-Murtaddin, bab 2 ; Ahkam , bab 12 ; Muslim , Imara, tr. 15 ; Abu Dawud, Hudud, bab 1 ; Ibn Hanba,l, v. 231.

  (11) al-Shafi’i , Umm, I 228 ; Abu Yusuf , Kharaj, 109.

  (12) Dictionary of Islam, ed. T. Hughes (Delhi , 1885 ). Apostasy from Islam. p.16

  (13) T.W.Juynboll , ‘Apostasy’, in Encyclopaedia of Ethics and Religion, ed. Hastings ( Edinburgh ,1910 ) p. 626.

  (14) Available online at The United Nations Website.

  (15) Sami A.Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh , Le Delit d’Apostasie Aujourd’hui et ses Consequences en Droit Arabe et Musulman, Islamochristiana 20 (1994) : 93-116 ; A.E.Mayer , Islam and Human Rights ( Boulder , 1991), p.164.

  (16) Abu Sahlieh , Le Delit d’Apostasie, p.94

  (17) Ibid.

  (18) Ibid.

  (19) A.E.Mayer , Islam and Human Rights, p. 187.

  (20) Abu Sahlieh , Le Delit d’Apostasie, p. 98.

  (21) Sami A.Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh , Les Musulmans face aux droits de l’homme (Bachum , 2001) p. 110.

  (22) A.E.Mayer , op.cit., p. 167

  (23) A.E.Mayer , op.cit., pp. 167-68.

  (24) Christianity Today, August 28 , 2000.

  May 2, 2005

• We Need to Fight the Battle for Enlightenment

  I am delighted to be here today to speak at such a wonderful conference. Here, I talk as an apostate, an atheist who left Islam and religion altogether at the age of 15, a veteran activist of women’s rights who survived the atrocities committed by political Islam in Iran.

  My being a Muslim, like all other children who are accidentally born into Muslim families, was hereditary. My parents were ordinary Muslims. My father was relatively open-minded but my mother indoctrinated us and used religious rules for protecting her children. In my childhood, faith meant that I had an all powerful all knowing father figure watching over me. Anything bad that happened to me – he’d take care of me. To me it was comforting to Know that evil would not triumph, that the anguish of the innocent in this world would not go un-avenged was comforting. The temptation to subordinate your being to a deity ; to a god was immense.

  My doubts about god began seriously when I was 12 years old. I would give a lot to be able to believe. But in the end I had to tread the rocky and non-comforting path of atheism. I gave up the shelter of a divine shadow – but I gained a life that could question and explore the life and human existence. I questioned and rejected religion and became an atheist because I could not answer the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of religion to myself, and because religion limited me as a human being – I remain an atheist because I have discovered myself as human being not alienated by any god or religion and I do not need religion to tell me who I am.

  But those years of exploring and searching for truth was soon replaced by horrors years of brutality and atrocities by political Islam in Iran. Though I left Islam, I had to live Islam. In my youth and young adulthood in Iran, I lived through thousands of days when political Islam shed blood. Since 1979, a hundred thousand men, women and children have been executed in the name of Allah. I have lived through years of assassination of infidels, apostates and opponents of the Islamic republic inside and outside Iran. Years of suppression of women and brutal treatment of those women who resisted the misery of mandatory Hijab and the rule of sexual apartheid. I, along with thousands of non – believers and political prisoners, was tortured by order of the representative of Allah and Sharia; tortured, while the verses of the Koran about non-believers were played in the torture chambers. The voice reading the Koran was mixed with our cries of pain from lashes and other brutal forms of torture.

  Non-believers – atheists under Islam do not have “the right to life “. They are to be killed. According to Islamic culture, sins are divided into great sins and little sins. Among the seventeen great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, adultery and so on. Courageous apostates aim to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people–as well as the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not tolerate its strictures in their own cultures.

  A free discussion of Islam is extremely dangerous not only in countries under Islamic rule but also in the west. Most keep their feelings to themselves. Those Muslims who disown or even criticize their faith publicly are likely to be accused of apostasy, a crime punishable by death under Islamic law–a penalty enforced by a number of Islamic states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.

  The Islamic position on apostasy has been described as: “total disbelief that any sane person could possibly have a genuine reason for leaving ‘the most perfect religion’. He or she must therefore, by definition, be acting in bad faith. Essential aspects of our civilised humanity, such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief, are best exemplified in Islam by those thinkers and writers it calls apostates. The importance of apostates and other religious dissidents is crucial.

  Freedom from and of religion does not mean merely the freedom to have a faith but also the freedom to change one’s religion, and freedom to be free from religion. But under the Sharia, apostasy (either advocating the rejection of Islamic belief or announcing such rejection by word or deed) is not permitted and for a man is punishable by death. The punishment for a woman is more lenient – she must stay in prison until she reverts, however long it takes. Even when the death penalty is not applied, those accused of apostasy can be subject to the most violent treatment. This discrimination is clearly contrary to freedom of religion and belief and to the principle that religion should be a private matter for the individual.

  In a feeble attempt to disguise the Islamic attitude to apostasy, apologists often quote the Koranic verse: “There shall be no compulsion in religion”. For a Muslim wishing to leave Islam this is simply not true. In Yemen it’s punishable by death as it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban and other Islamic states. The most famous incidence of Apostasy was in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini announced a fatwa, or death sentence against Salman Rushdie for his alleged apostasy in writing “The Satanic Verses”. In a similar vein in Iran in July 1998 a man was executed for allegedly converting a Muslim woman to the Baha’i faith, this was even though the woman claimed that her mother was Baha’i and that she was raised according to that faith. Freedom House’s Centre for Religious Freedom recently protested the forthcoming trial, before a Sharia court of Islamic law, of Hamid Pourmand, the 47 year old lay leader of a small Assemblies of God church in the southern port city of Bandar-i-Bushehr. Pourmand, a convert from Islam, is facing charges of apostasy from Islam and proselytising Muslims, both capital offences in Iran. The government of Iran puts someone on trial for his life solely for his religious belief. The state’s criminalisation of apostasy is always subject to political manipulation and indicates an absolute negation of individual rights and freedom. Iran applies an extremist interpretation of Shiite Islamic law or Sharia, which harshly represses the free expression of belief, including religious conversion by Muslims. Iran’s Sharia courts view non-Muslims as second-class citizens, whose testimony is given less weight than Muslims, and sometimes even as non-persons, without any legal protections.

  In countries ruled by Islamic law and where political Islam holds sway, writers, thinkers, philosophers, activists, and artists are frequently denied freedom of expression. Islamic regimes are notorious for the violent suppression of free thought. Often, as a government allies itself closely with Islam, any critics of the government will be accused of blasphemy or apostasy.

  In Islam, there exists a horror of putting the Koran to critical scrutiny. Ordinary people do not dare to question the Koran. The result is tyranny, thought police, and stagnation, no intellectual and moral progress. Even in the academic community it is a taboo to discuss the Koran scientifically. While there exist a growing critical movement to criticise religion, particularly Islam, Islamists, apologists for Islam, and western governments have come up with the idea of Islamophobia. They try to silence critics. Islam must be subject to critical examination. By silencing critics and calling them racists, Islamists and apologists intend to keep religious domination intact. In Iran the price for criticising Islam is death in its most horrendous way. How many more fates of Theo Van Gogh’s are we expecting in the west?

  The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. We must win the right to criticize the religion without fear of retribution. Criticism, free speech, is the foundation of an open society. We need to criticise and use reason to solve our problems.

  No belief, rational or irrational, scientific or divinely inspired, should be exempt from critical examination. If a belief is sound it will stand on its own merits. If it is not it deserves to fail. No religion should seek immunity from the examination of its claims, or seek freedom from moral criticism of its practices.

  In the West, the Enlightenment brought about defence of individual freedom and civil liberties. The battle against the Church and backward culture caused a deep change in society’s horizon and values and advanced the society. Western society shook off backward and religious thoughts and beliefs. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and civil liberties come from the Enlightenment.

  We the atheist and freethinkers need to fight the battle for enlightenment in the East. We need to push Islam back to where it rightfully belongs. We should fight for unconditional freedom of speech including freedom to criticise Islam. We atheists have to challenge religious authority. For every vilified and oppressed atheist, two more, ten more, a thousand more will spring up. No matter how brutal inquisitions and Islamic holocausts, atheists and freethinkers will spring up because people’s minds and needs cannot be imprisoned forever. Today our society under political Islam is being held prisoner by Islamic captors, who fight to dominate this world.

  And I am delighted to say that hopes continue coming from Iran where the society has changed dramatically and deeply since 1979. The movement for secularism and atheism, for modern ideas and culture, for individual freedom, for women’s freedom and civil liberties is widespread. Contempt for religion and the backward ruling culture is deep. Women and the youth are the champions of this battle; a battle that threatens the foundation of the Islamic system. Any change in Iran will not only affect the lives of people living in Iran, but will have a significant impact on the region and worldwide.

  Therefore, we must fight the battle for Enlightenment in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.

  Adapted from a speech delivered at a conference entitled “Victims of Jihad”, held parallel to the UN’s 61st commission of Human Rights on 18th April 2005, in Geneva, Switzerland.

  April 27, 2005

• Campaigning against the Sharia Court in Canada

  The reasons given for a Sharia Court in Canada by Islamists and their multi-culturalist supporters are not what they seem. They say Muslims do not want their family problems to be made public; these tribunals will deal with civil disputes not criminal matters; one can choose not to go before the Sharia tribunal; and that it will take less time than a Canadian court and cost less.

  Let me address each one separately. Why do the initiators of the proposal not want family disputes to be publicised outside of their ‘communities’. In communities where Sharia law interferes with people’s lives, family problems are not simply disagreements between a man and a woman and who gets what. In fact, private matters and religion are closely linked together. To make my point clear, I would like to present one case study I have come across in my social work. I have a client in Toronto who was taken out of school by her parents at the age of 15 and forced to marry a 29 year old man; according to Sharia, she is married whilst under the Canadian legal system she is not. At the age of 16, this young pregnant girl is going through separation because of domestic abuse. In a secular court, the fact that she was forced to marry at a young age is considered a crime and her husband will be charged for assault and child abuse. As for her parents, they too will be charged. The Children’s Aid Society will get involved and if they have any other children younger than 16, all will be moved out to the Aid Society’s care. While in the eyes of the Sharia tribunal no crime has taken place and the matter is a civil one, which can be resolved by the Islamic tribunal, under the modern secular system of Canada, the child will be immediately protected and the abusers prosecuted.

  Moreover, proponents say that the Sharia tribunal is optional for those who decide to use it. My question is optional for whom? Muslim women lose their options right at birth. But for the sake of argument, let’s go back to our case study. Let us say that the 15 year old girl refused to accept the forced marriage, and made a complaint against her parents to a secular court. I don’t know if that would have happened in reality due to social and financial restrictions. What do you think would have happened to her? I know it is hard to imagine. Her family would disown her for sure. For a moment, imagine being born and brought up in such a family and the so-called Muslim community, being made to study in an Islamic school and never having the chance to integrate within society; and then being disowned by not only your family but also the entire community. No wonder she chose marriage over isolation. I think it is fair to say that she had no choice, even though she could have filed a complaint. As I mentioned before, her choice was taken away right at birth. In her case, after going through tremendous abuse (verbal, mental, financial and sexual) for eight long months and being five months pregnant, she could not take it anymore. What are her choices now before the tribunal? Because she married according to the Sharia, in the eyes of her community and family, her divorce has to be in accordance with the Sharia too or else it will not be legitimate!

  Proponents go on to say that the tribunal costs less and takes less time. During a recession, these two excuses may be acceptable for the government and its right-wing parties. They may think that whatever reduces costs of social services, health care, education and social justice is to their advantage but what would the consequences of these low costs be? And who will pay the price? How much damage will it do to humanity? It is not their problem. The above two ‘solutions’ are exactly the same as letting an unskilled layperson do heart surgery on patients in order to reduce the cost of paying a skilled heart surgeon; the percentage of survivors in this case is obvious. Or discharging a sick patient right after her critical operation in order to bring down the costs of the hospital or to be able to shorten the process of recovery!! If this is not inhuman, then what is it?

  My point is why should Muslim women pay a heavy price to bring down costs? If the cost of courts are high and the process is long because of its bureaucracy, then it is everyone’s duty to fight it and make sure that the justice system is fair and affordable for everyone, while remaining secular and modern.

  And finally, we often hear people saying, this is not your problem; why do you care? This is what Muslim women want. Modern society is not built of different clans and tribes that can make their own laws and practice it without affecting others. A modern, secular society has its own norms and standards. We have gained them by going through harsh struggles over many years. The rights to live, education, health, to socialise and have a social life, and all other rights such as the rights of gays and lesbians and children, etc. make up the society’s standards and norms. The disturbance of any will affect others. For example, it is not acceptable to physically discipline children. In fact it is considered abuse and has legal consequences. When some Amish people claimed that it was their right to physically punish their children and had nothing to do with others as they were doing it out of love for their children, society opposed it. And we had every right to do so. It is exactly the same in the instance of the ‘right’ to have the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice. It must be opposed nationally and internationally as it will diminish our social norms and standards. In the real world, not every ‘right’ is or should be respected, such as the right to commit suicide, drink and drive, institutionalise male domination, gender apartheid and segregation between man and women and so on. Whether all Muslim women want it (as they falsely claim), 1,000,000 people demand it or just one does not affect the argument.

  We still have many long hard challenges ahead for the separation of the state and administration from religion, ethnicity, nationalism, racism and any ideology that contradicts the absolute equality of all in civil rights and before the law. Fighting the Sharia tribunals is one important step in defending universal rights for all those living here in Canada.

  The above speech was made on March 8, 2004, International Women’s Day at a panel debate organised by the International Campaign against the Sharia Court in Canada to debate the planned establishment of a Sharia Court in Ontario, Canada. The successful panel was organised by Homa Arjomand, the Campaign’s Coordinator. To join or find out more about the campaign to stop the Sharia court in Canada, contact Homa Arjomand at homawpi@rogers.com, visit the website
  and sign the petition online.

  This article first appeared on the Iranian Secular Society site and is republished here by permission.

  April 25, 2005

• Different Ways Of Thinking And Thinking In Different Ways

  We all have different ways of thinking but do we actually think in different ways? In other words, is cognition universal? The question of what is universal and what culturally specific is a classic issue in the nature vs. nurture debate. Those on the side of nature tend to see everything as universal and those on the side of nurture think that people from different cultures are fundamentally distinct. However, beyond this already tedious and sometimes artificial polarization, the reality is that both nature and nurture have some bearing on most of the things we do and the extent to which a phenomenon is universal or culturally specific can often just depend on how you define it.

  When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to a group of American and Japanese students and asked them to report what they had seen, he discovered that the latter were more likely to be “holistic” (they generally spoke about the whole field “a lake” or “a pond”) while the former were more “analytic” (they generally focused on particular objects such as “a trout swimming to the right”) (1, 2).

  Based on this and other experiments Nisbett concludes that basic processes of perception and cognition such as inductive and deductive inference, attention, memory, categorization, and causal analysis are not universal. To him, the differences described above are rooted in profound underlying cognitive variations that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world.(1, 2)

  Although several aspects of Nisbett’s research can be questioned, his experiments are useful to discuss a key issue in the nature vs. nurture debate: How do you actually determine if a phenomenon is universal or culturally specific? The obvious answer could be: if it occurs all over the world then, it’s universal. In that sense, the cognitive processes that Nisbett describes can be said to be universal because there are examples of perception, memory, categorization and reasoning in every known culture. However, Nisbett argues that people from different cultures actually think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. So, does he have a point? Is cognition not universal after all?

  The philosophers Ron Mallon and Stephen Stich made an observation that may help to resolve this apparent conundrum (3). By comparing the approaches of evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists to the analysis of emotions, they discovered that their disagreements are mainly rooted in a semantic discrepancy. If an emotion is defined in terms of observable behavior then it certainly varies across cultures, if it is defined in terms of underlying mental processes or “affect programs”(4) then it is the same for everyone. An underlying mental program can be, for instance, something like “if x then y”. So although each culture may have different values for x and y, the computation is exactly the same. For example, the mechanisms in our mind that yield humor are universal although the jokes(x) and how we laugh(y) can be culturally relative. That’s why even though we all know what a joke is, humor doesn’t always translate well.

  Referring to this observation Steven Pinker adds that what actually differs is the stimulus and response, not the mental states (5). This semantic distinction can be applied to explain what happened in the experiment mentioned above. What seems to vary is the participants’ responses to a particular stimulus, not their actual mental processes. In other words, the fact that Nisbett’s subjects described what they saw in different ways doesn’t mean that they actually did the seeing differently. Culture may have influenced what they regard as relevant to remember but not how they remember it. The actual computation “if x (something relevant) then y (save in memory)” as well as the biological process connected to it should be the same for all. Douglas Fields describes part of this biological process as follows:

  Memories are created when nerve cells in a circuit increase the strength of their connections, known as synapses. In the case of short-term memories, the effect lasts only minutes to hours. For long-term memories, the synapses become permanently strengthened. “Signaling itself contributes to memory formation. Messages begin to travel between one neuron (the presynaptic cell) and another when an electrical pulse known as an action potential travels down an extension of the first neuron called an axon to its tip.(6)

  In fact, if we describe the phenomenon in terms of stimuli and response and we change the stimulus in the same experiment we will probably get a completely different response (which, of course, may also vary according to culture). For example, what happens if we replace the trout with Angelina Jolie swimming naked and then show it to the Japanese participants. Will they notice the algae in the background? Will they say something about a pond?

  Ok, maybe that’s not fair (it was just a joke to prove that humor doesn’t always translate well). However, Nisbett himself has an example of this. In a follow-up experiment designed to analyze what he calls affordances, he changed the stimuli and obtained very different responses. He asked the participants to identify changes between two scenes and observed that:

  …when the scenes were intended to resemble American environments, both Americans and Japanese found it easier to detect object changes than field changes. When the scenes were intended to resemble Japanese environments, both Americans and Japanese found it easier to detect field changes than object changes.

  This means that Americans can also be “holistic” depending on the stimulus and that Japanese can be “analytic” when confronted with another type of image. Therefore, both should have the same structural mental processes and they just picked different strategies depending on the situation. The picking of the strategy is what can differ cross-culturally not the actual strategy.

  In this way, if we want to elucidate the extent to which cognition is universal or culturally relative maybe we just need to make a clear distinction between the different forms in which a cognitive phenomenon can be defined and analyzed. Noam Chomsky and other scientists had suggested several levels of analysis of the mind, but for the sake of this particular argument I propose the following descriptive planes:

  • As a biological process: genes activate, neurons, proteins, enzymes, interact, etc.
  • As a psychological computation: the mind’s core programs or operations. (e.g. “if x then y”)
  • As a surface behavior: the relations between stimuli and responses. (e.g. the x’s and y’s)

  In this way, it becomes clearer that although both nature and nurture can have an effect to some degree on the three planes, the first two are essentially universal while the third one is undoubtedly culturally diverse.

  To use an unpopular but illustrative metaphor that can incorporate the three descriptive planes, imagine we all have laptops on top of our shoulders and, unfortunately for us, they are all manufactured by Bill Gates. Our brains would be like the hardware (plane 1) and our minds like the software (plane 2). In this way, the things we can do are limited to the hardware and to the default software it comes with (yes, it’s Microsoft so I’m afraid they are very limited). Our laptop heads cannot suddenly grow extra hard drives or develop their own new programs. However, since the way we use them can be largely influenced by our social environment, if we observe our screens (plane 3) and compare them to those of other Microsoft laptop-heads from other cultures we’ll most likely see a lot of variation.

  Similarly, we can say that although the mind has the potential for generating infinite number of thoughts it cannot develop, for instance, new or different forms of memory and perception unless it does so through evolution or via the aid of external tools (written language, computers, infrared goggles). That’s why, for example, it is impossible to imagine (unless we use some sophisticated external representation) an eleven-dimensional space, because our brain evolved to process the information of a three-dimensional one.

  Now, a great part of the nature vs. nurture debate is also directed towards establishing which is more deeply embedded in the mind’s structure. Somehow scientists think that the deeper one is, the more it determines behavior and the more powerful and significant their findings or claims. However, depth shouldn’t be the issue here. The planes described above serve to approach the problem of what is universal in a more comprehensible way not to set a hierarchical order of importance, measure the impact of nature/nurture or justify deterministic explanations. Besides, although the third plane can seem to have less depth, the variables (“x’s” and “y’s”) are in fact part of the computations of plane two so they could also be seen as deeply ingrained in a person’s mind. The important thing is to see them as the variables (no matter their “depth”) not as the actual computations.

  In summary, what’s all the fuss about? Cognitive processes, as well as other phenomena, can be defined and analyzed in various descriptive planes. If we make a distinction between these, establishing what is universal and what culturally specific becomes easier and opposite views can come together or at least cohabitate. Once the distinction is made, some overlapping between planes may be useful to explain how complex interactions between nature and nurture shape human behavior. So, perhaps it’s time to stop this seemingly endless and already boring debate…And while that happens I’ll just end by concluding that people from different cultures may have different ways of thinking but they don’t actually do the thinking in different ways.

  References

  (1)Nisbett, R. E. (2003); The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently…and why; New York: The Free Press.

  (2)Nisbett, R. E. & Masuda, T. (2003); Culture and point of view; PNAS

  (3) Mallon, R. & Stich, S. (2000); The odd couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychology. The odd couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychology.

  (4) Ekman, P. and Rosenberg, E. (1997) in (3). What the Face Reveals. New York: Oxford University Press.

  (5) Pinker, S. 2002; The Blank Slate. Viking; p. 39

  (6) Fields R.D., (2005); Making memories stick; http://www.sciam.com

  Paula Bourges Waldegg has a web page here She can be emailed at bwaldegg@prodigy.net.mx

  April 22, 2005

• No, No Way, You Mooks

  A furore was set off here last year with the news that parts of New Jersey’s sizeable but non-homogenous Wise-guy community intended to use an obscure law to set up arbitration tribunals for disputes involving hoodlums’ ladies running numbers, shaking down and generally behaving like low-bred mooks when they should be attending to the kids.

  Wise-guy and non-Wise-guy critics alike protested that the 140-year-old body of Cosa Nostra-inspired laws considers Non-Sicilian broads inferior to Goodfellas and would infringe their equality rights as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

  However, a six-month study by former Teamster’s Moll Maria Pantonello concluded in December that, with new safeguards in place, Wise-guy women would still be protected by the ‘Mob law’. Her controversial recommendations still require final approval by the New York Bosses and the consiglieri-general.

  But a leading Madame in Jersey thinks it would be a mistake to sign off on it. “(We) must say loud and clear that not only do we not want Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t arbitration in Jersey, we don’t want it in New York and we don’t even want it in Chicago,” Monica ‘Badda Bing’ Tarantella told a conference last week. The East-Coast brothel magnate went even further in denouncing New Jersey’s attempt to accommodate both brassy out of control loudmouth dames, (would-be divorcees) and the hustling rights of “no-good can’t get enough two timing b@stards” in its increasingly pluralistic society. Furthermore , she said, wannabe playboy immigrants who want to come to Jersey “and who do not respect women’s rights or who do not respect whatever rights may be in our Civil Code – should stay in their country and not come to Jersey, because that is unacceptable. “On the other hand, if people want to accept our way of doing things and our rights, they will be welcome and we will help them to integrate.”

  The government’s opposition to Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t arbitration comes as no surprise to Sonny Bambozzo, president of the Wise-guy Council of Chicago. “We didn’t expect they’d entertain the idea because they have a taboo on all wise-guy activities,” he says. “They are trying to impose secular extremism, but we’re not France fer chrisakes. We still have a Charter of Rights in this country that should give us the right to run our rackets freely, and apportion cash to our broads as we see fit – if we see fit.”

  Which means that Jersey Wise-guys “don’t have to be given the right to use Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t arbitration. We already have the right. We’re talking about a complementary, not parallel, system of laws for those who want to live according to their numbers. It may be illegal for him to “arbitrate” in Jersey, says Alfonse, but as an high-ranking Goodfella, and successful corporate fraudster, he can and already does “mediate” between feuding couples who choose to use his services.

  “There are boundaries to tolerance. But there is a lot to be said for letting people work it out themselves with bats,” said Joey Pistone, a union organiser at the Waterfront University of NY. He notes that the legitimate Jersey law-firm rate of “totally beating a pain-in-the-ass alimony rap” is only 3 per cent, compared with Wise-guys’ ‘lawyers’ an overall rate of 50 per cent. And when it occurs, a teamster shake-down is important because otherwise a Wise-guy will feel “guilty,” he says, and be maybe unable to marry another broad, even if she’s a ten plus, right away.

  Alfonse, who is also a wise-guy regular at Badda Bing’s Bar, thinks Boyd did an “excellent job” on her report and blames the media for giving its critics a high profile. He vehemently objects to the widely raised argument that Wise-guy wives, many new to the country, unable to speak the language and unaware of brand-new legal rights, will be forced into accepting an high-ranking ‘s Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t arbitration ruling. “It is condescending to say they will be pressured,” he says. “Broads are not oppressed by The Mafia. It equates men and women, sort of, if they look good especially it does.”

  The Mafia may, but Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t laws – written over a period of 45 years after the death of Don Corleone Sr. and subject to a variety of interpretations – do not, say Wise-guy critics. They point out that one of the constants in Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t is that a woman’s testimony in a dispute is worth one-half of a man’s.

  Brenda G’iovi formerly of the Federation of Made Jersey Women is opposed to New Jersey’s move. Brenda, an Naples-born Wise-guy’s ex-moll, says many Wise-guy immigrant women will not be able to even afford a shakedown-type lawyer and will see no recourse but to accept a mid-ranking jackoff goodfella’s ruling. “New Jersey Mafia is not facing up to its responsibility to provide justice for all,” she says. “This isn’t just about religion, it’s about sexism, even not buying her furs and diamonds and stuff like that. Those lousy creeps.” Brenda says Jersey’s concept of alimony has gotta be the “reasonable settlement” of different domestic set-tos. And with different rackets, she says, “fairness protects the Family from hustling and other conflicts.”

  Possibly so, but secularism is not what Jersey as a free-thinking city subscribes to, preferring, like the Philippines, the concept of “separation of political bulls**t and making shitloads of dollars illegally.”

  “In our society, we allow violent, mercenary quasi-ethinic groups to discriminate,” says Joey Pistone, a Union Organiser and political philosopher at the bar of the Turnpike Dog Track, “because a liberal state must remain neutral.” He cites as examples the Catholic Church’s ban on female clergy and various churches’ refusal to marry same-sex partners: “Why do we permit this? Because religions are voluntary organisations.” The Mafia is no exception.

  Heath says that unless there is an issue of safety – he cites the Irish tradition of carrying C4 into classrooms – or an overriding public interest in interceding, the state should stay out of religion. Each requested exemption to the law, should be assessed, he says. “I don’t subscribe to rolling over and playing dead. Well I do sometimes. But there are boundaries to tolerance. And there is a lot to be said for letting people work it out themselves with bats.”

  New Jersey has no choice but to allow Wise-guys to use the Arbitration Act because the province’s small but deadly Chinese Triad community already uses it. Unless, Pistone adds, it decided to ban all wise-guy involvement in civil matters, including family law: “That would be acceptable because it is consistent. Crazy, but consistent.”

  Otherwise, the Bottom-feeding mob-guy bulls**t issue is an intramural debate between liberal and conservative Wise-guys, whether in New Jersey, New York or the rest of the country. “Let the Wise-guys work it out fer chrisakes.”

  April 15, 2005

• A fresh breeze in the labour movement in Iran

  Fariborz Pooya: What’s the news in the labour movement in Iran?

  Bahram Soroush: There are many strikes that are taking place. They follow the recent successful textile workers’ strike in the city of Sanandaj, western Iran, which we have talked about on the TV previously.

  Fariborz Pooya: What were the demands of the strikers?

  Bahram Soroush: They had a series of demands: reinstatement of six sacked workers; payment of overdue wages, improvement of health and safety, an end to contract work, and the revoking of the disciplinary rules. Those were the main issues around which the strike took place. An important point to bear in mind is that this was a long-running strike; it went on for 17 days. It received a lot of support from the people in the city and from around the country, from workers in other industries, as well as from the labour movement internationally. The workers remained very united, despite the fact that the management and the government tried to intimidate the workers back to work.

  Fariborz Pooya: Effectively, it turned into a national dispute. Everybody was focusing on it and there was daily reporting of the strike on TV International.

  Bahram Soroush: On New Channel TV (which TV International is broadcast on) we had two live programmes about the strike in Farsi. As you know, the New Channel TV runs 24 hours a day. The textile workers and their families could follow the programmes live, and they were very happy that the strike was being covered on the TV. A lot of people from around the world called in to offer their support. The Iranian regime was saying this is a political strike because the Worker-communist Party of Iran (WPI) is involved. They said the WPI is showing it on its TV and is supporting it. The workers responded by saying, ‘meet our demands, so nobody will be involved’!

  Fariborz Pooya: Absolutely.

  Bahram Soroush: The radicalisation of the workers’ movement was very evident. That just shows the new developments in the labour movement in Iran.

  Fariborz Pooya: That’s quite significant, because everybody in the city of Sanandaj could follow the strike as it unfolded. So it wasn’t as if the workers were facing the management and the oppressive forces of the Islamic government on their own. The government had to face not only the workers, but the people of Sanandaj and, to some extent, the whole of the people of Iran. Also, international opinion was constantly putting pressure on the Islamic government. Many trade unions from around the world in fact responded to the request and put their support behind the textile workers.

  Bahram Soroush: Exactly. 51 Union Locals in the USA wrote solidarity letters. Oil workers in Norway supported the strike. The ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) actively supported the strike, just as they had done previously. The Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU) in British Columbia, Canada, supported the workers, writing protest letters to the president of the Islamic Republic, Mohammad Khatami. There was support from the public sector workers in Canada as well. These are just examples of the support we saw. So, as you rightly say, it became a national issue and the government sensed that as well. For them the victory or defeat of the strike was going to be decisive because the outcome of other strikes would depend on that. The other point is that although the strike was successful, what you are now witnessing is that the Information Ministry (the regime’s secret police) has started to intimidate workers’ representatives. The workers kept a united rank and voice by holding general assemblies. So whenever their representatives, who were elected by the general assembly, were threatened, they asked the management to come and face the assembly. That’s because they had the backing of the assembly. So holding general assemblies became like a tradition, and that’s something the Worker-communist Party of Iran and its predecessor organisations have been advocating for about 25 years. Workers’ general assemblies could be the precursors of a workers’ council movement in Iran. They allow the workers to exercise their will, directly, and increase their power and unity. So that was very significant. What’s happening now is that the Information Ministry is summoning the strikers’ representatives, in particular Mr Farshid Beheshtizad and Mr Sheis Amani, to the Information Ministry and making threats on a daily basis. That’s why the campaign in their defence is continuing.

  Fariborz Pooya: So this is the campaign in support of the textile workers. Interestingly, the other sections of the workers’ movement in Iran came out openly in support. The workers of a plant in Sanandaj (Shaho) in fact dedicated a piece of music (‘Life is Life’) to them and solidarity messages were sent from different factories and workplaces in support of the workers. The strike was successful not only in the way the workers conducted the strike – holding general assemblies, electing representatives, successfully confronting the government – but also in igniting a wave of solidarity acts and networks in Iran.

  Bahram Soroush: If you cast your mind back to a few years ago in Iran, it was very rare, because of the repression and the brutal suppression of the workers’ movement in Iran, for workers to come out openly in support of each other. But during the past six months to a year we are witnessing that workers more openly and publicly are supporting each other. So we had groups of workers from different industries sending solidarity messages – for example, from the huge Iran Khodro car manufacturing company, as well as from Mashinsazi-e Tabriz, a large engineering tools manufacturer. Let me also mention another point about the strike which I believe made it significant. One of the demands of the strike was the payment of the wages for the strike period. This is very interesting and refreshing. And that demand was won too. The workers really fought against all the odds. You see, during the previous episodes of the strike, the factory had been surrounded by the security forces, by the military, and workers even managed to break that. The strike received tremendous support, which was crucial.

  Fariborz Pooya: So a combination of very clear demands, knowing what to do, TV International constantly broadcasting the news of the strike on live programmes, and solidarity from the international labour movement and by various sections of the workers in Iran actually led to the success of the strike. Recently, another group of workers near the Caspian Sea, the workers at Foomenat factory – who are textile workers as well – have been on strike. What has been happening there?

  Bahram Soroush: Probably the reason we are hearing a lot from the textile workers’ strikes – and there have been a number of them – is because of the privatisation and the contracting out that is taking place in that industry. Actually, that is one of the issues uniting a lot of the sectors in Iran. The workers are afraid that the government and the employers are turning all contracts into temporary, often three-monthly, contracts, which is leading to a tremendous deterioration of the conditions in terms of job security, pay, benefits and protections. So the workers are taking a lot of strike actions around that issue and also on the issue of non-payment of wages, or overdue wages, which is an acute issue. If you bear in mind how low the level of workers’ pay in Iran already is, which even with overtime work is not enough to eke out a living for many workers’ families, you can imagine the disastrous consequences of that. The workers of Foomenat Spinning and Weaving Company in northern Iran have not been paid for 11 months! The workers were holding a protest assembly in front of the factory when riot police savagely attacked them, resulting in a number of injuries, with some workers ending up in hospital with broken limbs. We know that the Iranian regime has done that previously, and its record is one of killing, torture, imprisonment of workers and workers’ leaders, the smashing of labour organisations, etc., in its 25-year existence. The difference is that now the regime finds itself on the defensive. So the security forces quickly denied that they had attacked the workers and said that in fact they cared for workers! Of course, they talked rubbish, because the evidence was there, but what’s important is that now they have to go on denial from the next day. The workers are continuing with that fight. That incident has received widespread coverage in Iran and led to outrage among the people. The Foomenat workers have said they intend to sue those responsible for the attack.

  As in the Foomenat strike, the issues around which workers are organising are more and more general issues, common to all workers, such as non-payment of wages, threats of redundancies, contracting out, and the dramatic rise in temporary and even so-called ‘blank’ (with no terms and conditions specified) contracts, which is creating, as the workers have called it, slave labour. The difference with six months ago, a year ago, is that the mood in the labour movement has changed. The demands are not just defensive, but increasingly offensive, with workers calling for improvement in conditions, pay increases, etc. Of course, it is still early days, but we are seeing a fresh breeze in the labour movement. That is what is interesting.

  Fariborz Pooya: So the demands of Foomenat textile workers are still outstanding. They are calling on various solidarity organisations to express support for their struggle, first of all condemning the fact that they have been brutally suppressed, and also putting pressure on the Iranian government and demanding that they meet the workers’ demands.

  The above is a transcript of a TV International interview conducted by Fariborz Pooya on March 7, 2005.

  April 11, 2005

• The University of Minnesota is Touching

  Yesterday, I was alerted by my wife about some announcements on the state of the University of Minnesota. We are a public institution, you know, which is synonymous with “cash-strapped and struggling to make ends meet” in these days of Republican antipathy to higher education. The university is cutting some substantial programs to save money, which is bad news, but what caught my eye was a related news item in the Star Tribune: the University of Minnesota is being sued for promoting religion.

  As you might guess, my interest was pricked. It seems we are being sued by Wisconsin’s Freedom From Religion Foundation for mingling religion with our health care.

  The lawsuit was filed on Friday, March 25. It charges that the Minnesota Faith Health Consortium, an unincorporated association between Fairview Health Services, Luther Seminary and the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center, which is located on the Riverside Campus, “engages in activities to promote personal faith and/or faith communities within the context of health care.” The “mission” of the consortium is “the alleged relevance of faith as an integral part of health care services.”

  I’m no fan of religion, but I don’t know that this is worth pursuing…I can appreciate that understanding religion is a valid part of medicine, as part of the psychological and social element of care, that bedside manner stuff. I’m also not going to get into it here, because I got a bad feeling as I looked into this MN FaithHealth Consortium at my university, and discovered it was part of a Center for Spirituality and Healing. I got here by looking up some major program cuts, and here I was discovering that we had something called the Center for Spirituality and Healing? Who knew? And strangely, it wasn’t among the programs on the chopping block.

  Browse around there, and you’ll discover that they have several links to something called TTouch. This set off a few warning bells. My fellow skeptics will recall something called Therapeutic Touch, or TT, that was big news a few years back when a grade school kid, Emily Rosa, effectively debunked it and got the results published in a peer-reviewed journal. TT was a bizarre pseudoscientific practice that was getting peddled in nursing schools, in which people would touch or stroke and claim to be able to diagnose disease and even heal people. Rosa showed that they were full of crap, and after a few squalls of fury from some New Agers, I hadn’t heard of it since.

  Now it seems my university has a unit babbling about a new variant, called Tellington TTouch. Read this description: it’s stock pseudoscience.

  The foundation of the TTouch method is based on circular movements of the fingers and hands all over the body. The intent of the TTouch is to activate the function of the cells and awaken cellular intelligence—a little like “turning on the electric lights of the body.” The TTouch is done on the entire body, and each circular TTouch is complete within itself. Therefore it is not necessary to understand anatomy to be successful in speeding up the healing of injuries or ailments, or changing undesirable habits or behavior.

  Look at that gobbledygook. “Cellular intelligence”? Notice the other common signs of quackery: amazing effects, but requiring no understanding of anatomy. Why, you can be stupid and do this!

  As a matter of fact, stupidity may be a prerequisite. Despite requiring no knowledge of anatomy and demanding no prior training, the Center for Spirituality and Healing is offering a 3 day Tellington TTouch seminar…for $750. That’s quite a sum of money to learn how to wiggle one’s fingers in circular motions over people’s bodies.

  And here are the wonderful powers you will acquire with this training:

  TTouch is for you, whether to use on your family or for yourself. If you’re a Massage Therapist, Physical Therapist, Nurse or in the healing arts, you will benefit personally and you will have new ways of helping clients.

  The Tellington TTouch has been used successfully for:

  • Relieving stress
  • Releasing unfounded fears
  • Recovery from stroke
  • Pain relief in neck, back and legs
  • Pain relief from migraines
  • Depression
  • Arthritis

  Perhaps best of all is the general feeling of well-being that so many experience.

  Grandiose claims, demands for money, too-good-to-be-true ease…is there anything to distinguish this from a Nigerian e-mail scam? Yes, a little hilarity. Brace yourself: the discoverer of this amazing ability is an animal trainer. Elsewhere on the site you will discover that:

  The Tellington TTouch can help in cases of:

  Excessive Barking & Chewing

  Leash Pulling

  Jumping Up

  Aggressive Behavior

  Extreme Fear & Shyness

  Resistance to Grooming

  Excitability & Nervousness

  Car Sickness

  Problems Associated With Aging

This gentle method is currently being used by animal owners, trainers, breeders, veterinarians, zoo personnel and shelter workers in several countries.

Not only will you be able to help people recover from strokes with this skill, but you can keep your dog from getting carsick. I hope their webmaster never makes the mistake of mixing up the contents of those two pages above.

I am embarrassed. Why is my university hawking this snake-oil? Why, when money is tight, aren’t we jettisoning this bit of quackery? The University of Colorado experienced something similar in 1994, investigated their nursing school’s promotion of Therapeutic Touch, and despite concluding that TT was bunkum, decided to allow the School of Nursing to continue with it.

The report itself gives us a clue as to the justification for this decision: “TT is potentially a source of considerable income. Training in TT is not complex and arduous and the practice of TT does not require a large investment in equipment or personnel.” Indeed, Quinn’s Healing Touch training brings in a substantial amount of money for the nursing school. A set of three HT videotapes featuring Quinn sells for $675. Healing Touch classes cost $225 each for the first three levels and $325 each for the next two levels.

But training is not the only cash cow associated with TT. Recently, over half a million dollars of public tax money has been spent on Therapeutic Touch research. The National Institutes of Health has given $150,000 in grants, the Department of Health and Human Services has granted $200,000, and most recently the Department of Defense granted $355,000 to the University of Alabama at Birmingham — all for studies of TT. The study at UAB, to be conducted on burn patients, was billed as being the study that would finally settle the question as to the effectiveness of TT.

I suspect something similar is going on here. The Center for Spirituality and Healing brags about bringing in the grant money.

The Center is committed to exploring integrative therapies in the context of rigorous science. Recently achieving the distinction of becoming a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-designated Developmental Center for CAM Research – one of only three in the nation – Center faculty are currently engaged in basic science, clinical trials and health services research.

In a highly competitive field, faculty have been awarded an NIH center grant, individual R01 and R21 grants, and an NIH education/curriculum grant in addition to numerous foundation grants. Additionally, an NIH clinical research fellowship program funded by K-30 and T-32 grants was established in conjunction with Hennepin County Medical Center and Northwestern Health Sciences University, both in Minnesota.

I despise Northwestern Health Sciences University. It’s our regional quack mill, offering training or degrees in acupuncture, oriental medicine, and chiropractic. They’re also flush with cash, judging by all the tchotchkes and spam mail they send me. Associating with them does not make me less grumpy about this.

I’m also not happy to see that our university is milking NCCAM. NCCAM is a ghastly federal boondoggle, a way to redirect money away from legitimate scientific research and into the hands of witchdoctors and shamans and psychic investigators and other charlatans.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) was established in 1998, seven years after the creation of its predecessor, the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM). The OAM had been formed not because of any medical or scientific need, but because Iowa senator Tom Harkin and former Iowa representative Berkeley Bedell believed in implausible health claims as a result of their own experiences. Bedell thought that “Naessens Serum” had cured his prostate cancer and that cow colostrum had cured his Lyme disease. He recommended “alternative medicine” to his friend Harkin, who subsequently came to believe that bee pollen had cured his hay fever.

I think I’m more than embarrassed. I’m a bit disgusted. Why is the University of Minnesota supporting these frauds? Even if the NCCAM is an income stream, it’s dirty money, and shouldn’t we have a little self-respect and dignity?

This article was first published on Pharyngula and appears here by permission.