Where we have human rights we would not have in Muslim nations
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is having a hard time putting things together.
Among western elites – artistic, political, scientific, media – I notice more expressions of abhorrence of Islam and its diverse adherents than ever before…Influential anti-Muslim voices are no longer bothering with nuance. Douglas J Hagmann, director of the non-governmental Northeast Intelligence Network in the US writes: “The latest murderous rampage should be enough to illustrate that Islam is totally incompatible with freedom, democracy and the western culture.” I wonder how many of my British friends think exactly this…Radical Islamists peddle partial narratives about the Crusades, forgetting the Nato interventions to save Bosnian Muslims from genocide and the fact that millions of us would never leave the West where we have human rights we would not have in Muslim nations.
Okay stop right there. Stop there, and think about it. Alibhai-Brown should have, and she didn’t – she rushed on to make a different point, instead. She apparently didn’t even register what she’d said. If she had, she couldn’t have left the first part of the article as it was – she would have gone back and re-written it, or possibly abandoned it in despair. She needed to stop and think very hard about the implications of what she blurted out there: that ‘in Muslim nations’ she and everyone else would not have certain human rights. Well – why is that? Why is that the case? Why did even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown not say ‘in most Muslim nations’ much less ‘some Muslim nations’ much less ‘a few Muslim nations’? Why is it the case that ‘in Muslim nations’ in general, some human rights are not available? Is it not possible that that is because of something about Islam itself, which she doesn’t want to admit to? Because if it’s not something about Islam itself, it seems awfully surprising that it applies to ‘Muslim nations’ without qualification, and that even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes this for granted as a fact.
The horrible truth is that it is something about Islam itself that renders some human rights unavailable in places where Islam is entangled with the government, which is to say ‘in Muslim nations.’ Islam itself, as the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam makes so unpleasantly clear, does rule out certain rights, especially for certain people, such as women. This isn’t ‘extremist’ Islam, or terrorist Islam, or radical Islam, or any other minority or eccentric Islam, it’s just Islam. That fact could be different – it’s a contingent fact, as it is a contingent fact that some religions have learned to ignore the nastier parts of its holy books while others have not – but in the world as it is now, that fact is not different. Alibhai-Brown almost admitted that – but not quite. She clings to the idea of Islam’s ‘diverse adherents’ and fails to point out how much of the content of ‘Islam’ has to be ignored for that putative diversity to amount to anything.
It seems useful to think of religion as a form of self-indulgence. If you want to believe one, that’s up to you, but the limit to what you can do with it depends on the effect on other people, just as the amount of alcohol you take doesn’t depend only on your physical capacity.
Once you realize that wearing a crucifix or burqa, or stopping work to face Mecca is an act of self-indulgence it becomes much easier to see that there are circumstances in which we might not want to permit it.
And the reason it’s a self-indulgence is of course that it’s untrue, by any reasonable standard of evidence. So this is the big question – how do we get people to realize that it’s nonsense?
As for Alibhai-Brown’s article, if Muslims don’t want to be criticized, why don’t they believe something else instead? Ha!
I wonder if that’s true. The Qu’ran is the word of God in a way in which no other scripture (at least that I am familiar with) claims to be the word of God. The Gospel of John makes a good stab at it, but it never quite comes off. (Indeed, the Jesus of John’s gospel often sounds quite a bit like the Allah of the Qu’ran. I wonder if this influenced Mohammed?) Every word in the Qu’ran is addressed directly to the reader from God himself. I suspect that this is something that can never be ignored, and this is something that is particularly worrying. A few may manage it, if left to themselves, but there is no liberal way of reading the word of God. It either is, or it isn’t, what it says.
The Bible, on the other hand, never makes this claim, though the claim is often made for it, but this is what makes it a contingent fact that some do and some do not ignore its nastier parts. One of the pastoral epistles speaks of the scriptures as being ‘God-breathed’ (obviously not counting itself as part of the scriptures) but there is nowhere, in the Bible, where it is held that God is the author. The Qu’ran is the exception, and that makes it very dangerous.
Islam is, I believe, an ideology of total control. It’s not called ‘Islam’ for nothing. Its whole raison d’etre, its lifeblood, is jihad, conquering unbelievers and absorbing them into itself. Islamic ‘civilisation’ flourished as long as Islam was expanding and imperial. It was in recession for the European centuries, but now it is trying to make a comeback. It’s more, I think, than a contingent fact about religions that some do and some don’t ignore the nasty bits. Hirsi Ali knows this, and so, I think, does Ibn Warraq. I think we all need to digest the idea.
Yes…I meant ‘could in principle’…not necessarily in fact. I don’t have much hope that it can be in fact.
Ah, well, but that’s where we differ. I don’t think Islam can, in principle, ignore the nasty bits. Besides the fact that much the greater portion of the Qu’ran is nasty, it’s all nevertheless the word of God. Even when it seems not to be, the word “Say!” often precedes the substance of the sura, so that it becomes immediately, and not only mediately, as is the case with most of the the biblical text, the word of God.
The only thing that might alter this would be the general acceptance of serious textual criticism of the Qu’ran, but it’s hard to think of textual criticism becoming part of core Muslim belief. That’s hard to achieve even for the Bible, where its description as God’s word is almost certainly false of the Bible’s own self understanding (if it makes sense to speak of books that way). This would, however, if it could, per impossibile, be entertained, provide the ‘in principle’ that you are looking for.
In the 19th century, the Roman Catholic church was quite hostile to democracy, especially Pope Pius IX, and many Catholic countries were dictatorships as late as the 1980s. I don’t think that Islam is inherently more antithetical to civil liberties than the other Abrahamic religions, but certainly there is a correlation currently between being an Islamic nation and having fewer individual liberties. It may not be that the Koran is worse than the Bible; rather, for historical reasons, fewer Westerners now take the Bible seriously.
I guess that depends on your definition of Islam. Is it still Islam if you ignore most of the Qu’ran? Well, a lot of people I have met call themselves Christians although they ignore virtually all of the bible, in some cases even guiltily laughing about the idea that Jesus could have been resurrected. It is enough for them to believe that you should, in principle, forgive other people (which is probably all that they could remember of his teachings if pressed), even if they do not actually manage to do that, and that there is probably some higher intelligence at work in the universe. Now why should not somebody call themselves Muslim and go to the mosque once a week while believing something equally fluffy and nondescript? In that sense, a Muslim country would be very compatible with human rights and democracy, just like “Christian” France and Germany are.
To be honest, that is a very interesting discussion that I would like to have one day. How do you define a Christian, or a Muslim? Simply ask them? But what if somebody says they are Christian although they pray to Ganesha every day? Or, more realistically, what about somebody who is deist but does not believe any specifics that distinguish Christianity from other religions. Is that person really Christian?
I’d have more respect for Alibhai-Brown’s position if she acknowledged that Islamists ‘peddle partial narratives’ not just about the Crusades, but also about Israel and Jews. After all, antisemitism is central to Islamist ideology – see the Hamas Charter, and the speeches of any Islamist you care to name, repeating racist stereotypes of Jews that could have (and in many cases did) come straight out of Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It seems that the demonisation of Israel is one aspect of Islamism that she shares – but then I suppose so do the pro-Islamist so-called liberals and and leftists (including the newspaper she writes for).
Greg Tingey: yes, but that’s not just any noted academic, that’s B&W’s old friend Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University. This seems to be a promotion from the jobs in Rotterdam that he (rightly) got sacked from (B&W passim).
IIRC Oxford Uni has received stacks of money from wealthy individuals in the Middle East, but I don’t know if there’s a direct connection.
And such nonsense he talks. He “explained” why he famously declined to condemn stoning (so that Sarkozy didn’t gain a debating point).
He has also been campaigning for women’s rights apparently.
Most baffling for me was this: there is an ancient idea that the world is made up of two “abodes”, those of Islam and of war. [This idea is not his.]
TR’s contribution is the suggestion that there be a third abode, that of testimony, in which everyone is a witness and nobody imposes their POV on anyone else.
Or something!
But her point, surely, is about ‘partial narratives’. And it does seem to me that deducing something about Islam as such which is inimical to human rights is, really, a partial narrative. There are, in those predominantly Muslim countries, human rights organisations, etc, which define themselves as Muslim. I know people who define themselves as Muslim (observe Ramadan and what have you) but are no more literalist about the Quran than most Christians are about the Bible (and it may be that they’re theologically all over the place, but that hardly seems the point in this context).
On a more mundane level: for instance, in the part of London where I live pretty much every off-licence (that’s the shops where you buy alcohol) is run by Turks, ie by Muslim families. You can argue that Turks aren’t typical Muslims, I suppose – but then you’re saying that the narrative about Islam as such is partial. (Or you’re saying Islam as such might be antithetical etc, but not Muslims per se. But I’m not sure where that’s taken the argument).
Eric
“Ah, well, but that’s where we differ. I don’t think Islam can, in principle, ignore the nasty bits.”
I didn’t say ‘can,’ I said ‘could’ – could meaning in a different world, or with a different history, or with a different kind of prophet or scripture or both, or all those, or all those and more. We don’t differ. I too don’t think Islam can, in principle, ignore the nasty bits, though I would add that I’m not absolutely sure it can’t, given the right conditions etc – but then we may be back into ‘could’ instead of ‘can.’
I do think Muslims can ignore the nasty bits – but Islam itself, not so much.
I also think, as I said long ago, and you agreed, that all those potentials are inherently terribly fragile and unstable. Yes one can always cherry-pick one’s religion, but one can never ever be secure that all believers will do likewise. Yes there is hope in the sense that more people could liberalize their religious views, but yes there is also danger and fear, in the sense that the lure of purity and zeal and struggle is always always there.
Clive – hang on –
“run by Turks, ie by Muslim families”
The two are not synonymous! You can’t simply assume that all Turks are Muslims. That’s why I put scare quotes on A-B’s ‘Muslim nations’ – it’s a misleading term.
“And it does seem to me that deducing something about Islam as such which is inimical to human rights is, really, a partial narrative.”
Can you explain that a little? I don’t deny (or want to deny) that there are self-described Muslims who are in favour of human rights, but that in no way rules out the possibility that there is something about Islam as such which is inimical to human rights. The same applies nicely to Catholics and Catholicism, by the way – and I would argue that there is indeed quite a lot about Catholicism that is inimical to human rights; ditto for other particularly conservative literalist religions; ditto but in milder terms for at least some more liberal religions.
Consider what that guy at Ans. in Genesis said about lying to the Nazis – God’s commandment not to lie trumps what we think we should do for other human beings. That’s inimical to human rights, in a nutshell.
You’re right Ophelia. I am probably ignoring nuance here. I guess I lean towards the thought that the possibilities here are so fragile that ‘can’ and ‘could’ blend into each other.
I watch it happening with Christianity – I watched it happening to Anglicanism – and it is particularly clear as the Roman Catholic Church marches boldly into the past, from a position that, in the early sixties, looked very promising indeed. Yes, Roman Catholicism could change; it could ignore centuries of blindness and intolerance; it even seemed possible, in those far off days, that it would begin to recognise ‘separated brethren’ as genuinely Christian. But it can’t. Try as hard as it likes, the Roman Catholic Church simply can’t give up the hoard of truth over which it stands sentinel.
I agree with you that Roman Catholicism and other forms of literal Christianity are probably inimical to human rights. They are showing this more and more clearly lately. I suspect that the same applies to Islam, though perhaps even more strongly. It has a few more nasty bits, and nasty bits point directly to concentrations of power that, in fact, subvert human rights. The nasty bits always do.
Thanks for cleaning up my mess.
Don’t want a polarised argument here.
Of course you can’t assume that Turks are Muslims, but I’m pretty sure these particular Turks are, in the general sense.
I don’t disagree that Islam, like any other religion, is ‘as such’ bad, or indeed a pile of shit. I think what I am disagreeing with, warning against, or something, is the idea that Islam is somehow less capable of having many, many individuals who simply don’t operate/function/live according to its strict rules than other religions.
For instance, Answers in Genesis, yes, truly appalling. But nobody doubts that gazillions of Christians wouldn’t go along with them. It’s the same with Islam/Muslims, is what I want to say. But I think there’s a tendency for this ‘Islam is especially nasty’ idea to ignore the fact that in reality this translates into a statement about Muslims, and as a statement about Muslims it is false.
It’s not a polarized argument. This one in particular I think is one that’s about particular words and their implications and the like.
Again, it’s not a matter of “the idea that Islam is somehow less capable of having many, many individuals who simply don’t operate according to its strict rules than other religions” – because it’s not a matter of “somehow” – because we know how. Islam imposes the death penalty on ‘apostates’ and it is often very harsh toward people who don’t operate according to its strict rules – harsher than other religions. This isn’t something vague or based on gossip or intuitions, it’s a reality about the real world. It just is harder for Muslims, especially Muslims in majority-Muslim countries but also Muslims in Muslim neighborhoods in secular countries, to ignore the rules. My friend Gina Khan could tell you about that.
Yes, it’s easy for people to ignore the danger of criticism of Islam to turn into or appear to be criticism of Muslims – but the reverse is also true – it’s easy for people to oppose and shout down all criticism of Islam under the pretext that it is something called “Islamophobia.”
Johann Hari on meeting ex-jihadis is worth reading in the context of this discussion.
http://johannhari.com//2009/11/16/meet-the-ex-jihadis
OB: “Islam … is often very harsh toward people who don’t operate according to its strict rules – harsher than other religions.”
Is it true of those religions as such, or of those religious communities (or whatever) as currently historically constituted? I think if you lived in Savonarola’s Republic of God in the 1490s it would be probably be rather like living in the more extreme Muslim states now. Of course it may well be true that Christianity (say) has adapted to modernity (or something) better than Islam. But if ‘Islam’ is not a monolithic entity, which is part of what I’m trying to say, bits of it might catch up.
Again, I’m sure it would be harder for a Muslim in my street, for instance, to ‘ignore the rules’ than it is for non-Muslims. But up the road from here is a large orthodox Jewish community. I’m not sure it’s any easier for them. But nobody would make statements about ‘Judaism’ as such, because everybody knows there are plenty of Jews who aren’t orthodox, or whose communities don’t work in the same way. It’s not an exact parallel, but hopefully you see what I mean.
For my part I’m not on board with the “in principle” predictions so long as I don’t know what the principle is.
And anyway, to cut to the chase, if a statement about what’s predictable ‘in principle’ is true according to some interpretation, then that interpretation would absolutely have to accommodate the platitude that ideology is not the primary or sole determinant of social events or institutions.
But people would make statements about orthodox Judaism as such, and Islam is in practice more like orthodox Judaism than it is like Judaism as such or in general. I’m not sure it’s very meaningful to say that Islam is not a monolithic entity.
Ben – what? Why? And are you saying that platitude is true? Do you seriously think that ideology is never the primary determinant of social events?
Not that I know what a determinant is. I know what a cause is, but a determinant? No. And primary is not the same as sole, and social events are way different from institutions – so all in all you’ve done a lot of wiggling there. I suspect you’re not clear about what you mean yourself.
Ophelia, your criticisms are correct, so I’ll elaborate. I do believe that collections of events (events in the plural) have to be understood as the product of complex causes. (By “determinant” I mean types of causes, arranged in the crude taxonomy of social science: economic, ideological, political, ecological, biological.) I therefore abandon ever speaking of “sole” determinants as plausible. (So i.e. I reject the economic determinist boogeyman that people used to worry about with Marxism, for instance.)
That only leaves “primary” to be explained.
Maybe (for the sake of argument) it’s reasonable to say that for a few token events, the proximal and distal causes involved are mostly ideological. Then we might say that the event was “primarily determined” by ideological causes. We can’t say anything until we have an idea of what we take as sufficient to qualify as a case of “most”. But however we define that threshold, if we are giving a plausible account, I think the primarily ideological cases will be special and rare.
To admit this about a few token events is not to say that “events”, as a collection, are mostly determined by ideology. For one thing, the very idea of “ideology” as distinct from other spheres of social activity is awfully shallow and hard to apply to particular cases. But we can’t do without this kind of talk — it’s the best we have if we want to talk about events in the plural, or have sciences that treat of events in the plural.
Be that as it may, for another, just as an empirical gambit, as a policy I don’t generally believe that one-dimensional explanations of particular events usually end up being useful. So for example, I don’t believe the Cheney-Bush lie that “they hate us for our freedoms”. But the reason I doubt this is not just because it’s patently absurd. Rather, it’s also because the story is too simple: the empires of the Occident really have treated the rest of the world like their grand economic and military chessboard, and we got blowback as a consequence. In other words, I detest the trivialization of the social sciences, because I think it tends to mislead us. This is not to say that some token events can’t be primarily this or that, but that I think it’s most prudent to put the burden of proof on those who say that it is.
Though none of this stops me from assigning responsibility to collectives. This is a separate issue, if we believe in negative responsibility and various other moral things.
Confession: I don’t really know what an institution is, except a granfalloon that involves people who wear special jackets and who act mean. So maybe we should forget I said that.
I think it is necessary to distinguish between Islam as a system of thought and Muslims as believers or followers of that system. I probably live in the same area of London as Ben and indeed it is true that most of the off-licenses are run by Muslims. They are not actually Turks, they are Turkish Kurds who have a separate history to the Turks. The Communist Party was big in Turkish Kurdistan (the PKK) so many Kurds are semi-secularised. Having said that, there is a (dis)honour killing trial going on at the moment involving a Turkish Kurdish family, and indeed, in the past, most of the (dis)honour killlings in England have been committed in this mileau. Although the Kurds sell alcohol, I don’t believe they actually drink it, it is mainly a commercial decision. With regard to human rights in Muslim countries, call me an empiricist, but wherever are meaningful rights founds? Any progressive legislation is the result of colonisation, or non-Muslim minorities. I know that the Roman Catholic Church as a by-word for feudal backwardness in Europe until recently, but it has now joined the Protestant world, allowing divorce and abortion. I hold no brief for Christainity, but what’s done is done, we should study the contemporary world not times long past. The armies invading Iraq and Afghanistan are not doing it in the name of Christ, it is purely to do with modern nation-states and economic advantage. They are not foreably christianizing the local people, so I regard all this talk about how rotten the Church is as irrelevant.
Sue, I think you meant Clive. I haven’t lived in London for years, and even then it was fake London we have in Ontario.
What? The RCC is definitely fundamentally opposed to abortion, and the pope regularly speaks out against such evils as contraception and condoms, too.
OB, I find it a bit problematic how you speak of “Islam” in such bold terms. What is Islam, really, what is Christianity, if not the sum of all the believers and their individual interpretations, these including the liberal ones? I doubt that a literalist taking that actually is incompatible with democracy and human rights is intellectually coherent, so can it then be the “real” religion? After all, scripture of every religion contradicts itself every second page.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think that faith in general is a bad idea, but that is on a different categorial level. Saying Islam is this or that is like saying liberalism is this or that while neglecting that there have been national-liberals, social-liberals, radical-free-market-liberals and various other shades in history.
Sue, I don’t know where you live, and there are Kurds round here, but for sure the off-licences and restaurants I am referring to are run by Turks, and some of them certainly do drink the alcohol, including in the local pub.
As a general statement, I think it might be right to distinguish ‘Islam’ from ‘Muslims’. But undoubtedly general statements about Islam are taken by many Muslims to be statements about them, which hardly seems unreasonable. And certainly ‘Muslims’ are not a monolith, as my local Turks and Kurds (but also people I know who are, say, Libyan, or Asian from East Africa) testify. Plus, surely as soon as you start saying ‘oh yes but *these* Muslims have a particular history which accounts for them being semi-secularised’ or words to that effect, you are demonstrating the non-monolithic quality of the subject.
OB – Islam is more like orthodox Judaism. Sure, much of it is. But some of it isn’t, which is the point I’m trying to make.
Eric: “Since we see very similar types of denial of human rights that can be found right at the heart of Western democracies nowadays, in areas where Muslims have settled, somehow it seems reasonable to say that there is something about Islam that is inimical to human rights…”
I don’t understand. Are you saying that the only denials in Western societies of human rights are because there are Muslim populations?
You can make general statements about institutions. But whether or not the general statements are the most instructive, insightful, helpful, accurate or whatever in assessing the entire thing depends, surely, on the nature of the entire thing, and can’t be assumed in advance. If there are things about Muslims (if not ‘Islam’) which appear to contradict the general statements, that’s surely worth knowing. If there had been, for instance, large numbers of Nazis who were opposed to anti-semitism, embraced Marxism – you fill in the blanks – it would have meant that Nazism wasn’t what people thought it was. Of course, there weren’t such people. But that’s because of Nazism, not because of the value or otherwise of general statements.
Italian women were granted abortion on demand within the first 90 days of a pregnancy in 1978, and the right to request it in the second trimester.
And? Is that supposed to justify the claim that the Catholic church allows abortion? It doesn’t. You do realize that Italy is not the Vatican, I hope.
Alexander
Well I usually qualify “Islam” with something like “in practice” or “in the form of sharia” or similar. I did neglect to do that in one comment above, because (as so often) I was writing quickly. I agree that it’s hard if not impossible to say what “Islam” is without that kind of qualification, if only because there is no Islamic Vatican. But with that kind of qualification, I do think it’s possible. I definitely don’t think “Islam” is currently “the sum of all the believers and their individual interpretations, these including the liberal ones” because the liberal ones are currently helpless before the onslaught of the highly illiberal ones. The liberal ones are not in power, and the illiberal ones are. The liberal ones aren’t spending Wahhabi petrobillions all around the world to promote liberal versions of Islam, nor are they running the thousands of madrassas in Pakistan, nor are they governing Iran, nor are they winning the struggle in Somalia, and so on and so on.
Also, though there is no Vatican in Islam, there are of course the Koran and the Hadith, as Eric says, and it can’t simply be ruled out in advance that the Koran and the Hadith are fundamentally illiberal. It’s entirely possible that there are liberal Muslims even though Islam itself cannot be described as liberal. I know there are liberal Muslims, and I think it is the case that Islam itself cannot be described as liberal.
Clive, you said:
Of course not – nor did anything that I said suggest such a silly thing – but I am suggesting that, to the extent that Islam seems to function, around the world, even in otherwise democratic countries, in ways that restrict human rights, there is a reasonable basis upon which to suggest that Islam is, in principle, inimical to human rights. That there are liberal Muslims, just as there are liberal Roman Catholics, goes without saying, but this is nothing to the point so far as Islam or Roman Catholicism, as such, are concerned.
And the burden of proof is on the other side of the question. Given the fact that there is no country with a more-or-less Islamic government that can be described as liberal (Turkey? No. Morocco? No. Jordan? No.), the burden is not on those observers who suspect that Islam tends to train people (mostly men) to be illiberal and that there is some substantive content to “Islam” that does that training. That idea is taboo in some circles, often for laudable reasons, but it takes a lot of skill in denial to just rule it out ahead of time.
To put it as simply as possible, if “Islam” is not largely illiberal, why are Pakistan and Somalia and Sudan and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Algeria and Afghanistan such godawful oppressive punitive shitholes? Is it really likely that there is no connection?
It would be lovely if “Islam” were not like that – if it had somehow developed differently over the centuries – but that is not the world we live in right now!
Well, maybe, up to a point. But right now in the UK, for instance, there is a quasi-fascist organisation, the English Defence League, organising demonstrations against ‘Islam’ on the basis that Islam-as-such (meaning Muslims-as-such) is/are a threat to ‘democracy’ and what have you.
You’re right about Saudi Arabia, and what have you. But in this, other context, the fact that the woman selling you your cans of beer is a Muslim; or the fact that you have no reason, ipso facto, to assume that the Muslim family at the end of your street is hostile to human rights, and what have you, seems pretty important to me. (And this was the context of Yasmin Abilhai Brown’s article).
I will try to stop saying ‘and what have you’ so much. x
But Clive…I’ve already agreed to most of that (and so has Eric). But that’s a separate issue – or if not altogether separate, it’s one that has to be carefully dilineated so that the two aren’t just treated as identical.
For one thing, it’s not a good idea to make decent treatment of “the Muslim family at the end of your street” dependent on belief that Islam is not basically illiberal – because what if you become convinced that Islam is basically illiberal? Do you then stop treating the people at the end of your street decently?
For another thing, it’s not always in all circumstances best to give people the benefit of the doubt. It depends. Suppose a teenage daughter of the Muslim family at the end of your street knocks on your door late one night crying and bleeding and begs you to shelter her from her angry father and brother. Should you assume – I mean really assume, on the basis of nothing but a laudable devotion to equality and fairness and anti-racism – that the girl’s father and brother can’t possibly be a danger to her, and send her on her way?
No matter about what have you – I’m always veering between ‘etc etc’ and ‘and so on’ – it can’t be helped!
Whereas Christianity began as a minority cult within the Roman Empire, and used that empire as the model for its later corporate structure, Islam began amongst the tribes of Arabia, and became the glue that held their federation together. ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, and that is what it cannot exist without. Conformism and groupthink are very notable features of pre-industrial humanity the world over. The liberalism and personal autonomy that developed so slowly and painfully in Christian Europe and its derivative countries are total anathema to Islam.
India and Pakistan sit side by side as pretty much a controlled experiment on the effect of Islam on people of the same ethnicity. The results could not be more stark.
In the memorable words of OB: “To put it as simply as possible, if ‘Islam’ is not largely illiberal, why are Pakistan and Somalia and Sudan and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Algeria and Afghanistan such godawful oppressive punitive shitholes? Is it really likely that there is no connection?”
No. That’s not likely at all.
Good point Ian. Your comparison of India and Pakistan, which started out on the project of nationhood at the same time, does, it seems to me, show very clearly something about the intrinsic nature of Islam and its ability to accommodate democracy and to provide protection for human rights. India has some of the same problems (with religious extremism), but not to the same degree. It is interesting that Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, you might say, had this to say about the new nation:
Pakistan has had very few years of secular democracy since that was written. India, though it has had struggles with its democracy over the years, especially with the more fanatical wing of Hinduism, has done comparatively well, when you consider that it is the most populous of the democracies. The supposition that Islam is not what makes the difference here is, as you say, simply not plausible.
It is worthwhile mentioning Ayan Hirsi Ali’s warning, given some time ago, that Western societies should limit Muslim immigration until it is clear how those immigrant minorities will fit into the social patchwork of Western democracies, whether they can or cannot adapt to democratic polities and integrate in socially non-threatening ways. I don’t think the answer’s in on that yet. We have a responsibility to treat all members of our society with decency, but we must expect of those who immigrate that they will accept and practice principles of equality and rights that form the bedrock of our social contract.
Ophelia. Maybe we don’t disagree, I’m genuinely not sure. Maybe I’m dim. Of course in your example you assume in favour of the woman claiming abuse.
If you’ve already agreed, you’ve already agreed. So I’m sorry. Or is it about immediate contexts, what immediately bothers us? I think the critique of religion is important, including of Islam. But I am worried by quasi-fascists. Do you see the dilemma?
Clive, well I did say the teenage daughter was bleeding as well as crying – I’m not assuming in favour of her, I’m saying that is the situation so what follows from the situtation? And I didn’t say she was claiming abuse, either – I said she was begging you to shelter her from her angry father and brother. I put it that way because I have read accounts of women and girls who have been in exactly that situation and have been refused help, or actively handed over to the very male relatives they were trying to escape.
I’ve already said I see the dilemma. Of course I see the dilemma. Yet I notice you ignored my question – in fact you just brushed it off. What is your answer? Should you assume – really assume, on the basis of nothing but a laudable devotion to equality and fairness and anti-racism – that the girl’s father and brother can’t possibly be a danger to her, and send her on her way?
It honestly depends on the strength and quality of the connection you’re trying to make. Clearly it’s a correlation, a starting point, which lets you get away with saying something about how it’s involved. Enough to even talk about collective accountability.
But surely we can’t stop there if what we’re really up to is explanation (and prediction). We also have to ask — what else do the states have in common? For one thing, many of those states are relatively new and former colonies that feel quite justifiably alienated from the Western empires after having been exploited in the most inconceivable ways through economic and military occupation. It matters because occupation puts people into disarray, and prompts them to grab onto the nearest basis for self-direction and solidarity they can find. Many of them have economies that are more or less premodern or stagnant, with major exceptions with Saudi Arabia and Egypt — who are not only can get away with a functioning oligarchy (one of the perks of raking in the cash in an export economy), but who use that actively to their advantage in controlling their brother and sister states. These palpable geopolitical and economic facts conspire with the ideology to produce a situation where human rights just aren’t seen as a necessary part of the paths to economic prosperity. Dry up the oil overnight, or change the West’s foreign policy, and maybe the board wouldn’t be quite so tilted towards injustice for their lot. Not incidentally, maybe when the oil dries up, we will lose the desire to take human rights quite so seriously.
And we must see the differences, too. Take the budding incipient progressive revolution just lately squashed in Iran. I doubt we could foresee that kind of revolution happening in Saudi Arabia. (Admittedly, it wasn’t a Purely Secular revolution — far from it — but I can concede the point and still call it gratuitous.) This tells me that the analogy between Islamic states in the present day and Christian states of yesteryear may have been brushed aside far too hastily.
Benjamin: “For one thing, many of those states are relatively new and former colonies that feel quite justifiably alienated from the Western empires after having been exploited in the most inconceivable ways through economic and military occupation.” This not only describes many present day Islamic countries, but most of non-Islamic Africa, of south and east Asia, and Latin America. Yet Islam correlates very tightly with repression.
India and South Korea have loosened considerably, and representative government has replaced autocracy in both of those. Japan is a special case in so many ways.
Cultural and religious traditions are used all over the planet to justify oligarchical government and stultification of human rights. But no religion correlates as brilliantly with state repression as does Islam.
Eric, I expect Muslim communities to remain as endogamous enclaves in western ‘multicultural’ countries like Australia for a long time yet. I know many Muslims not happy to send their kids to government schools, and want to set up their own Islamic school system.
Meanwhile, there are Indian restaurants all over the place in Australia, but no Pakistani ones; plenty of Lebanese restaurants, but none that I know of from other Muslim countries. Chinese restaurants got going in the 19th Century, and Vietnamese, Thai and Malay-Indonesian in the 20th. Cuisine, for whatever reason, has developed unevenly in the ‘third world’. Iran has a great carpet-making tradition, but its food is nothing to write home about – very bland. I get the feeling that a kind of Islamic anti-sensual puritanism is to blame there too. The big exceptions to this are the Malay Muslims of Malaysia and Indonesia. Their food is first-rate, but I understand that they are regarded by the rest of the Muslim world as about the slackest Muslims around, and their cuisine tradition probably predates their conversion to Islam and has managed to survive.
OB – sorry, I didn’t mean to brush it aside. I took it as obvious that you’d help her. I didn’t mean to suggest that there should be any ‘anti-racist’ assumption that fathers, brothers etc aren’t capable of harming their daughters, sisters… God no.
If you see the dilemma we’re not really arguing.
Ian, you need to discover Moroccan.
If the Indian restaurants in Australia are anything like the Indian restaurants in England, they are mainly run by Bengalis. This is a legacy of seafaring days, when it was Bengali sailors who settled here and set up restaurants. Pakistani immigration is a different story. They are mainly here as professionals. Incidentally, if you want to divorce the thought system from the embodied reality ie Italy is not the Vatican, then how do you see movement or change being effected? That’s actually Islam’s problem, the religion of ‘perfect peace’ wants to stifle and bury any change and remain in a model of society that functioned in the late Bronze age.
Ian, correlation is fine, but is it the sole or primary determinant? I say no.
“We also have to ask — what else do the states have in common? For one thing, many of those states are relatively new and former colonies”
No kidding, but as Ian points out, they have that in common with a great many other countries, but the particular kind of oppressive punitive theocratic authoritarianism they have in common with each other is Special. Obviously (surely it’s obvious) I’m not saying that’s all there is to it, but I am saying it’s far from trivial. Are you saying that Islam is not central to the peculiar horribleness of Afghanistan and Somalia and Iran and Saudi Arabia?!
Is it central? Sure. An account of general events that didn’t include talk of the legal structure and its cultural meaning would be hopelessly incomplete and ethically negligent. These other kinds of causes, though, are also ubiquitous to any plausible account of what’s going on.
Is it a case that you think has to motivate rethinking the rejection of determinism, or even reason to rethink the strategy of putting the burden on would-be determinists for explanation? I don’t think so, and haven’t been given any reason to be dissauded from such views.
And if the above positions that I’m critical of (either determinism, or determinism as a method) are not positions that you, Ian, or Eric are willing to endorse, then we have no quarrel. (And just in case you don’t hold those views, keep in mind that all the while I have not presumed that any of you hold them. But they are at least plausible interpretations of what’s going on here, and I’ve only claimed to present the conditions under which I would have to dissent to what’s been said.)
Brown and I are asking, what causes people to make strong claims like “Islam is totally incompatible with freedom, democracy and the western culture”? I can’t give a plausible reading to phrases like “totally incompatible” except in two ways: either it is as a claim predicated upon determinism, or as a claim that in the next breath is prepared to allow us to infer that Western Culture is incompatible with Western Culture. After all, we have the Old Testament and we have the UN Declaration of Human Rights and they’re not compatible, but they’re both part of the canons of Western Culture.
If we’re serious about adopting the latter, then we’re barking without bite — our glib social talk is hopelessly shallow and unreliable and self-contradictory. In that case, it seems to me that no ethical consequences can follow and no serious collective accountability can be assigned to religions. Because in order to hold something accountable, they have some kind of internal integrity and persist across time. You can’t criticise a swarm of bees.
I take it that we’re not interested in this latter conclusion at all. So we must be talking about determinism when we’re looking into the import of what Hagmann is saying. But what you’re saying now seems quite weaker than what Hagmann is up to, so it isn’t vulnerable to the criticism I’m offering. It’s nevertheless important to draw attention to the concern with determinism as a way of drawing a dividing line in the discussion in such a way that I can (at least for my own sake) understand what people here think, especially since the nature and scope of the views was not at all clear at the outset.
Ben, right, as you (eventually) indicate, I’m not agreeing with what Hagmann said, in the form in which he said it. But then I should think that would be obvious from the discussion, if not from my post.
I think what is more possible than that Islam could be loosely interpreted enough to be compatible with rights is that Muslims could just ignore the incompatible parts – and that (again, in principle) one needn’t worry about who is a True Muslim and who isn’t if ‘Muslim’ starts to work the way ‘Jew’ does. None of that looks at all likely right now, but things that look wildly unlikely do happen.
In the meantime though I think it’s a bad mistake to think and claim that it cannot possibly be true that Islam is in tension with concern for rights and equality and certain kinds of freedom.
Eric, to be clear, I don’t think you’re being self-contradictory or glib or unreliable! I mentioned that as the only other way of interpreting Hagmann besides determinism. It’s a position that leads to absurdity when we follow its logical implications, and it’s also an irrelevant position for our purposes here, but a plausible reading of him all the same.
Still there are a lot of things that puzzle me in what you’ve said. First, that it is of any surprise that I would just now make reference to a position held by the article we are supposed to be talking about, at Ophelia’s reminder that the article is the core of the discussion. I didn’t do so to distract or confuse or conflate his position with any of yours: I drew our attention back to the object of her AB’s criticism in order to draw out some clarity in the positions here, relative to the kinds of issues that people would find salient. Second, I’m puzzled that it would be suggested that AB’s own criticism is inconsistent with the problem that I, as it happens, also have with the object of her criticism. My criticism is independent from hers (if it weren’t, then there would be no need for me to say anything at all); but nevertheless is consistent with it, as my latest rejoinders were meant to show. Third, that you’d bring up the ‘principle vs. practice’ distinction as illuminating of Islam, when that is what I have claimed is the very thing that has required clarification all along.
I don’t know what “in principle” means or (barring that) to what extent it would be cashed out if I did know what it meant. (I’ll assume that “in principle” was not just a way of speaking, but refers to some actual principles that have predictive purchase.) Does it mean a) that there’s a viable, contingent correlation between oppression and creed (ala Ophelia and Ian)? If so, then all hands agree — but then there’s no distinction between principle and practice to speak of, there’s just practice. So does it mean b) that oppression necessarily follows from the creed? That would make full sense of your “per impossibile” remark — but then it would be indistinguishable from Hagmann’s claims (on their most natural reading), and would make no sense of the violation of principle by practice in modernized versions of religious cultures which are consistent in some of their nasty bits.
I interpret you now as though you are somewhere between a) and b), or at least are at a point between them where the distinction is in degree instead of kind. I’m still not clear, though, if we disagree or not. We agree in rejecting determinism (i.e., sole determinant). But my critique has two prongs, the other prong is “primarily”, where the upshot is that as a strategy, we are in a worse position to predict and explain things as if they were primarily determined by this or that. But your upshot is that, as a strategy, we do gain something by interpreting Islam as “at bottom” (as if it were the most important thing at bottom). I’m suspicious of this very strategy, because just about every time I see this style of explanation used in the social sciences, it leads to avoidable explanatory error. So I’m wary of even treating the suspicious correlation as prime facie evidence that the dominant ideology is primarily at bottom until you can come up with a plausible story for explaining the external similarities and internal differences.
But maybe you mean there are lots of considerations at bottom. Then we’d agree. Or maybe you mean this is a critical project for purposes of ethical critique. We’d agree on that too.
Grrr…whatever I deleted, it was an accident. Spam patrol, as usual.
Benjamin, I was almost ready to submit another long screed, and then thought better of it, though this will probably be longer than I would wish. I find your writing lately to be almost opaque, with a little bit too much technical philosophical flourish, and not enough plain reasoning, if you’ll pardon the reflection.
The point, so far as I can see, is a simple one, and it has nothing to do with the outcome of sociological studies, or the question of what we can know a priori, or whether human actions and the behaviour of human societies are or are not deterministic. No one’s going to get to do the studies anyway, but we have to have some understanding of how these things seem likely to play out.
What is Islam likely to do if it is in power? Well, I think we know the answer to that question, enough of an answer to know that I, like Ms AB, wouldn’t want to live in a Muslim majority nation, and certainly not if it chanced that I was female. Whether this is just a matter of fact or of principle doesn’t make a lot of difference, except when it comes to trying to understand what effect large numbers of Muslims will have on jurisdictions which now provide some scope for the exercise and protection of human rights as understood by the UDHR. I don’t know the answer to that question, but the uncertainty does concern me, and it concerns others as well, which is why we saw a recent demonstration against Sharia law in London recently. In my view, knowing what I know about religion, it’s a safe bet that all religion is dangerous, Islam is, at the moment anyway, particularly dangerous, and we must do all that we can to arrange our common lives in such a way that the effect that religion has on the way that we live together is minimized.
And since this more or less reflects what Ophelia said at the start, perhaps I could have saved myself and others a lot of bother and kept my thoughts to myself!
Damn, I missed all the fun! :-(
I agree with your post, OB. The way homosexuals are treated in Muslim nations is a clear example of the inherent conflict between Islam and human rights. Most countries in which homosexuality is illegal are Islamic, and all 8 countries in which homosexuality is punishable by death are Islamic. I really don’t think it is controversial to point out a correlation here, particularly when Islamic law and jurisprudence is explicitly and virulently anti-homosexual.
And it’s also true that Muslims enjoy many freedoms in secular countries that they couldn’t enjoy in Muslim countries. Tarak Fatah is a Canadian Muslim writer who spends a lot of time pointing this out, but unfortunately we are more likely to hear Muslims engaging in defensive apologism for Islam and counter-critique of the West, rather than critique of Islam.
Eric, I benefited enormously from your presentation, even if I disagreed with it. But I take it that you’re now evidently backing away from the ‘in principle’ stuff, which satisfies my only real concern here.
Apologies for opacity, my brain prefers fancy polysyllabic words. Bad habit.
Have I backed away from the ‘in principle’ stuff? Well, in one sense, yes, since I acknowledge that people do, in fact, interpret religious beliefs in an enormous variety of ways, so that any religion could be interpreted (whether intelligibly or not) in such a way as to be consistent with the UDHR (to go no further).
On the other hand, however, almost all religions, it seems to me, if we take them au pied de la lettre, are inconsistent, in principle, with human rights. The pope makes this clear about Christianity almost every time he opens his mouth. So whether or not specific religions are, in fact, inimical to human rights depends, to a large extent, on the amount of interpretive freedom its adherents possess. At the moment, anyway, the interpretive freedom of Muslims is fairly restricted, and, while I do not deny the existence of a few beleaguered liberal Muslims like Tarek Fatah about, I find it difficult to see how those restrictions will ever come to be generally lifted. This may just be a failure of imagination on my part, but as I watch Christianity – which, for a good part of the twentieth century provided space for widespread liberal intepretation – reverting to its less liberal roots, I suspect that there is a lot more ‘in principle’ about the conflict between most traditional religions in general, and Islam in particular, and human rights, than you seem prepared to acknowledge. To this extent my disagreement with you stands.
(Parenthetically, I have no problem with polysyllablic words (an indulgence which I often allow myself); my problem was that you seemed to be importing philosophical disputes or distinctions into the midst of a discussion where they were not obviously relevant, and this had a tendency to obscure rather than to clarify your meaning.)
This is the terrible problem we’re stuck with. It seems to be true in principle that people can always decide to interpret liberally, to cherry-pick, to ignore. But what is also true is that that way of doing things can never be secure – the trend, when it exists, can always be reversed. We’re watching a Great Reversal now.
People can always just decide to be irrational homicidal maniacs, too, but religions provide some written instructions for that kind of thing, and there is no way of rendering those instructions permanently impotent.
I’ll suppose that some parts of the texts are consistently against human rights, any of which would make sense of your ‘in principle’ claim. (This is not a feature that’s unique to Islam, as you seem to acknowledge with your comment about Mr. Ratzinger’s interesting opinions). Still, no freedom of interpretation will help us escape consistent advice towards immorality, there can only be freedom to ignore the passages, or (more likely) to follow unwritten practical laws among practitioners which explicitly eschew the relevant kinds of passages. So I would be on board with this claim about what’s happening ‘in principle’. But in such cases, practice trumps principle. And since this is easy to foresee, we’re not getting it right when we think of these situations as “per impossibile”, which I take it is a point you now assent to.
Since people are evidently powerful enough that they can let their practices can trump their principles, it’s no surprise to see religions oscillate back and forth. But these special cases are exceptions to the rule. What’s more likely (if we’re interested in explaining and predicting things) is not with what is coherently said in principle in these texts (i.e., the Koran is quite coherent in telling us to pay the poor-due), but rather what’s incoherent and hence not in principle (i.e., repeal evil with goodness so that they might become your friend, vs. the enemies of Allah and Muhammad will be killed, crucified, etc). These kinds of contradictions are capable of encouraging any kind of behavior depending on the situation, which is probably the point of having them. But then what we need to do is look at the aspects of the situation that prompt people to support one interpretation over another.
I’m quite happy to admit, for critical purposes, that religions do not fit with human rights. But I guard against “principle” talk for various reasons which I may or may not have been terribly clear at communicating.
That parenthesis in the penult para certainly isn’t clear – I’m not sure if it has at least two typos, or if I just don’t get what you’re saying at all.
The parenthetical remarks are taken directly from summaries of the contents of the Koran from SAQ. I preserved their exotic phrasing and grammar.
That doesn’t help.
Then I’m confused. If the problem was the parenthetical remarks, then it should have helped.
Maybe I should rephrase the paragraph to make the structure clearer.
Benjamin, I might be a bit dim sometimes, but I don’t see how your last note really responds to Ophelia’s perplexity.
You seem to be forgetting that religions have different classes of saying, as well as different ways of assessing the sayings that they have. Let’s assume that all counsels to action in the Qu’ran or Hadith are commands of a god. There are, for instance, commands that apply primarily to the Ummah, the people of Islam as a whole. So, paying the poor due from your wealth is a command to treat neighbouring unfortunate Muslims well. But then there are other commands which lead us out of the Ummah, out of the clear light of day to the world of confusion which surrounds it. Everything that refers to kafirs, or unbelievers, are in this class, and a command which applies to unbelievers has no real effect in moderating or qualifying the commands which apply to Muslims.
There is another level of structure within Islam as well that we should not ignore. If commands early in the Qu’ran are contradicted by commands later in the Qu’ran, then the later commands are assumed to abrogate the earlier. The Qu’ran tends to be get more intransigent and warlike as it proceeds, so some of the gentler commands get quashed by later, more morally problematic ones. Indeed, this is one source of serious misunderstanding of Islam’s intentions, since it is possible to quote the Qu’ran to good purpose only to discover that the good purposes served are actually overridden in principle and in practice by other sayings which have less humane interpretations.
This is why, though Islam seems to have a dispersed authority – viz., no central authority like a pope – it has a exceedingly complex structure of interpretive authority which makes it very difficult for oursiders to say exactly what Islam does say, a situation which is so perfectly designed for duplicitousness and confusion that it is no wonder Islamic jurisdictions are so inconsistent and apparently arbitrary.
The re-write did at least clarify what you (Ben) were saying though. The first version really lost me!
Eric, I’ve been working all along with a naive face-value distinction between the meaning of the word and its use (ways of speaking). I do this, not because I find the deeper level of discussion uninteresting or unimportant, but because it would burden the discussion with complications in the philosophy of language. That said, I still need to figure out your view on where to draw the line between principle and practice.
Your last paragraph makes it sound like we don’t know, only the insiders do. So perhaps by the true interpretation of dogma as a general principle of the text you mean something like “authoritative interpretation after it has been legitimated by the complex religious organization”. If so, then it’s different from my notion of literalness which is more individualistic and based on coherence. If that’s what you’re suggesting, then your idea of what’s a predictable interpretation of a dogma in practice would be something more like “what the non-authorities think, what people interpret ad hoc”.
But if the circumstances were to change for the Islamic world, i.e., the IMF were to spontaneously and inexplicably actually help countries develop internal economies, and the West were to stop bombing villages and blowing up children with minefields, then the formal convention that the later bits of the Koran trump the former bits would be more likely to fall away. In that case, what’s true in your sense of principle is a matter of what I’ve called a matter of practice.
So the trouble is evidently that I distrust the sense of “principle” that you’re using. It has Orwellian implications that I don’t like. But this goes straight into philosophy of language territory, which is probably not appropriate for this thread.
Got it in one! No, we don’t know how practice and principle, in religious contexts, come apart. The Orwellian implications are part and parcel of religion, as I understand it, and I suspect that Orwell was completely aware of these characteristics of the ways in which religious language functions. For, in religious language, black does in fact become white, bad becomes good. And this means that, in any context, religions cannot be entrusted with power. Their inner logic is never clear. You can never say what their next incarnation will be.
For example, would you have thought that an organisation like the Roman Catholic Church would have operated, as the Irish church did, with almost no regard whatever for the welfare of children? That they would protect a crude animal of man who abused children, instead of the children themselves? No one thought so. It was the church, and as Karem Armstrong says, the church is all about love and compassion.
Not true. The church encompasses arcane structures of thought and power which have no reasonable foundation, none whatsoever. They take the Bible and the church’s intepretation of the Bible as the final and absolute authority for the shape of human morality and the shape of human society. Is it any surprise that they put that structure first, instead of the children? No surprise at all, to my mind. And they continue to do this kind of thing, don’t forget. They excommunicated a Brazilian woman because of her concern and love for her daughter, along with the doctors and nursing staff who helped abort the nine year old’s twins! That’s what religious good looks like.
So principle and practice are not easily separable when it comes to religion. There is no clear statement of principle, and no clear indication of how that will affect practice. It can allow for the existence of a John XXIII just as well as for the existence of a Benedict XVI. Nothing in the church’s dogma is able to predict one or the other. You can hear the Irish cardinal say that now children’s welfare is the first priority. Now! So, when people tell me that there are liberal Muslims, I believe them. There are. But I have no idea whether this is ever going to be a predominating voice within Islam, and I know that there are quite a few people who are willing to give their lives to make sure that it never is. So, it’s as unpredictable as the weather. So, I don’t trust it, and I look with concern at the growing influence of Islam in the West, and the growing confidence of Islam in Muslim majority parts of the world. I don’t think my use of words is Orwellian, but I think the prospect before us may well be.
Honestly, Ben, spare us the boilerplate, willya? “The West” isn’t “bombing villages and blowing up children with minefields” – that’s just hackery.
And the whole idea is simplistic anyway. Not everything is all about “the West” or colonialism or the IMF or any of that. It’s not all push, a lot of it is pull. Purity and iron control of women really do appeal to some people (mostly men), with or without the CIA or McDonald’s.
Eric, I probably should’ve been more careful with my last line. You’re not Big Brother — it’s the semantic externalist thesis that is Orwellian in this context. Like you say, it might either be because we’re talking about religion as newspeak (a highly plausible interpretation), and/or because we’re not trying hard enough to get a fix on things.
If we accept this new turn in the conversation, it seems now I’ve driven you into Jorge Luis Borges territory, rejecting any reliable principle/practice distinction. That entirely satisfies my original worry, though pushes it to another extreme that I’m not sure I’d want to maintain.
Ophelia, yes of course it’s more complicated than all that, and the boilerplate rhetoric was unfortunate. And to some extent avoidable: really, all I need to do in order to make the point I wanted to make is substitute the “West” comments with some other appropriately phrased push-factor.
But while not all sets of issues are entirely about political economy, almost everything is partially about it. Same for evolutionary biology. Same for this particular kind of sociology that we’ve been doing here. They’re all parts. And I never said or made any universal/absolute claims. I did say “would be more likely to”, which I still think is a responsible thing to say.
No, Benjamin, I don’t think you have driven me into Jorge Luis Borges territory. I see no reason why we should not be able to think carefully about what we do and the reasons we have for doing so, and act on that basis. I don’t say it’s entirely without problems, but it’s the only shot at freedom we’ll ever have. Religions of the book, hermeneutic religions, will always find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish principle from practice, because there are no clear boundaries in the hermeneutic pursuit, only, as the post-modernists say, interpretation, all the way down. I disagree, in general, but it’s true when stick to the text alone. I think that truth matters, and the truth cannot really matter to someone who is satisfied with a book. I know that some people, like Don Cupitt, think that language is outsideless, so that we never get out of language. I don’t think that’s true, and if you think that’s where you’ve driven me, look, I’m over here!